tkh’s blog

10.3.4 update

I’ve installed the OS X 10.3.4 update yesterday. It includes lots of feature enhancements. After installing the update, I noticed Safari runs faster, and OpenGL performance is improved as well. Nice update.

libdl on Panther 3

It turned out that if a library uses a function that is defined in the other library, it cannot be found. This is perfectly legal on Linux. I don’t understand why OS X has this limitation. Maybe there is a way to avoid this problem, but I still don’t know.

libdl on Panther 2

I figured out that the libdl functions which Panther provides in libSystem.dylib is actually the dlcompat package. I also found that I didn’t call lt_init() before calling any other lt functions. So, now I can find the location of lt libraries, but I still can’t load functions in a specific project.

libdl on Panther

I have a problem loading functions in shared libraries on Panther. In order to narrow down the cause of the problem, I created a shared library with libtool and wrote a test program which dynamically loads a function in that shared library using dlopen() and dlsym(). It worked perfectly, so I’m puzzled. Only the project I’m working on has this problem. I checked /usr/lib/libdl.dylib and it’s a symlink to libSystem.B.dylib, so Panther must support libdl out of the box. I removed the fink’s dlcompat packages, but no help. I also tried using libtool’s lt_dlopen() and lt_dlsym(), but I got the same result. What’s wrong?

Fragmentation in HFS+

There is an article on HFS+ fragmentation at slashdot. I know Panther has a mechanism to avoid fragmentation in HFS+ volumes, but I was still interested in seeing how much fragmentation my harddrive has. So, I ran hfsdebug. The result is as follows:

Out of 296070 non-zero data forks total, 294976 (99.63 %) have no fragmentation.
Out of 12142 non-zero resource forks total, 12115 (99.78 %) have no fragmentation.

Pretty impressive. There is virtually no fragmentation in my harddrive. Panther users are free from worrying about disk fragmentation!

GNU libtool

Having been troubled with creating shared libraries on MacOS X, I’ve decided to use GNU libtool to create shared libraries in the hope that I’ll be free from platform differences. As a first step, I migrated my TCP/IP library written in C++ to use libtool. After briefly reading the info document for libtool, I modified Makefiles to use libtool to compile and link the source code. I was bit confused here because there are two versions of libtool on MacOS X. Libtool is the Apple original one that takes totally different options and the GNU one is called glibtool. After figuring this out, I was able to build a libtoolized library. Then I compiled the test programs for it. The only issue is that you need to “install” built libraries and binaries to see actual binaries since the ones you see in the source tree are shell scripts to call the respective binaries in .libs directory. Maybe I just need to create a local installation directory under my home directory. Other than that, it works pretty well and I really love libtool.

Spatial Nautilus

I read a review on Gnome 2.6 called “Living Down to a Low Standard”. Mostly I agree with what he says. Spatial file browsing is okay, but browsing file with single window should be an option in the preference panel. I don’t want to mess up my desktop with so many Nautilus windows. Also we really need GUI to set widget colors. Users are not as stupid as GNOME developers think!

wiki

I installed a wiki engine called WiKicker which my friend wrote. Until recently, I have never thought that WiKi is useful for personal use. But now I think that editing web pages from everywhere is really nice and especially suitable for writing down ideas. I have been writing my ideas on research as text files, but now I don’t have to synchronize these files from various computers.

bash 2

I read through /etc/bash_completion and there was no suspected code fragment. After I logged off and on, however, I don’t get the error anymore. Oh well.

bash

A couple of days ago, I started to get an error “grep: write error: Broken pipe” when I try to complete a filename using bash. I get this error especially when I keep pressing the tab key until key repeat starts. So I tried to track down the problem. When I turn off the bash_completion, I don’t get this error. So there must be something wrong in /etc/bash_completion file. I have to debug it.