I really don’t get happy with Qt 4.6 on OS X 10.6. Nokia rates Qt on that platform as Tier 2. Which means, it is not fully supported. This results in stupid things happening. With Licq, I currently have the problem that the whole program crashes with the following message:
Update on MacPorts: Qt working again
Good news: The Qt port of MacPorts is working again. The port was upgraded to Qt 4.6 and now it compiles again. Now all I need is a 64 bit CUDA package for Snow Leopard, and I’ll be happy.
Preprocessor Tricks
This allows you to convert any preprocessor macro value to a string, e.g. for printing.
#include <iostream>
#define MEINMAKRO 1.3.4
#define STRINGIFY(x) #x
#define TOSTRING(x) STRINGIFY(x)
int main()
{
std::cout << TOSTRING(MEINMAKRO) << std::endl;
return 0;
}
Syncing Google Calendar with the iPhone or iPod Touch
Some small iPhone address book nags
I am using the try-out version of Mobile Me for the iPhone. Syncing the device with the Macbook Pro. Whenever I go to my address book, all the contacts appear twice. Very strange, I though, until I noticed that I was in the Group “All contacts”, which will show the contacts synced from the Mac and from Mobile Me. What a stupid way to present things. Right now, I just need to switch to “All contacts from my Mac” to fix this, but when I were to add another address book (say a corporate one or the Google one), I would be in trouble. Not very clever, Apple…
Qt woes on OS X 10.6…
Oh dear, Nokia and Macports do seem to hate me. I’ve spent half a day to get some version of Qt running on OS X 10.6.2. The problem is as follows. Nokia only provides 32 bit builds of their Qt SDK for OS X (universal binaries for PPC and i386) as can be seen here and here. Under OS X 10.5 this was no problem, since the whole system was basically 32 bit. But Snow Leopard now builds for x86_64 per default. Especially when using Macports. So I thought, lets just install the qt4-mac port from Macports. Wrong again! That port is currently broken. So, my project depends half on Qt and half on stuff from Macports. Now neither one is in a usable state. Ok, so I thought maybe I can force Macports to build in i386 mode only, to be compatible again with Qt. So I edited /opt/local/etc/macports.conf, cleaned the whole Macports tree and reinstalled. Fail again. This time, perl5 fails to build. That port is broken on 10.6 for non 64 bit builds. Hooray. Well, I give up for today, but will continue to investigate and will report back, as soon as either Nokia provides a decent 64 bit build, or Macports recovers and fixes any of their build issues.
What’s with PulseAudio?
After my upgrade to OpenSUSE 11.2, I noticed that VLC was again stuttering when playing videos. A quick check revealed, that the upgrade re-installed the PulseAudio system. Removing all Pulse related stuff fixed the problem. I wonder why, oh why on earth all the sound servers under Linux suck? And why are they default for every installation, if they don’t work as expected? I still own a nice SoundBlaster Live, which does sound mixing in hardware, which means I do not even need a sound server, since the card can expect many different audio streams from many applications. Anyway, please, dear sound server developers: If you need to write such a beast of a tool, make it work as expected!
Using YMP URLs from the command line
I just upgraded my home machine to OpenSUSE 11.2, and needed a few programs from secondary repositories. SUSE comes with those nice YMP URLs, which allow one-click installation of programs. However, after my change to using sudo from a few weeks back, this does not work anymore. The One Click Installer does not seem to be compatible with sudo yet. So I now found a workaround, by just using the shell to do the same. E.g. if you wanted to install Amarok 2.2, which does not come with SUSE 11.2, you would do:
/sbin/OCICLI http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/KDE:Backports/openSUSE_11.2/amarok.ymp
Nice, isn’t it?
Light pollution
Printing the SSH host key fingerprint
Whenever you update your SSH host keys, your machine becomes compromised, or you re-install your system, the SSH host key will change. To check if there is really a man in the middle attack, it is nice to be able to print out the fingerprint of the SSH host key on the host itself. So locally log onto your machine, and do the following:
$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub