Java programmers, like all mere mortals, are used to defining their constants as static constant variable accessing it throughout the application, like so:

public class Constants {
    public static final int RED = 1;
    public static final int BLUE = 2;
 
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        System.out.println(Constants.RED);
    }
}

Objective-C doesn’t have an equivalent. There is the #define preprocessor macro, but those need to be defined in each file (and cannot be imported), so are very impractical. For integer constants, you can use typedef enums in your header file, as described by the first commented in this thread. But if you need NSString constants, we need a different method.

Singleton Pattern

A Singleton Design Pattern is a way to define a class so that it can only have one instance, and no more. Why is this useful? Because we can define our variables in a singleton class and just import the file. I created my own Constants class much like Wikipedia’s Singleton class – in retrospect, I should have done it this way, and will do it in the future.

Once you have your singleton class, you define your variables in the overridden init method, synthesize the get methods, set the @property to (readonly) to only generate the get accessor. Here is my example:

//===== Constants.h ================
@interface Constants : NSObject
{
    // Place any "global" variables here
    int RED;
    int BLUE;
}
// message from which our instance is obtained
+ (Constants *)sharedInstance;
- (void) setConstants;
@property (readonly, nonatomic) int RED;
@property (readonly, nonatomic) int BLUE;
@end
 
//===== Constants.m ================
@implementation Constants
 
@synthesize RED, BLUE;
 
+ (Constants *)sharedInstance
{
    // the instance of this class is stored here
    static Constants *myInstance = nil;
 
    // check to see if an instance already exists
    if (nil == myInstance) {
        myInstance  = [[[self class] alloc] init];
        [myInstance setConstants];
    }
    // return the instance of this class
    return myInstance;
}
 
/*Set constants here, instead of +sharedInstance method
because non-static variables are not accessible from static
methods.  You can also overload the init constructor
(I prefer it this way because it's more readable)*/
- (void) setConstants {
    RED = 0;
    BLUE = 1;
}
 
@end

The +sharedInstance method is a static method that checks to see if the Constants class has been instantiated. If it hasn’t, it makes an instance, and sets all the variables to what you want them to be, and returns the singleton instance. If it IS instantiated, then it just returns the previously instantiated instance.

Also, the readonly property only takes effect if you try to access it via a setter method. However, you’ll notice we can still directly access variables in the setConstants method because these variables are part of the class (effectively, they are private variables now). In Java terms, this would be like creating private variables and setting them within the object, but not creating the setter methods.

To use the constants, you would simply import Constants.h, and do this:
int red = [Constants sharedInstance].RED

I’m not 100% happy with this method because there are a few nasty things that can happen if you misuse this class, but in general it should be ok. Some things that can go wrong:

• Instantiating a Constants class yourself: [[Constants alloc] init]. The variable initialization code would never get called, and then you would wonder why your Constants are not defined somewhere in your code. Don’t do this! Alternatively, you could set all your variables in the init method, and not really have to worry about this, but why? Just used the sharedInstance method, and you’re ok.
• You could re-set your constant variables (either by accident, or on purpose). For example, the code if ([Constants sharedInstance].RED = 3) is a common mistake. This sets RED to 3… forever. Make sure that the property is set to readonly.

There you have it. I am definitely interested to see how other people solved this problem, and if this method worked for you.

As I indicated in an earlier post, my first hurdle was to get my MacBook’s hard drive defragmented enough for Boot Camp to be able to partition it. In theory, the HFS+ filesystem used by Mac OS X does not get fragmented due to how it was designed and how OS X uses the filesystem (read all about it on Apple’s website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1634).

As one of my favorite professors once said: “The difference between practice and theory is small in theory but large in practice.”

As it turns out, in order to partition a hard drive, and make a new 32GB partition, you need to have 32GB of free, continuous space. My understanding is that Boot Camp attempts to clean up smaller files and try to defragment. But if you have ever used larger files on your system such as in a virtual machine or gigantic movie files when you’re doing movie editing, you are basically left with a partition which Boot Camp refuses/is unable to partition.

