Why am I so surprised when things just work?

So I was on my MacBook Pro and went to write an email. I instinctively did C-p to move up a line. And you know? It worked! I was surprised! So I did other Emacs keystrokes (C-a, C-e, etc) and they all worked! C-k didn’t work, but I can deal with that for now.

Huh, this really is a geek machine . . .

Eclipse in MacOS

I downloaded the latest Eclipses and unzippped in on my MacBook. When I try to run it, I get an error that tells me to look in ~/Documents/workspace/.metadata/.log. This is the error message in that log:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2006-04-25 21:24:29.412
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /Users/michaelhostetler/eclipse/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/63/1/.cp/libswt-pi-carbon-3139.jnilib:
	at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1751)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1660)
	at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:822)
	at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:992)

So something it’s being found or the classpath isn’t setup correctly. Anyone in Lazyweb-land have an idea?

When your files get garbled

I have a tiny little web site that I’m beginning to setup — just some basic PHP for now. I need to update some stuff on there and so I fired up Aquamacs on my MacBook and began to edit stuff over Tramp.

And something went horribly, terribly wrong.

I’m not sure what that something was, but my index.php was mostly missing. By “mostly”, I’m saying the beginning of the file was there, and the end of the file was there, but the middle 2/3 were replaced by some binary data. Doing a “file index.php” on it resulted in “index.php: data”, so it was for sure binary data — not something else.

The weirdest thing was that it looked fine in the editor but the browser had the garbled crap in it. So I quit the editor and went back in — and found the garbled text in there.

Naturally, I didn’t have the backup, but it wasn’t hard to rewrite it. This experience makes me scared to try it again — scared enough to do better at backing up, for sure.

More MacOS stuff

Wow — a rare weekend post! Okay, Sunday night, actually . . .

Had more time to mess around with things. I got Aquamacs to behave (have the same colors for each mode, not open a new window for each file) and I even it got working with Tramp thanks to SSHKeychain. Now I can do some real editing. And SSHKeychain works for ssh on the command line, too. Yeah, it’s cool.

I did get OpenOffice running. It turns out that I installed X-dev package and not X-user. Once I got that, and have it running, thinks are good. Well, OOoX is a little slow to start — a combo of X and Rosetta probably. So I’m anxious for NeoOffice to be released on Intel.

And, speaking of NeoOffice — does anyone know where the NeoLight installer is nowdays? Because it seems that the entire internet only has one copy of it. Pity — since that link is dead and I have a lot of OOo files that need the Spotlight turned on them.

My First Dive Into OSX

If you’ve been looking at my del.icio.us links lately (either on the left side or on del.icio.us itself) you may have noted a few Apple-orientated links appearing. Now, it is a official — I am an Apple user.

This is my first Apple product I have ever own — I didn’t have an Apple II and I don’t have an iPod or anything else like it. But an opportunity came for me to get a new computer and I choose one that is pretty close to my dream machine — a MacBook Pro. I only messed with it for a few hours last night, but here some very early impressions:

• The screen? Very, very nice. The speed? Even better.
• I installed Aquamacs and it’s not quite what I need, or it’s going to take some configuration to make it so. It tries to be OSX over Emacs — I’d rather have it the other way around.
• Safari is a nice browser, though it doesn’t wrap pre-formatted text well. This is important if you use Cox Webmail. A quick call to Jeremy helped me figure out how to change the screen size. But Gina figured it out before I could tell Jeremy the problem.
• I tried to install OpenOffice and failed. A quick google this morning shows this may not be as easy as I thought. I’ll try to fight through this tonight or this weekend.
• Terminal is good but lots of people say iTerm is better.
• While I was getting the wireless going, my screen kept flipping to Front Row. I couldn’t figure out how that was happening — was I pushing the wrong thing on the Mighty Mouse? I was befuddled and looked around — and then saw the problem. Leah had the remote and was hitting the buttons.
• Even though I only used for a little while, the Mighty Mouse may just be the best mouse ever made.

So, really, it just rocks. You can rest assured that this won’t be my last OSX post, either.