Longtime Apple developers probably know this intuitively, but I needed some time to figure it out: When CVS-ing files with a resource fork, you must not use the /usr/bin/cvs that ships with OS X!

Because Apple used to separate data and metadata, most files in the pre OS X era had a data fork and a resource fork, but for the user this was transparent; the user just manipulated one file. Tools without this “Classic” background know nothing of the resource fork. Files without data fork appear in the Terminal to have 0 bytes.

It is exactly two years that I ordered my first Mac, a 12 inch Powerbook. It’s compactness and completeness (almost everything built-in without protruding parts, Bluetooth and fast WLAN, except the second and third mouse key) make it still the right choice. And with OS X it has a decent operating system that lets you use the mouse if you want to, but the power of the command line is integrated in a better way than with Windows and Cygwin.

The Firefox New York Times Ad is finally out (PDF or a smaller PNG); it took much longer than the German ad in the FAZ ;)

After four years I had again a PC assembled, but this time as a gaming PC for K (and for the rest of the family, too ;) ).

At work we have a PC department that assembled the PC according to my wishes. The installation of the OS I like to do myself; I chose Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) over XP Pro, because it’s less expensive but has almost all features of XP Pro. The Media Center itself I don’t need; the PC hasn’t got a TV card.

Every year after christmas the El Niño Cup takes place. It is a tournament where the result is less important than exercising and having fun. There is a team day, where every team plays Volleyball, Basketball and Unihockey, and a single day, where the disciplines are Badminton, Table Tennis and Archery.

Last year I wrote a program to ease the drawing. It is a fairly complex problem:

• Every participant must have six matches, two for every discipline, against members of its category (men, women, mixed…)
• There should be not two matches against the same adversary (except if the category has less than 7 players)
• Between two matches there should be a break of at least the duration of one match

This year I enhanced the program some more. The amount of tweaking the program output by hand is now almost zero. Just some games remained to be exchanged to satisfy the at-least-one-break condition.

While reading an interview with Tim Berners-Lee concerning the Semantic Web, I stumbled for the second time in a couple of days over the friend of a friend project FOAF.

I don’t know if FOAF has a future or if it is just another geek thing – but I couldn’t resist and generated my own FOAF description.

After many months of betraying each other, the diplomacy game gimmel01 ended with a shared triumph of England, France and Austria.

Now we are waiting for the last players to sign up for gimmel02, and after that Andreas will try to find a way eliminating me…

Im Gegensatz zu PCs ist bei OS X Python bereits vorinstalliert. Leider fehlt jedoch ausgerechnet IDLE, so dass trotzdem noch etwas zu tun bleibt.

Installationsanleitung für IDLE (von PythonMac FAQ abgekupfert)

• Tcl/Tk Aqua herunterladen und installieren
• MacPython herunterladen und installieren (für OS X 10.3 sind das die MacPython Panther Addons)
• Das Programm PackageManager im Ordner /Programme/MacPython-2.3 starten
• Im PackageManager _tkinter installieren

“Neue” Division

Damit IDLE sich so benimmt wie im Buch beschrieben (vgl. Anhang D im Buch), muss noch eine Datei leicht verändert werden.

(Deutscher Text siehe separater Artikel)

K got the book Python für Kids. To enable him to use the book on OS X, I wanted to setup the Python environment on the Mac as on the PC: Install IDLE and, to hide the differences between integer and floating point math, configure to use the new division.

Installing IDLE on OS X 10.3 is easy with MacPython. IDLE comes as bundle, ready to be launched with the mouse from the Finder. But for using the new division without the need for from __future__ import division, IDLE must be started with options. How to embed these options in the IDLE.app bundle?

A friend’s PC had lost its ability to dual boot (Windows 2000 for work and Windows 98 for games). I had installed BootMagic to switch operating systems some years ago and it worked fine until it was broken this month during some harddisk cleanup.

I completed the cleanup of the Win98 partition with a new installation. After installing PartitionMagic and BootMagic again, Bootmagic would still not work, and the Windows 2000 installation (which I didn’t touch) booted, but after a successful log on I was always logged out immediately.