I was left with one of two options:

1. Buy iDefrag – a $30 defrag software
2. Reformat the hard drive and reinstall OS X

I don’t like to pay for software. I’m one of those free software advocates. I especially don’t like to pay for software to fix something which should not have been broken in the first place, or, which other operating systems (ahem, Windows) include with the operating system.

So, I was left with option 2. Reformat and reinstall.

The plan was simple:

• Back up all my data using Time Machine
• Double-back up all my data using Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/), JUST IN CASE, on a different drive
• Put in Leopard CD, reinstall
• Retrieve data using Time Machine Migration Assistant
• Partition the drive using Boot Camp
• Install Windows
• play Team Fortress 2 with my wife and best friend

Let’s start with backing up. I needed to do this right because my Master’s thesis is on that drive, so I wanted to be extra careful and diligent in making two copies of everything.

It’s important to remember that in order to use Time Machine OR CCC, you NEED to have a HFS+ formatted external drive. I had only one 750GB HFS+ drive. So redundant backup was out of the question already. Well, I manually backed up all my files smaller than 2GB, which is the filesize limit on a FAT32 filesystem.

So with everything backed up to the HFS+ drive using Time Machine, I held my breath and did a Carbon Copy Clone onto the same drive (stupid I know, but phew, no problems!). All my other files were safely and redundantly manually copied to my FAT32 drives.

Next came the reinstall. But wait, I lost my Leopard CD! Luckily, I made a copy using Disk Utility from which I made a dmg file and another copy. This worked well. I reinstalled Leopard OS X and got to the “Would you like to migrate your data?” screen. I selected “Restore from a Time Machine backup,” selected my USB drive, and let it copy files while I did some things around the house.

4 hours later, the progress bar is still at 0%, and the drive is flickering. This is not good. I had no choice but to turn off the system manually (there was no cancel button on the only window on the screen), restart, and hope my data is ok. Luckily, it was.

I decided to use a different approach and fired up Migration Assistant from the Utilities folder once Leopard was installed, selecting the same option (restore from TM). This time, the progress bar moved, the hard drive churned, but received an error message at the end that there was a problem with my main user account (where all the data was located). Turns out that the restore only partially restored — none of my preferences or applications were restored. I manually dragged over applications like Firefox from the Applications directory on the drive, which seems to work (except for Adobe Photoshop and VMWare Fusion).

Demoralized, but not defeated, I cut my losses and partitioned the drive. It worked this time! The Windows XP installer presented me with the familiar blue installation screen. After going through all the license agreements and such, I had to choose how to handle the new partition. My choices were:

• Format the partition using FAT32
• Format the partition using NTFS
• Quick Format the partition using FAT32
• Quick Format the partition using NTFS
• Convert the partition to NTFS (I chose this)
• Leave the partition as is

That was the wrong choice. The machine rebooted, and showed a message like “Invalid startup disk.”

Apparently, the right choice was Format using FAT32 (or NTFS). So, back to OS X, use Boot Camp to restore and repartition the drive, and select the right option this time in the Windows installer.

Note: if you need to eject the Windows XP CD because you may have something of value written on it (maybe some kind of a serial number?), you need to eject it after Windows installer restarts and BEFORE it actually boots. Remember, there is no physical eject button on Mac’s computers, and the keyboard button WILL NOT WORK.

I finally installed Windows XP SP2. Great. But, it didn’t recognize the ethernet card, the wireless card, video card… in fact, if there was anything to be recognized, Windows failed at it.

AH! But the drivers! According to Apple’s instructions, put the Leopard CD in while in Windows, and an installer will automatically start up the driver installation process.

But this wasn’t working. In fact, when I inserted the Leopard installation CD, there was nothing on it — it was blank. I finally realized that the original CD is a dual-format CD, HFS+ and iso9660. Since this is a copy of the Leopard CD, and Disk Utility didn’t make an exact copy, I had no way of getting the drivers unless I found them online or got the original CD again.

Don’t even bother looking online, Apple doesn’t provide them (why?!), and as a rule of thumb I never download executable torrents (unless they are Linux ISOs).

I ended up borrowing a friend’s Snow Leopard CD, which worked. The video driver, ethernet driver, sound, microphone, isight, everything is fine.

