Oh, this is going to turn out well.

10 years ago
Cops clean up Tenderloin   [ it really says that! ]

A three-week sweep targeting Tenderloin drug dealers is the beginning of a tough-on-crime era dawning on the gritty neighborhood, authorities promised Wednesday.

"Let's get it really clear," San Francisco police Chief George Gascón said at a Tenderloin Station news conference. "We're not talking about a war on poor people or a war on the homeless. We're talking about a war on drugs and organized crime."

From Aug. 13 to Sept. 2, police arrested 302 people in the neighborhood. Most of the arrests were undercover narcotics stings, in which suspects sold crack-cocaine, heroin and prescription painkillers to police. Nearly half the people arrested were on felony parole or probation, police said. Dealers commuted to the open-air drug market from as far away as Stockton, Fresno and Santa Rosa.

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Current Music: Kelli Ali -- Home Honey I'm High ♬

remapping mouse buttons on 10.6

10 years ago
Dear Lazyweb,

Now that the nagware "USB Overdrive" driver has stopped working on 10.6, I guess it's time to ask again: is there some simple, free way to cause my middle mouse button to send Option+Left Click instead of Middle Click? (Logitech RX1000.)

Update: It turns out that USB Overdrive does still work on 10.6, it's just that the behavior changed slightly. I also use the Apple pref that swaps Opt and Cmd, and now that means that I have to tell USB Overdrive that middle-button sends Cmd+Left instead of Opt+Left. I didn't have to do that in 10.5, so I guess the order in which these things fire changed. Or something.

Anyway, I still find it absurd that I'm expected to pay extra just to remap my mouse buttons, because the OS doesn't include this basic functionality, and there's no free software to do it. It makes it feel like this OS is nickel-and-diming me over trivia.

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Current Music: Shellac -- Shoe Song ♬

Robots: A Clarification.

10 years ago

Exhibit A:
This is a Fine Robot.

Exhibit B:
This is a Stripper making Kissy-Face.

Robots should not make kissy-face.

Also that movie looks terrible.

I hope this helps. Thank you for your cooperation.

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Current Music: Shout Out Out Out Out -- Dude You Feel Electrical ♬

bridge surgery

10 years ago
What they're doing this weekend:

Is there a photo-blog of the bridge construction? It seems like (here in The Future) there ought to be someone on the work crew with a camera, but I haven't come across it yet. I want to see the mega-engineering porn.

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I am consulting the flowchart.

10 years ago
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ptys still broken in 10.6

10 years ago
Hey Apple! How come ptys are still just as broken in 10.6.0 as they were in 10.5.0? I reported this bug in Nov 2007. "Problem ID 5606018", for those of you on the inside who can see such things.

At some point after that, it was marked as "closed" with no mention of why.

Note that the current MacOS behavior has all three of these awesome properties: 1) Inconvenient; 2) Has no sane workaround; 3) Different behavior than MacOS 10.1 through 10.4; and 4) Different behavior than every other Unix in the world.

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XScreenSaver 5.09 out now

10 years ago
XScreenSaver 5.09 is out now! In addition to the appearance of a few new savers, this version works on Snow Leopard (as well as 10.4).

It has a few bugs, but since the previous version didn't run at all on 10.6, I'll call this the "better than nothing" release.

Some things I could use help with:

  1. There were some new color-endian issues with 10.6. I have tested it on a 10.5.8 PPC Mac and on a 10.6 Intel Mac. I would like to know if images are displaying properly (in, for example, the Ripples screen saver, when loading photos from disk) on 1) 10.4 Intel Macs, 2) 10.4 PPC Macs, and 3) 10.5 Intel Macs.

  2. Somehow the colors got screwed up in xmatrix on both 10.6 Intel and 10.5 PPC. It makes no sense to me that the colors are screwed up there but nowhere else. I'm lost in a twisty maze of endiannesses, all alike.   Update: I've fixed this, it will be in the next release.

  3. When running the savers under SaverTester or System Preferences on 10.6 (but not 10.5), I get frequent crashes at startup inside NSLayoutManager, as I mentioned earlier. I assume it is a memory corruption bug somewhere, but I can't find it.

  4. Someone needs to fix the configure.in file for autoconf 2.64. I can't make any sense of this bullshit change they've made: Expanded-Before-Required.html. I have no stomach for this, so until someone sends me a patch, I guess xscreensaver will require autoconf 2.63 or earlier.

  5. osxgrabscreen.m is using "deprecated functions" like CGDisplayAddressForPosition(), and that code was flaky to begin with. If someone would like to write me some "modern", non-deprecated code that grabs an image of the desktop and returns it as an array of RGB data, I would be most appreciative. This, apparently, is rocket science.   Update: Fixed this too, though the fix is 10.5-specific, so it will remain flaky on 10.4.

  6. Something has gone catastropically wrong with makedepend on 10.6. It takes like 15 minutes to process even a single one of the xscreensaver Makefiles. It's crazy. This is not an xscreensaver problem per se, but if you know a fix, I'd like to hear it.

Let me know how it works!

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