iPhone Developer Activation Problem
I went to renew my membership on my iPhone developer account and although the membership is $99/year, my expiration date was only extended out for 3 months. I opened a ticket and it took about a month or two to get this thing resolved. I had to send screenshots, steps and evidence that I was doing the right thing (ok, fine, tier 1 support). Eventually I got a person that had a trick up their sleeve but didn't quite get it right. I'm blogging this in case this is happening to someone else.
First, the symptoms. Let's say your dev account is about to expire in January 2010. You want to renew for another year. You add a year subscription to your cart, pay for it. You'd expect your new expire date to be Jan-2011. But in your profile and in the "thanks for ordering" activation page it says March 2010 or something else wrong. Support send me activation links basically to the same page that wouldn't activate any differently. Each time I checked out, it would say March 2010.
The trick was to click on renew membership (as if paying again), click the checkbox to select which membership you want to buy ($99 year) and hit continue. Now you're on a "Review your purchase" page. Click continue here. Finally, it says "Proceed to your country's Apple Online Store to purchase" and has an add to cart button. Stop here.
Click the following link: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/enroll/activate.action. It should bring you to a page with a single textbox for your activation code (the one you've been trying to use all along). Put this in and hit continue. Your expire date should be correct now. If not, try using a link formatted like this:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/enroll/activate.action?activationCode=YOURCODEHERE
Seems like they have some bug in the dev store. Please comment if this helped you so it's documented.
RMagic, ImageMagick, Snow Leopard and Ruby 1.9
I ran into a problem that kept me busy over the weekend. It seems that rmagick (which is requires for the awesome sparklines project will compile and run on Snow Leopard, however it has a critical bug when trying to use it. The script/server process will crash with a "Trace/BPT trap" error. The logs won't say anything and the hell if anything is going to appear on the browser. WTF.
Here's my stack on my Mac: (do not use this stack, this is just for informational purposes only)
- ruby19 installed via macports: sudo install ruby19
- regular rubygems installed
- ImageMagick 6.6.0-0 installed via macports
- A bunch of github gems installed but not firing on the controller method that crashes
So I started over on a CentOS 5.4 VM just to try out my stack and it worked. Except, I used ruby 1.8.7 compiled via source. It's a really lengthy process and it'll be part of my README if I ever get this project done. On CentOS you have to compile and install ImageMagick yourself because yum has a really old version. There's a ton of devel dependencies too. If anyone needs the instructions, leave a comment and I'll copy/paste from my README.
So I suspected that ruby 1.9 was causing problems my mac laptop and that turned out to be true. I did a sudo port uninstall ruby19 and then a sudo port install ruby. I had to reinstall all the gems again but it wasn't too bad. If port gives you a ln error, just exit your shell and open a new one.
So RMagick, ImageMagick and ruby 1.9 do not play together.
Growl Network Notifications Not Working
Growl's network notifications weren't working. Either sending or receiving. I had two machines that had growl cleanly installed and my main machine that's had many versions installed over the years. It was my main box with a dirty growl history that was having problems.
I found a post on cocoaforge that helped a lot. First, I ran the uninstall applescript (I always keep uninstallers in ~/Uninstallers but you can find it in the Growl.dmg). That didn't really work, it gave me an Apple Script time out. So I removed everything manually. I deleted the pref pane from SysPrefs by right-clicking on Growl and selecting remove.
After that was done I removed the preferences file from ~/Library/Preferences and also a folder under ~/Library/Application Support called Growl (has two subfolders called Tickets and Plugins). I emptied trash. Reinstalled Growl 1.2 (latest). I didn't restart. I re-setup the network bit of Growl on this page:
Notifications started working. Now all my boxes are notified when something cool happens. Weee!
Scroll Lock Button on OSX
Here's an esoteric fix for something I wanted to do. In WoW, right click will move the camera. For some reason, when hosting synergy on the Mac (as the server) and connecting a Windows client, the right clicking gets whacked. It works fine the other way (don't ask me).
So I want to hit scroll lock to lock the screen so that mouse-looking works. Except there's no scroll lock button on a Mac keyboard! Doh. But I find a solution:
keystroke(f13) = lockCursorToScreen(toggle)
Found on mattcutts.com, this is the option I need. I use SynergyKM, which is a Mac-ified app to control synergy. It doesn't use the conf file of synergy but instead uses a .plist property file. So I edited it to look like this:
And viola, roll over to the XP box from Mac, hit F13 and mouse look works in WoW (or probably any other drag-tracking app).
