Somehow Apple had problems getting Corky’s order of his MacBook straight: First they had lost the order and he had to order again, then they apparently found it again, and Corky ended up with two MacBooks. Since the MacBook has a dual-core CPU, he asked if I wanted to work on it. I am blessed. Thank you.
It’s a very slick machine. I’m still getting used to MacOS and several of the Apple-specific things like mounting archives, and so on, but I feel that I could really like Apple’s blend of graphical OS and Unix-like internals. I’m in the process of installing all the things I need, like Perforce for my one-user mini repository, Ant, Subversion, etc… Most of it is working already. I don’t have a decent office suite yet, though.
Unfortunately, many things are really different. It took me a long time to find something that resembled a JDK. For the Mac, Apple makes the JVM, so it’s neither in a place that looks normal to me, nor can I just go and download a stock JVM from Sun. And I thought Sun was brewing it’s own strange blend of coffee…
Apparently, the rt.jar file is split into two parts on the Mac, classes.jar and ui.jar:
- /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/classes.jar
- /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/ui.jar
I may have to extend the capabilities of the FileInstrumentor a little to handle that, even though it should already be able to handle it: I’d just have to treat one of the jars as a normal input file, and it won’t be auto-detected.
It’s just a little bit sad that the differences are so great that I’ll have to adapt my project to the MacOS platform, when I haven’t even finished adapting and testing it on Linux, and I’m in such an awful time crunch right now since I’m leaving for Oregon next Tuesday.
