What sucks most about the Mac

.. are those nearly weekly software updates which require a reboot. I didn't buy a Mac because I was influenced by those all-day-long digging mac fanboys, I bought it because I wanted to run some graphics and video editing software which is not available for Ubuntu Linux (my previous desktop system, from windows I stay away as far as possible) and for paying about twice the price compared to a similar Dell or noname hardware configuration capable of running Linux, I really expected a better user experience in every possible aspect, as promised in their glorified advertisement. But the requirement to reboot the machine for those nearly weekly minor updates really puts the Mac back into the stone age of computing !

Erlang R12B-0 on Leopard

Yesterday Erlang R12B-0 was released. Compilation on Leopard (with XCode development tools installed) was straight forward, except for one Erlang application: the new profiling tool percept, which got disabled because of missing libgd library at the ./configure step.

So I installed it via macports:

sudo port install gd2

unfortunately ./configure continued to complain. Finally today a solution for how to run ./configure was posted on the Erlang mailing list:

./configure --with-gd=/opt/local

and everything went without further problems ...

There a lots of new features and improvements, and I look forward to explore them one by one in the next weeks and months. Just the troublemaker percept I had to inspect immediately. It seems to be a powerful tool for performance analysis and it ships with a module called edg which wraps libgd and serves for creating 2D vector graphics (to visualize the percept profiling results), similar to my own erlycairo, but it produces*.gif files (erlycairo only outputs *.png files).

Easy Erlang compiling with TextMate

Today I created a custom command for easy Erlang compiling with TextMate. Errors (if there are any) are popping up hyper-linked on a HTML window, and if you click on them, you get straight to the file and line with that error.

• Download: Erlang Build command
• See it in action: Screencast (Quicktime, ca. 4 MB)
  

This is work-in-progress and just compiles the current file. The following features will be added in future versions:

- only compile modified files
- parse Emakefile if available, otherwise:
- crawl directories to figure out src, include and ebin folders.
- code reload if node is running

First step in adapting Textmate for Erlang

I have been using Textmate for two weeks now, for all my coding needs, my productivity has increased (I know, all the real good programmers use Emacs or Vim, so I am not one of them). Today I spent some time on starting a little side project: improving Textmate Erlang integration. I have created templates with skeletons for a general Library module and also for the the following OTP behaviors:

• application
• gen_server
• gen_event
• gen_fsm
• supervisor
• supervisor_bridge

The module header details such as author, license, etc. can be specified via environment variables.
There is a long way to go, to create a complete Textmate bundle and reaching an Erlang integration as provided by Emacs. If anybody wants to join, you are welcome. An feel free to use the templates and adapt them to your own needs:

Download: Textmate Erlang templates

Note: if you set environment variable TM_MY_LICENSE to "MIT", then the MIT license gets included in the header as comment (more open source licenses to be added). Other custom environment variables I use: TM_MY_EMAIL and TM_MY_WEBSITE. You can set them in the preferences.

Erlang and textmate

Two days ago, I felt the need to reevaluate my options for an Erlang text editor or an IDE. I have been using aquamacs (the mac-ified emacs) for a couple of months now. It has a steep learning curve, but looks reasonably well on the mac (yes, that matters for me, and therefore I try to avoid Java desktop apps) and it provides good Erlang integration. And everything can be customized, in elisp, a LISP dialect. That is what I did not like. I would prefer to customize things in Erlang itself.
So what are the other options ? Beside of of emacs, a vim hack and Java IDEs (erlide, ErlyBird) there are no other open source options I am aware of. So I investigated about proprietary solutions and it turned there is one with decent Erlang support: Textmate. That was a pleasant experience, quickly downloaded and installed and it looks great. Textmate ships without Erlang support, but it's very easy to install the Erlang bundle, I just had to install and run GetBundle, a helper app to browse and install additional language bundles.
The support for Erlang is not that much yet:

• Syntax highlighting
• Code snippets

There is also a language bundle for Makefiles, but it seems to simplify only running make without arguments, therefore it is not very useful. The most interesting part, which I haven't explored yet are custom scripts accessible via user-defined key-binding, which can take current file or text selection as input, process it and overwrite the input with the result. Those scripts can be in any scripting language, so it should work with with Erlang escripts. Will experiment with this ...
There exists also a windows editor called E-TextEditor, which is language bundle compatible
with TextMate.

Mount Amazon S3 on your Mac

I recently discovered s3fs, a fuse based file system which allows to mount an Amazon S3 bucket like a normal file system at your PC. With other words, it is very easy and relatively cheap now to expand your local hard drive with terabytes of backup or Photo/Video storage. And with the recently announced Amazon S3 SLA, it seems Amazon is committed to continue with this service.
s3fs is currently only provided in form of source code. But with a little bit of tweaking I got it compiling and running on my Mac, see below the instructions and the required Mac specific modifications:

Get and install the latest MacFUSE-Core. This is just background process, without any
GUI elements.

Checkout the s3fs source code. Because it is just one file, you can even copy it manually in a newly created directory and add the following line to s3fs.cpp
(after #define FUSE_USE_VERSION 26):

 #define __off_t off_t

Start a terminal, change to the directory with the s3fs.cpp file inside and prepare the environment:

  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

Next modify the Makefile (or create one, if you just downloaded the s3fs.cpp):

  all:
  g++ -Wall -D__FreeBSD__=10 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 $(shell pkg-config fuse --cflags --libs) -lcurl -lcrypto $(shell xml2-config --cflags --libs) -ggdb s3fs.cpp -o s3fs
@echo ok!

  clean:
  rm -f s3fs s3fs.o

If everything went well, you should have now a binary file s3fs in that directory. Now create a file /etc/passwd-s3fs which contains just your Amazon ID and secret key separated by ":", e.g:

  example-id:example-secret-key

now you create a new Amazon S3 bucket. I have been using the S3 Browser for that. Define a mount point, I just created a new directory in my home folder for that. Now you can mount that directory to your newly created Amazon S3 Bucket by running the following command:

  ./s3fs your-bucket-name your-mount-point-directory

Now you should see the MacFUSE icon in the Mac OS X Finder. And any file you put into your mount point directory is now physically stored at your bucket at Amazon S3. It's not very user friendly yet, let's hope the MacFusion guys integrate it soon into their excellent Fuse tool. I plan to integrate this S3 bucket access via s3fs into my software development toolchain. Because everything is scripted there, s3fs works fine for me, even if lots of important features are still missing.

Update:

In case you don't have libxml2 installed already, you need to install it first:

  sudo port install libxml2