Synergy2 mouse centering
Synergy is a great tool for sharing multiple screens (reverse KVM) but for some reason lately I've noticed that if I'm physically on the center screen, then the mouse recenters occasionally. It's pretty annoying.
I turned on debug log and looked in ~/Library/Logs/synergyd.log. I found this:
2007-10-04 22:12:11.894 Synergyd[337] DEBUG: dropped bogus motion -840,-526
I searched sourceforge for that string and found code that essentially centers the mouse when it detects motion on the primary screen. There doesn't seem to be an option to control the behavior, so short of me making a patch, I don't see a solution.
UPDATE: I found a workaround, simply move your mouse over to the display that it being buggy and the if() condition doesn't fire off. So in my case, my mac connects to my PC's keyboard and mouse. I move the PC's mouse over to the Mac screen and the Mac stops acting weird (the centering problem).
Ports being weird.
When I typed port, portmirror or anything related to darwinports (macports), I got a strange error with no google hits.
# portmirror
can't find package macports
while executing
"package require macports"
(file "/opt/local/bin/portmirror" line 11)
stormbringer:~/phonedmg root# port
can't find package macports
while executing
"package require macports"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 42)
The solution was to download macports 1.5 and run it again. It's been a while since I had used ports on my Mac and maybe the project got renamed or changed. I dunno.
Then "port selfupdate" failed with "Directory not empty" errors from mv:rename so I did this:
mv /opt/local/var/db/dports/distfiles/ /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles
mv /opt/local/var/db/dports/receipts/ /opt/local/var/macports/receipts/
mv /opt/local/var/db/dports/software/ /opt/local/var/macports/software/
Then it seemed to work:
# port selfupdate
MacPorts base version 1.5 installed
Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.510
Configuring, Building and Installing new MacPorts base
selfupdate done!
Fink OSX
I wanted lua installed on my Mac for some gamedev tests ... darwinports didn't give me a warm fuzzy. In uninstalled DarwinPorts with:
sudo rm -rf /opt/local /Applications/DarwinPorts /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup
And then downloaded fink (the universal binary). After installing the rather large 17mb package, fink wasn't working. First the path /sw/bin wasn't added to my profile. I fixed that by editing ~/.bash_profile:
PATH=$PATH:/sw/bin
Simple enough but then you're supposed to type "fink scanpackages; fink index" after the install is done. That failed like this:
$ fink index
...
Failed: Can't locate auto/Term/ReadKey/termsizeopt.al in @INC
So then I googled this and only found a jp site that suggested this:
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Term::ReadKey
Which fixed the `fink index` command.
Installing BeOS 5 Max Edition on Virtual PC 2004
Logging what I'm doing.
Clicked on New in "Virtual PC List", selected "Other" for OS. Basically, this just lets us boot from a CD in a vanilla PC and install to a simple file on our Mac.
Downloaded BeOS Max Ed from here. Make sure to put the CD in, let it spin up and then click Start Up in Virtual PC. Otherwise, it just says Boot Failed over and over again while letting you select a or c. This drove me nuts and cost me a few CDRs.
The installer was black and white although this isn't a huge deal according to someone else on the web. It should reboot in full color.
View image
In addition, I could not type on the keyboard otherwise the installer would freeze. Strange.
It took a long time, an hour and more. The Max edition certainly adds a lot of packages to the base BeOS install.
The GUI and most components were considerably slow during the installer (1.33ghz powerbook). Like a Pentium II 350mhz or something. Reminds me of the good old days before lighting quick video acceleration, OpenGL/DirectX interface components (Windows 2000). The mouse was very jerky, like the difference between a USB mouse and a PS2 mouse.
There was constant CD->Hard Disk activity. The powerbook fan would spin up every once and a while. It was hot and working hard. There is no progress bar in the BeOS installer.
Just go get some coffee :)
Virtual PC has a little IO bar at the bottom of the window. This was particularly useful to watch disk/cdrom activity like IDE lights on the front of a real PC to make sure everything wasn't locked up. Orange lights mean writes and green lights mean reads.
My OSX 10.3 Review
After starting with a 386 back in 1990 and moving to Linux/Solaris professionally, I decided to jump into OSX when a requirement for a laptop came up in my new job.
What follows are my initial impressions after about a week. I provide mostly unseen screenshots, info, the good, the bad and the ugly.