I’ve been thinking a lot lately about old-timey computer stuff, and I got a hankerin’ to play some of those old BSD games. No one had ever gotten around to getting OS X versions of the games up on the Internet, though (while some have started, no one ever seems to have finished and put their changes out there), so I spent a little time this evening and got most of them working.
If you’re doing local mod_perl development on Mac OS X and find that after Software Update runs that Apache is segfaulting on every request with an error like [Tue Mar 19 23:30:01 2013] [notice] child pid 43158 exit signal Segmentation fault (11), check your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf for a line like this: LoadModule hfs_apple_module libexec/apache2/mod_hfs_apple.so If it’s not commented out, do so. For whatever reason, mod_hfs_apple and mod_perl do not play nicely together.
It’s a bear. For some ungodly reason I was having a really hard time building perl’s Data::Alias on Mountain Lion just now, where trying to build Data::Alias kept blowing up with errors about RETURN_PROBE. The problem proved to be frustratingly ungoogleable, but eventually I found the solution. Add the line #undef USE_DTRACE" to Alias.xs at some point before #if defined(USE_DTRACE) && defined(PERL_CORE) in Alias.xs, make clean, re-run perl Makefile.PL, make, make install.
Over at Daily Kos, Markos did a write-up of his experiences with his iPad and using it as a laptop replacement during a trip to DC. The reaction has, fairly predictably, been pretty strong. I'm torn on the issue. I'm acutely aware of the concerns with Apple not letting the iPhone and iPad be more open, but on the other hand they're amazing pieces of hardware and software. I still haven't made a decision on the iPad, but I've had one iPhone or another for quite a while now, and I love my iPhone.