Except wireless. Wireless wouldn’t connect to my Airport Extreme router saying that the network is out of reach (even though it’s sitting RIGHT NEXT TO my machine). I found a forum that basically said that in order to get it working with XP, I have to change my encryption on the router from “WPA2 Personal” to “WPA/WPA2.” Lo-and-behold, it worked.

The final hurdle was installing Service Pack 3. Starting the install, I get the following message “an error occurred while copying file osloader.ntd.” This forum helped explain that. To summarize, you have to remove the Mac partition from the Windows partition table, install SP3, and re-add it.

So there you have it. It’s a painful process which for once, in my opinion, isn’t Microsoft’s fault. But it’s worth it to see spies burned, heavies backstabbed, and pyros ubered.

sudo dd if=bt4-pre-final.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

where /dev/disk1 is your particular disk. In OS X you can find out by going to the Disk Utility and selecting information on your target drive. In linux, type `dmesg` and that should give you the drive name.

I will be editing this to add more stuff.

Criticism is good. Criticism leads to change. Criticism makes things better.

In this post, I will try to do my part in making OS X better. The following is a list of GUI inconsistencies that bother me on a regular basis with OS X Leopard.

1. Maximize button. Why does the green maximize button (+) have so many different behaviors? Window buttons should be unified, have a consistent feel across different applications. How window buttons behave should not be up to developers. Instead, developers should adhere to a set of standards and a standardized windowing API.

To demonstrate, I have compiled a few before-and-after screenshots.

It is very frustrating when the user is unsure of how a standard window button is going to behave.

To put this into perspective, imagine getting into a car and being unsure of whether the button for rolling down the windows is actually going to roll down the windows, turn on the windshield wipers, or maybe even turn on the headlights. You simply expect a button that is in every car (especially a line from one manufacturer) to behave in exactly the same way (I know car analogies are very fickle especially because different manufacturers use different way of turning on the headlights for example — and I don’t agree with this either, ahem, VW — but every time I do get into a VW, the headlight switch always turns on the headlights!).

Anyway, I don’t care exactly WHAT behavior they assign to the little green button, but it needs to be consistent across the entire UI. Period.

2. Key Bindings. Along the lines of consistency, OS X should have a set of standard key bindings for moving to the end of a line, beginning of a line, page up, page down, etc. Ever tried to move the end of a line in TextWrangler? Word? Terminal? Adium? That’s right, all four applications have different key bindings: Cmd-RightArrow for TextWrangler, END for Word, and Ctrl-E for Terminal. I have no idea how to do it in Adium.

To this day, I still don’t know how to jump between words on a line (Ctrl-Arrow on Windows/Linux) because not only does every application use a different combination of modifier keys – between Command, Control, Alt, Option, Shift and Fn, I don’t even know where to begin! It feels like I’m performing finger gymnastics every time I try to jump between words.

Again, this goes back to a basic design principle: consistency. Unify and standardize behavior for all applications, and discourage developers from being cute (here’s looking at you Microsoft). Also, the Terminal app may be a special case, but again users like having options.

While I’m talking about Terminal, I would also like to see it unified with *nix terminals, where a mouse selection copies the selection to the buffer and the middle button pastes it.

3. Alt-Tabbing/Minimized Windows. This has been a sticking point since I first got OS X. I work with lots of open applications at the same time, as most developers do. Try this: minimize all windows of an application, switch to another app, and then try Command-Tabbing back to one of the other windows. I Cmd-Tab to my app, but it seems like nothing happens. That’s because the windows are still minimized and you have switched to the application, but not to a particular window. I am stuck moving my hand to the mouse.

This is not intuitive, and is a direct result of Apple’s insistence of distinguishing applications from application windows. It’s bad design, in my opinion. Maybe Apple can take a page from the world of Linux development and make things configurable, for example allowing users to either have a One-App-One-Window paradigm, or a One-App-Many-Windows paradigm. But I won’t hold my breath — sometimes, it seems configurability goes against the very grain of Apple’s existence. Also, I’ve tried Witch. While it does switch to separate windows, it’s cumbersome to use and has some quirky UI bugs.

