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.

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.

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!

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).

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).

# 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!

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.

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.
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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.

What follows are my initial impressions after about a week. I provide mostly unseen screenshots, info, the good, the bad and the ugly.

I think everyone knows the basics. OSX is FreeBSD and a modified Mach kernel. It comes with many standard Unix like utilities (cat, grep, vi, less, man) but not quite as loaded as a default RedHat install.

The interface is what Apple is selling. Otherwise, it's a FreeBSD box and I was quick to start testing what I can and can't do in my first week of owning a Mac

Networking is a snap - I have CAT5 at home and at the office. The DHCP client is quick to recognize a new connection on the Ethernet side as well as on the wireless side. I easily got the AirPort card talking to my Linksys DSL router with 128 bit keys. I get good reception, very little problems there. The ability to plug in CAT5 or not is a huge plus. Never yet done an `ifconfig' trying to fix a net problem.

Installing Mac software is a snap - let's say that you click on a .dmg file from the net attempting to install something ... Safari automatically uncompresses it, mounts it and puts it on the desktop. This is really great. With winzip or tar, I'd probably follow the same steps. This automation just saves me the trouble.

Installing open source software is a snap too - I found a project called Fink which allows you to install debian packages through the familiar apt-get interface. Their site lists all the packages available, you'll see quite a lot. I easily installed a binary version of mysql for dev purposes and easily checked the status of the service starting with `daemonic --list'. Very good. Other packages are easy to grab as well. Fink also can update packages quickly. I'm looking into this for work purposes...

The Good (and good pictures)

1. No multiple desktops - found an app called desktop manager that gives you multiple desktops like Gnome or KDE. Even does keyboard switching with "option+apple+left or right". Excellent. You can move apps from one desktop to the other by ctrl clicking on the pager. You can't drag apps from one desktop to another though. Small detail :(
2. Expose really helps you move windows quickly. Haven't used it much with multiple desktops running
3. Safari is a GREAT browser. You can command click on the menu bar and it will show you a hierarchy of the website
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4. This is also true for Finder and regular folders.
   View image
5. Safari has tabs. You can make tab folders and "open all links in tabs all at once. For example, if you have a daily set of sites (yahoo.com, slashdot.org, cnn.com) it will open the group up.
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6. Safari has a really sweet bookmark page where folders you create show up in a polished bookmark bar.
   View image
7. You can easily see disk space, network space on the desktop.
   View image
8. Fonts look great. Notice that the cursive in this below picture is not an image.
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Stability - a few apps have frozen but they were a bit shady. I've had Linux crash in X a few times as well so you can't be perfect all the time. All I can say is, Sleep actually works! If I close the lid, it goes to sleep. The laptop doesn't "prepare for standby" or anything else. Windows can't do that. I tell people not to use Windows standby. Because it doesn't work on all hardware. Behold the power of Apple control.

Speed - some things are a lot faster, some things are a bit slower. Some apps hang a bit when a lot is going on and you have no choice but to watch a color wheel spin. Windows would at least painfully try to draw the GUI components. Linux would give you the chance to drop to a shell. On the positive side, boot time is quick. There isn't any residual loading. After you enter your password in Windows, there is a lot of crunching going on in the background. OSX reminds me of BeOS. When it's loaded, it's loaded. (yes I have startup items in both OSs')

Development - Eclipse runs on osx. Perl, PHP, MySQL, JBoss (comes on the XCode CD), cvs, gcc (XCode CD). What more do you want?

The Bad

I'm not as fast without Windows+R for Run, Windows+M for minimize all. Dual booting is probably going to be hard but really all these things are just experience bound.

$$$ - it's not cheap. You can easily guy an equal PC for 1/3 the cost. BUT you don't get as much software with it (excepting if you ran linux - which wouldn't have the functionality). So although it's still no contest (macs are expensive), consider all the costs.

Software - most things are available but I really had to do some hunting for a good GUI text editor like TextPad. I finally found SubEthaEdit. Very decent.

No VMWare - haven't played with Virtual PC yet but VMWare doesn't exist on Mac.

Games - don't care about this but there are less of the boring bad PC titles. All the good titles you can get for Mac (unreal, the sims) although I don't play many computer games (( buy a console! ))