In addition to writing the inspector panels for custom Quartz Composer patches tutorial, I spent this weekend writing up some advanced custom-patch-development documentation and posted it on QC Wiki:
Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.
Author’s Note: Forgive this preamble I promise that they’ll be juicy links and google page rank increases in Part 2.
After my October escapade in Boston – with a brief layover at Yon Reptile Campaign – Lifeâ„¢ decided to shine a ray of hope in my general direction, after Thanksgiving. However, quick to grant me access to enough income to pay rent, Lifeâ„¢ viciously raped my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and I was unable to use MPlayer to play movies, use GL to play games, or whatever else we non-Apple people do with our video cards.
I use PINE as my email client.
“Why are you living in the late 1970s?” you ask.
But I’ll refrain from answering that question for now. And I’ll even refrain from correcting you in that PINE wasn’t available until 1989.
And, so, in fighting the ongoing war against email, I tend to spend a lot of my day interacting with Mac OS X’s Terminal.app. I SSH into one of our Fedora Core Linux servers and run PINE there.
The default keybindings used by Terminal.app leave a bit to be desired, however
Frustrated with the tedium of going through all the Xcode project files in a text editor and manually replacing all of the identifiers and filenames when creating a new Quartz Composer Patch, I decided to finally figure out how to create a new Xcode template.
At the point where I left off, I figured I was pretty good to go. I had Xcode installed, so I grabbed the Thunderbird 2.0b2 source so I could compile it – hacking on Thunderbird is one of my soon-to-be all-encompassing projects.
There are many options in the database world. Many solutions for all kinds of work loads, and solutions for all kinds of financing models.
Oracle, a database vendor, is pretty tight-lipped about its financing. Nowhere on the website is price listed. Today, we managed to breach this obfuscation. We had to call them.
Licensing for Oracle is offered on a per-CPU basis for the database servers, and on a per-machine basis for the user clients. They weren’t clear as to what constitutes a CPU – does Hyperthreading count as 2 CPUs? does Dual-Core?
Either way, the price per CPU is $40,000.
Per client machine, the license cost is $800.
Plus a support contract.
So, instead of spending well over $200,000 on this…
We’re replacing one of Kosada’s consulting clients’ ancient Oracle servers with one running PostgreSQL.
After working my way through most of the migration to Mac, I came across a common problem for multi-platform developers like myself. The problem is the creation and use of applications targeted for another platform. For example, using a Linux compiler to develop Windows applications, or using an OS X compiler to develop Linux applications.
This is a fairly common problem, and also fairly simple to solve. The resultant tool kit is referred to as a Cross-Compiler, because is crosses platforms, and it compiles source code into target code. For Linux, my cross-compiler of choice was created and maintained by SDL, and can be found here. This allowed me to write Windows programs without needing to actually run Windows. Since both Linux and Windows were my complete set of frequented platforms, that sufficed. Now, however, one more platform has entered the mix.
And there’s a pretty steep curve attached to switching Operating Systems. This is especially the case when you’ve used a very dynamic, customizable operating system like Linux the majority of the time. In this article I’d like to address some of the issues noted, less than 12 hours after I’ve opened the box, to perhaps help others get reoriented.
For much of my computer-using life, I’ve been an Intel-based computer user. This means that I grew up on