As a result, I simply resort to not minimizing or maximizing my windows. That means I never, ever use the green or yellow buttons, basically making them pointless. This is a shame because I think the Traffic Light scheme can really work well for OS X if it exhibited correct behavior.

4. Crashes. Sure, OS X doesn’t crash as often, but it does crash.

What was I doing in Safari to make it crash? Nothing. It quite conveniently crashed as I was making screenshots for the maximize button-point. It had one page open. I don’t even use Safari, so that was the ONLY page I ever opened since the machine was rebooted. It simply stopped responding (Beach Ball of Death), kicked up my fan to 6000 rpm, and upped the temperature to 80 degrees Celcius.

To be fair, crashes are inevitable on any computer and os, and OS X really does have fewer of them. But it’s not immune. I guess you can write this off as an annoyance at Apple fanboys and their superiority complex. =P

Screenshots

When Apple announced the switch to the Intel architecture in 2006, nerds everywhere rejoiced. A Unix operating system with an Apple GUI along with the x86 architecture must have been a fantasy until then. It should be trivial to run any operating system on the machine, making “the switch” from Windows or Linux to OS X painless and comforting. BootCamp Beta was released in OS X Tiger 10.4 that allowed users to re-partition an existing hard drive to FAT32 and run Windows on it. After the beta, BootCamp was released into the wild in OS X Leopard 10.5. Life was good.

Except when it isn’t. Turns out, when you start to repartition the hard drive, BootCamp expects you to not have used to your hard drive at all. It expects your disk to contain almost no fragmentation. But the friendly error message really gives no useful hints:

The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved. Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

After lots of searching, I found that my drive must be heavily fragmented, despite Apple’s claims that this can almost never happen. Even if it did, they claim, there will probably be no performance gains. Notice that they completely fail to make any mention of BootCamp in the support article.

So, Apple’s solution is to back up my hard drive, reinstall Leopard, and restore it? That seems like a major PITA, and might alienate some Windows power users. But, to be fair, they also show a link to iDefrag — software that can defrag your hard drive — for $35.

IMHO, the whole thing is ridiculous. In order to use an advertised feature of their operating system, one that makes “The Switch” so much easier, I either have to shell out $35 to defrag the hard drive, or $100 to back up my hard drive to an external device (Time Machine stealthily fills up and chews up external drives), and lose about 2 days of backup, installation and restoration — all while not being able to unplug my laptop or take my work with me.

I guess I must be the only person in the Universe to actually want to use an Apple product to its intended and advertised capacity, not just surf the web, write documents, or play with Photoshop.

/rant

Basically, it comes down to killing mysql server, re-running it without the grant tables, setting the password and then restarting it in normal mode. To quote the linked website (Keystone IT Tech):

sudo su
kill `cat /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid`
mysqld --skip-grant-tables &
mysql -u root
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD ('newpassword') WHERE User = 'root';
exit
kill `cat /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid`
mysqld &
mysql -u root -p

Very cool.

As we were deciding what to get with our hard day’s play, we decided it’s probably better to just give the tix away than to add another piece of plastic to our collection of junk. It felt good. The expression on the kid’s face, followed by his parents forcing a thank you (“now Jimmy, what do we say?” followed by a thin “Thank you”) brings a smile to our faces. Usually, the kids are shy and their parents thankful.

So we now do this every time we go to the arcades. We play till we’re sore or out of money, and then give the tickets to kids (tip: always make sure that the parent is with the child before approaching lest someone gets the wrong impression).

So go out there and put a smile on a kid’s face!!!

Anyway, the solution depends on which version you’re running:

For Tiger, edit /private/etc/httpd.conf AND /private/etc/users/username.conf for the correct directives

For Leopard, edit just /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Days of pulling hair solved because I was looking in the wrong places.

Update: because of the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, ALL of the above directories were present on my system, but only /private/etc/apache2 was being used.  This is because Leopard uses apache2 and Tiger uses apache 1.3.  Obviously, apache2 uses /private/etc/apache2 instead of /private/etc/httpd.  If you had installed Leopard from scratch, this would not be a problem.

Taken at the Prescott Rally, Prescott, AZ, October 6th, 2007.

http://island94.org/setting-octave-and-gnuplot-osx

[EDIT: This method may be obsolete now]