Category Archives: Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Adobe Acrobat Stupidity

I’m filling out a fellowship application that requires the use of Adobe Acrobat, and the free reader won’t cut it. I had been using a computer in Dr.Rudy’s lab, running Win XP, that had Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. Unfortunately, I’m not done filling it out yet, and I am leaving for NOLA tomorrow bright and early.

Therefore, I had to go buy Adobe Acrobat for Mac. I opted not to get the professional version. It cost $100 at the educational pricing level. It’s bad enough that I should have to fork out cash for this when a simple web form would have been just fine, but it gets worse.

It wouldn’t run. Nothing. Not run and quit. Double-click-then-nothing. I was pretty sure that I knew what the problem was right away: they assumed that my filesystem wasn’t case sensitive, and were accordingly careless in writing the program. When installing OS X v. 10.4 (Tiger), it’s possible to choose a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem, rather than the standard non-case-sensitive HFS+. I chose case-sensitive, because I normally work with case-sensitive filesystems in Linux, and there have been times in the past where I had collisions — files that were named the same thing except where case differed, and transferring those files to Mac OS X had been a mess.

Luckily, I was able to figure out what the problem was. I ran the program from the command line, and discovered from the error message that the program was looking for AdobeBIBUtils.framework. The file that existed was AdobeBibUtils.framework. The difference is just the case in IB vs ib. I renamed the directory. The program then launched, but crashed moments later looking for AdobeBibUtils.framework. They had used two differently-cased names in the same program.

I just symlinked one name to the other, and now the program runs without a problem. Adobe has something about this problem on their support site. Their solution? Install it on a non-case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem. For many people this means reformatting their hard drive and reinstalling everything. That’s a great solution to Adobe’s shitty coding. There may be a few more of these spelling land-mines in the software. I guess I’ll have to find and fix them as I go along. How absurd.

Guess what, Adobe? It took 30 seconds to fix the problem. I suggest you take care of it on your end. I can’t believe I paid money for this.

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G4-optimized Firefox Build

I know I have some mac-users on my reading list. If you use a mac with a G4 processor (and you probably do) you should go here and download a special build of Firefox that’s optimized for your processor. I was skeptical, but it seems a lot zippier for me after using it all day.

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A blur of a day

I awoke once more at around 05:00, without an alarm, but was a bit slow to get moving. I felt heavy, like I wasn’t meant to be up. No matter, I caught up on my RSS feeds, did my morning pushups and crunches, and remembered that I have today off from running because it’s the weekend. In reality, I should have run anyway since I skipped a few days this week, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it.

I’ve been setting up and running simulations all day. This takes a bit of time, because I’m running the simulations remotely on our cluster. I have to log in, set up the simulation, submit it, wait for it to finish, zip up the data files (they’re quite big but compress very well), copy them over, load them, play the sequence in the data viewer, and then discover yet again that something’s not quite right with the timing. I’m trying to initiate a spiral wave, and I fear that perhaps the model I’m using is too small. My excitable gap is too narrow. The problem is, this mesh must be relatively fine. Therefore, if I make it larger, my required computational power will increase quite a bit, slowing me down further. I’ve got another try running right now, and I think I’m getting close to the right timing. I’ll check it in the morning and find out.

In the gaps of time between simulation stuff I’ve been playing some Prince of Persia / Sands of Time, reading blogs, pruning my RSS feed list, making some phone calls, eating breakfast, brunch, lunch (with a margarita!), and dinner. Oh yes, skipping exercise and eating more. This is doing me a world of good.

The blog associated with HubMed was full of Mac-friendly goodness today, including links to a bunch of free games for Mac OS X. Most of them are available under the GNU General Public License (a.k.a GPL, free as in speech) and are originally Linux games. One of my favorites, which I played on Linux first, is Frozen Bubble. I have problems copying it to my applications folder for some reason, and have to play it off of the disk image. I was also reminded by the presence of Goban on that list that I should try picking up Go again. But not tonight. Maybe I’ll order a Go book from Amazon once their gift certificiate payment scheme is back up and running. By the way, I hope none of you have sustained any injuries during the post-Thanksgiving commercial feeding frenzy…

I know by this time you must be dying to see the stats for the day. Agonize no longer:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
8 h 2.5 L 0 min 2 cup(s) 4 cup(s) 1 drink(s)

If I’m going to get eight hours of sleep again, I should get on with my pre-sleep reading, and then crash. Ta ta for now.