Apple finally released OSX 10.5. (leopard I guess, but I don’t call OSX by its cat name ever because for some reason I can not remember what cat is what, I even bought the wrong one accidentally once, doh!) I went against my usual wait and see policy and installed it on the day it came out.

First off, I was going to head down to the apple store this past Friday and get in line at 6:00 to get a copy. This was until I noticed that no apple’s website their shipping was listed as “Delivers on 10/26/2007″. Well hell, if they are going to promise that it will deliver on a certain day rather than promise when it will ship, I might as well just order it online. I did expect apple to come through with their promise, what was a nice surprise though is that they shipped it via FedEx priority overnight. I had my copy of OSX in my hands by 10am, way earlier than if I had gone to the apple store, and for free no less. Thank you apple for this nice detail.

Of course, I got caught up in the installer trouble like so many other people. I had taken a nap while the installer ran, and woke up to the never ending blue screen. Normally I would have spent hours and hours doing a reinstall and trying to figure out what the problem was, but it was Friday night by this point so I went out drinking instead.

The next morning, low and behold, my issue was the first article on Slashdot. How handy, I wish I could just go to bed every night and have my latest problem solved for me.

It was a little frustrating that people, even the Slashdot article was calling this blue screen the Blue Screen of Death. The famous BSOD is a kernel panic which is something OSX is not immune to. This is what OSX’s equivalent of the BSOD looks like:

I have gotten four of these in the four days since installing 10.5. To be fair, on another computer I have been using Windows Vista Ultimate for over a month and have not been able to get it to crash. It slows down and complains a lot, but it hasn’t had a kernel panic.

I think that my panics I’ve been getting are probably related to some software I had installed before the upgrade. Just to be safe, I ordered a new hard drive from Other World Computing so I can swap it out and do a fresh install next week.

So, what’s the verdict. 10.5 has a lot of awesome new features and enhancements, but has a lot of issues as well. I’ll write up my wishlist for 10.5.1 later on.

looking for something in my office yesterday yielded 11 cards on my desk that were not in any computers. this is probably not good.

My order from Ultimarc came in. I am starting work on a DIY version of one of these, for about 1/10th of the price they charge. It probably won’t look as sweet, or be as powerful, or run windows. but it will run ms pacman and that is all that really matters to me.

My big project for yesterday…

after much pain and frustration…

OSX on a Dell 4700!

I had a lot of issues with the video card and NIC but was able to swap them out with different ones from the pile in the first photo. It runs very fast since it has fast hard drives and a ton of ram. yay!

Also, in apple news. They announced today that they will have an SDK for the iPhone in Feb. This may be enough to get me to buy one. I am tempted to start bringing some of my cocoa libs up to speed with 10.5 now so I can write apps when it comes out. I really want to get off of Windows CE for my phone and this could be awesome. But then again the Nokia N810 looks like it may be even way awesomer. I was kind of hoping Sun would have revived the SavaJe phone by now, but it looks like they are going to be slow and under deliver so I am not going to hold my breath.

In the nice to dream DIY category, there is a company in Australia that sells DIY laser tag kits. Basically they sell all of the electronics, you make the guns. It means that you can make a custom gun for about $300-$500 rather than pay the $3k-$4k for the other pro systems out there. The only problem is that even though I’m willing to pay that much for a gun, I don’t know if enough other people would be willing to in order to get a proper game going. I would maybe even make two, but I think it takes six people at least to have a good game. I’ll keep it in the back of my mind for next summer.

I just spent a few hours trying to figure out why modifications to my /etc/hosts file weren’t working in OSX.

a google search found this article:
Mac OS X hosts File Regrouped

which had some great tips on how to get lookupd to do exactly what I wanted. Being able to set up the host name lookup search order has been hugely helpful in debuggins some errors I have had in the past.

It turns out that this particular problem was that my host file had been generated from a build script that was written for windows. It seems that if you have any windows line returns in the file, lookupd will ignore the entire hosts file.

a quick install of dos2unix from Darwin Ports fixed the issue.