Adventures As Me

Resolving fglrx issue initializing dri

Executive summary: newer versions of fglrx appear to rely upon ACPI support. Ensure you don’t have ACPI disabled at boot time.

On OpenSUSE 12.1 all attempts to make 3d accelartion with the ATI Proprietary drivers resulted in failure. This was particularly troublesome as I had used the same setup for years (with the same hardware). Normally my operating system updates followed a simple outline:

Update the OS
Install latest ATI Drivers
Restore working xorg.conf
Reboot

That didn’t work with the 12.1 upgrade. Searching /var/log/Xorg.0.log gave me my only clue:

[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************************
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed                               *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * kernel module (fglrx.ko) may be missing or incompatible *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): * 2D and 3D acceleration disabled                         *
[    46.185] (WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************************

You’ll find numerous articles about installing and troublehsooting this and similar issues. They didn’t work. What did work:

(as root) modprobe -v fglrx
Note failure to insmod button
Research the button kernel module
Note this is an ACPI module
Check /boot/grub/menu.lst
Remove acpi=off from menu.lst
Reboot

Now I have both 2d and 3d acceleration. If only a clearer error message had been given…

Address this!

This past week saw some news items regarding iOS applications that scan your address book. Lifehacker has a brief writeup on an app that alerts you when the scanning happens. Trouble is, as is pointed out in the comments, this is going to generate too many false positives. Connectedness, or social networking, is trumpeted every where. Compare your game scores with your friends. Invitie your friends to join you in <random activity>. As more an more apps add this kind of support, more and more will be scanning your address book.

An app that alerts you to this activity is, IMHO, the wrong approach. Application developers should be required to:

Disclose they want to access your address book;
Prompt you for permission, at least the first time;
Provide a succinct explanation of:
1. What the data is used for
2. What data they actually need
3. Whether the data stays on your device or not

Without those types of requirements being enforced by the market vendor we’lll have a similar landscape as the antivirus scene, where the software can only know about things after the fact.

Using Minecraft Texture Packs on OS X

Do texture packs work with Minecraft on the OS X platform? Yes, yes they do. Is it as simple as dropping the file(s) into ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/texturepacks? No, no it isn’t.

After searching for several weeks on this (it took so long because I was avoiding all the youtube videos) I finally found the solution. Here is how to use texture packs on OS X:

Download your chosen texturepack
Open your Downloads folder using Finder
Go into, or open, the folder created when the texturepack was unzipped during the download
Select all files (cmd+a)
Right click the selected files
Click the menu entry labeled ‘Compress # Items’ where # matches the number of files selected
A file named Archive.zip now exists in the folder
Rename Archive.zip to a more appropriate name

At this point your texturepack is now ready for use. Copy it into ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/texturepacks and start minecraft. The listing in ‘Mods and Texture Packs’ should be in color, indicating the texture pack is ready for use.

Crib Notes: Pimp Your Mac with Perl

Title: Pimp Your Mac with Perl

Speaker: Mark Fowler

Photobox

URL: www.pimpyourmacwithperl.com

All slides are on site. Highly recommend reviewing them.

Apple standard perl is seriously broken.

pbcopy/pbpaste for clipboard interaction from cli

growl integration

Numberous Perl modules to do this

Cocoa::Growl

Growl::Any

Mac:Growl

Net::Growl

Once used your script appears in the growl preferences for configuration.

OS X Automation

Mac::Safari::JavaScript

Use ThisService to create a Mac Service(free)

Keyboard shortcuts tend to collide with other apps.

Doing things Automatically

Example of tidying Downloads folder

launchd

uses plist format, a variant of XML

~/Libary/LaunchAgents to run at login

fsevents

similar to dnotify

Mac::FSEvents

is a pain to install

Todo: investigate App::GitGot

App::GitGot simplifies management of multiple git repositories. It provides simply status reports and update management. It’s goal is to support multiple repo types but only supports git at the moment.