Jan 24
About 6 weeks ago I posted about the various ports that failed to install in my first attempts at getting “my standard suite” of ports installed under MacPorts on Leopard. My standard suite until Tiger involved issuing the following command:
sudo port install aquaterm chmdump contacts coreutils curl file findutils g95 ghostscript gv ImageMagick ksh93 latex2rtf lynx macutil osxutils plotutils subversion teTeX tidy vim wget wine xterm xephem
Since then
MacPorts has released version 1.6 and the various porters have been hacking at the various problems. I can now report that of the ports I reported failed to install:
- xterm, wine, and g95 all now install without any issues.
- teTeX can be installed, there was a bad dependency in the portfile. You just needed to install openmotif first manually. I don’t know if the bad dependency is still there, it may have been resolved.
- subversion can be installed, it also had a bad dependency. You just needed to install nawk first. Again, I don’t know if the bad dependency is still there, it may have been resolved.
- gv can be installed if you apply a patch. If you check that bug ticket on gv (you need to get a free MacOSForge account), you will find a new patch-setenv.c file is available there. If you download that file and replace /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/print/gv/files/patch-setenv.c with it, gv will compile and install just fine.
This leaves just two of my standard suite of packages that don’t compile right in Leopard, osxutils (See this post) and xephem (See this post). And xephem installs just fine manually if you download the source code.
Jan 21
I apparently made the mistake of staying at a Hilton Hotel in Austin, TX for the AAS Meeting last week. Hilton Grand Vacations, a division of Hilton Hotels (no link, they don’t deserve the traffic) has been calling be several times this weekend, abandoning the phone call when they don’t have an operator available fast enough. I know this because the caller ID reported the call was from Orlando, FL, phone number 407-722-3532. I called the number back and they said they were Hilton Grand Vacations and were really willing to set me up on a nice vacation.
Apparently, these idiots don’t realize that calling someone on the National DO NOT Call list, even if you have a “prior business relationship,” is calling someone who has already stated they don’t like Junk Calls. Why they don’t bother to check against the National DO NOT call list before placing telephone solicitations is beyond me. Apparently, a search of 407-722-3532 on Google reveals several people pretty torqued off about the calls.
I informed the nice lady on the other side of the line that
- they should remove our home phone number from their phone list since I am on the National DO NOT Call list, (they did so without complaint and gave me a reference number to supposedly track the request)
- They should consider any previous business relationship severed (this is how they get around the National Do Not Call list), and
- I will be filing a complaint using Form 1088 at the FCC for the series of abandoned calls.
I will hopefully email the AAS to inform them of this completely unprofessional behavior on the part of Hilton. Maybe they will reconsider their relationship with these idiot, I know I have.
Jan 16
Check out this link to the The Astrological Magazine and tell me this isn’t a wee bit ironic (and maybe smelling of a hoax).
Jan 14
The folks behind SAOImage DS9 have now released version 5.1. The big change I’ve noticed since the last version is that version 5.1 works without issues under Leopard’s new X11 implementation. Of course, the disadvantage is you now must download a version compatible with your OS version as well as your CPU.
- If you want the Aqua (MacOS X native version, download the appropriate one of the following files. If you want to use the Aqua-native version from IRAF, you will need to access the command-line binary within the SAOImage DS9.app application bundle as “SAOImage\ DS9.app/Contents/MacOS/ds9“.
- If you want the X11-based command line driven version
More detailed release notes are available here. See my previous post on SAOImage DS9 5.0 to see how it is possible to upgrade the binaries included with SciSoft OSX.
