Joey Gibson’s Blog

I was first exposed to Emacs back in 1991. It took me a while to warm up to it, but I did and I have been using it ever since. Once I started using it on a regular basis, I started customizing it. You can write modules and such for it, but for simple customizations, you can just put them in a hidden file called .emacs in your home directory. As time passed, I would add various changes to my .emacs file, adding convenience functions in Lisp and other bits to make me more productive. As I changed jobs and changed computers, I always made a point of taking this file with me so I’d always have it.

When I switched from Windows to OSX in November of 2006, I didn’t immediately need Emacs, so I didn’t think to copy my .emacs file over. And once I didn’t need the Windows machine any more, I put Linux on it and turned it into a server. But guess what I forgot to do. Yep, I forgot to copy my .emacs someplace safe. I hadn’t noticed it was missing until today. I need to run Emacs for something and when I went to make a change to my .emacs file, that’s when I realized it was missing. I checked my backup drive, which has a bunch of stuff off that old PC, but my .emacs file was nowhere to be found.

Even though I haven’t used Emacs in a while, I need to now, and having that file sure would be nice. But even if I didn’t need to use Emacs right now, I’m still a bit sad to see the file go, since I carted it around for so long. Keeping one file with you for 15 years is quite a long time, wouldn’t you agree?

I love your machines. Truly, I do. Back in 1988 I bought a toaster-model Mac SE, with one megabyte of RAM, and I loved it. It only had a nine inch, black-and-white screen, and I loved it. For various reasons, I sort of lost the love for a while, until 2006. I acquired an iBook G4 in a hardware trade with a friend and I quickly became hooked on the sweet goodness that is OSX. That was in August, 2006. Two months later I bought a Mac Pro, which I love so much I sometimes feel the need to kiss it goodnight.

But there’s one thing about the Mac that bothers me: lousy Java support. Sun handles JDK releases for Windows and Sun machines and every Linux system on the planet. Yet, for some inscrutable reason, you have decided to handle Java for OSX yourself. And, not to be rude, but I just have to say that you suck at maintaining Java for the Mac!!! Let me ’splain.

Sun released the first version of Java 6 for Windows, Linux and Solaris in December 2006. Two days ago, Sun released the tenth update for Java 6, again for Windows, Linux and Solaris. On September 24, 2008, you guys released Java 6_07, which was nice to finally get it, but it’s only for Leopard systems and it’s only for 64bit machines. My Mac Pro is 64bit and Leopard, but my iBook is 32bit and can’t run Leopard. And what about the tons of other developers out there who don’t meet these requirements? I can’t think of a good reason you have restricted Java 6 in this way, but I can think of a few bad reasons. Probably the easiest to come up with is that you’re trying to force Java developers to buy more expensive Apple machines.

What’s really funny about the crappy state of Java on the Mac is comments from Sir Steve himself, several years ago. I was at JavaOne in 2000. Sir Steve was the Mystery Date™ for the keynote speech on Day One of the conference. His Steveness trots on stage, clad all in black, and proclaims that he was going to make the Mac the ultimate platform for Java developers. Apple would be bundling Java 2 SE with OSX. And the crowd went wild. And he did make the Mac a great Java development platform. For a while. I can’t tell you how many conferences I went to after that, Java conferences, where the majority of developers were toting Mac laptops around. 

But then you started falling behind with the releases. And then you started restricting which of your users were worthy of getting updates. What gives, Apple? If Sun can release timely versions of Java that run on a ton of disparate systems, why can’t you release timely versions that run across your own hardware family? It’s absurd that you are only supporting 64bit Leopard system for the latest versions of Java, and even then you make us wait forever. 

So, how can we fix this? I think you should go back to Sun and say something like,

I’m sorry, Sun. We like to meticulously control everything, but in this case, that desire has caused us to hose down our customers. They’re not happy, and we can’t figure out a good way to appease them. Please, Sun, would you take over maintenance of the JDK/JRE for OSX? We’d really appreciate it.

Or something like that. Something needs to happen soon. Although the lastest version sounds like just another update to Java6, there are actually lots of new features that are going to really improve Java. Except those of us on the Mac have to wait for some unknown amount of time before you guys release your own version. And if we’re not 64bit Leopard, we’re screwed.

Please, Apple, help us out with some timely Java love, OK?

Sincerely,

Joey Gibson

I love iTerm as a replacement for Terminal.app, but this morning after letting iTerm upgrade itself to “Build 0.9.5.0909″, all my settings, profiles and bookmarks were lost. I don’t know why, but that’s what happened. I pulled back the iTerm.plist from ~/Library/Preferences using Time Machine, but that didn’t seem to fix it. I also tried to restore iTerm.app using Time Machine, but there was something funky going on with TM, so I wasn’t able to.

In the end I just reset the preferences as best I could from memory and started recreating my bookmarks. You might want to wait to upgrade.

Yesterday, the internets were all a-flutter about Chrome, Google’s new surprise web browser. Sure, I downloaded it, like everyone else, and I was impressed by its rendering speed. I used it for a few hours without any problems at all. It works with every site I tried it with, and speedily. I’m especially juiced about the JavaScript JIT engine called V8, and the fact that each tab is its own process, separate from other tabs.

But here’s the rub: for now, it’s Windows-only. How can this be? It’s built on top of WebKit, which is Apple’s updated version of KHTML, and both run on OSX and Linux. So what gives, Google? I know they say that there will be OSX and Linux versions “soon,” but how long is that?

I found directions for building Chromium, which says on its homepage, “Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.” So I downloaded all the source code and tried to build it. Here’s 2,000 words about how it went

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the official OSX release.