Jon Simpson’s Weblog

Ok, so tonight’s CSCS was focused around the unix userland & tools, and how to administrate a Linux/Unix box. Lack of networking hampered things slightly, but there was definitely some useful stuff demonstrated (and its the kind of thing that’s really useful when it’s exactly what you’re looking for). I’m posting a rough crib sheet [...]

So it seems Microsoft have discontinued Windows Media Player for mac to reduce the size of their mac business unit, and are going to focus more on going forward with business applications. (source). So what replaces it?

So today had lots of interesting announcements on the Apple front at Macworld SF and a few other cool tidbits. Mac OS X 10.4.4, a Google Earth beta for Mac OS X and the new hardware announcements. Interesting to see the new MacBook Pro announced. It’s not perhaps as big a leap in terms of [...]

Having had multiple copies of Wordpress installed on my server since the 1.2 version, I’d grown increasingly sick of the upgrade process (mostly involving removing every single non-customized file, replacing it with its new equivalent, then trying to merge the changes gracefully).
For a weblog or two, that procedure might be acceptable, but when the [...]

This is a simple/step-by-step guide to building mplayer’s CVS on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. There seem to be quite a few issues going around about this (and I have experienced quite a few of them first hand..)

Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) has been the root of many issues for Mac users in dealing with media playback for a long while now. Due to its prevalence on people’s desktop computers, a lot of small video clips that float around the web often carry the .wmv extension, and the playback of these files [...]

Further to my earlier attempts at compiling mplayer from cvs, the bugs that were previously causing errors in the compilation (I believe, due to library dynamic/static linking strangeness and the stripping of symbols) have been fixed quite a while now and I’ve been enjoying up to date builds of mplayer on Mac OS X Tiger.
There [...]

In the real world, things happen in parallel. As I type this, people and objects around the world are doing everything imaginable, in parallel to my typing. Computer programs, traditionally, follow as a set of instructions that are run in order, one after another in a simple step by step execution. Parallel languages provide syntactic [...]

OS X’s weird changes to the unix layers on which it builds are usually bearable. Mainly because they don’t get in the way, or create any real problem in everyday use (Including the fact that the Finder loves to hide unixy pieces of the filesystem away). However, sometimes it can be a real pain in [...]