Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

Okay, I'm sure by now that we can't build MySQL 5.5.15 from source on OS X Lion. I'll wait for 5.5.16 to be released and try again.

Am I the only one trying to do this? Nothing else turns up on Google. You can build MySQL 5.5.15 from source on Snow Leopard (32/64 bit fat binary) and that will run on Lion but what i was going for was getting everything built and run on Lion.

I also tried building MySQL Connector/C 6.0.2 on Lion (which is needed to build our database access frameworks at the client ends, like on Mac, iPhone and iPad). That will build OK and I can get a fat 32/64 bit Intel binary. But when I run it, I get lots of NSAutoReleasePools errors. Seems like something to do with threads, and if it were so, then that's like the problem we're having building the whole MySQL 5.5 server on Lion (which failed at doing something like pthreads).

Anyway, I only have a vague understanding of what I'm doing here, at least right now. Will need to do more digging. But I'm sure we'll sort this out. They always get sorted out. Eventually. I'm the rational optimist.

MySQL 5.5 on Lion

I've been working on this the whole weekend but I still can't build MySQL 5.5 from source on Lion. I keep getting errors with the pthread and, after I've found a way around that, there were errors with my_atomics or something like that.

Will leave this for now. Seems to be fixed in the coming 5.5.16 version of MySQL. We'll see then.

Luca on Lion - A Descent into the Walled Garden

I was having problems even opening the Luca project's nib (user interface) files on Xcode 4.1 on Lion. Xcode, moving forward on Lion, has dropped support for custom Interface Builder palette objects. But that was one of the most powerful ideas from NeXT's Objective-C Project Builder/Interface Builder environment - that developers can build palettes of custom user-interface objects and drag and drop them or connect them, just like Apple's own built-in objects (like NSTextFields, NSTables, NSPanels, etc).

So, if I want to change anything on Luca's interface while developing on Lion, I sinply can't because I can't open any of my nib files due to their dependencies on my custom interface objects (in Luca's case, these objects dealt with the formatting of currencies whenever Luca presents money values in its windows). In Apple's scheme of things, I had to find a machine that is still running Snow Leopard, and run the previous Xcode 3.2.x on it and then open Luca and cut off all dependencies on the custom nib objects.

Theoretically, I could open Xcode 3.2 on Lion but, in reality, installing Xcode 3.2 on top of Xcode 4.1 would mangle Xcode 4.1. I took a long time to settle in on my Lion development - I didn't want to start all over again. So, fortunately, my wife's MacBook Pro was still running Snow Leopard. So I re-installed Xcode 3.2.6 on it. And killed off the dependencies and rewrote some code to replace the lost functionality.

This is really like taking a few steps back. But developing for Apple is often like that. You have to run just to keep in place.

But then, I've always been a Mac fan. I can buy in to what Apple would like to do to keep their platform alive going forward. But I wonder. Would we think back, years later, to Mac OS X Snow Leopard as being the zenith of Mac development, where we can make the Mac do almost absolutely whatever we can dream of, before it descended into this walled (curated?) garden that is the iOS?

MailServe and DNS Enabler for Lion Updates

With MailServe for Lion 5.0.1, I updated Dovecot to its current latest version, 2.0.13. I also fixed two problems with Dovecot. Dovecot can now allow SSL ports (995 and 993) to be opened without requiring the corresponding default ports (110 and 143) to be opened, too (so that you can force a user to connect to Dovecot only via SSL).

Also, this update restores Dovecot's ability to support custom port numbers for POP and IMAP. Please remember to save your config, do a de-install from MailServe's Help menu, re-open the saved config, and then restart all the services, in order to get these latest Dovecot binaries.

It's currently very hard to work with Dovecot 2.0.x because there is just no documentation to be found. I found the workarounds to these problems (plus that about how to use an Intermediate CA SSL cert) by Googling for the answer and not via the Dovecot Wiki. But I don't want to knock Dovecot, which is really a very good system.

For DNS Enabler for Lion 5.0.1, I fixed a problem whereby the dyndnsupdate.key used to support dynamic updates cannot be found on a Lion system with a case-sensitive file system.

So, it's really not that easy to build and support these systems because there are so many variations to test and consider.

MySQL & PostgreSQL Database Installers for Lion

I've uploaded new Lion versions of our database installers - for MySQL and PostgreSQL. They come with their own Startup Preference Panes that you can install into System Preferences. I've tested them. They work great.

The MySQL version this installs is 5.1.57. We'll want to build a version for MySQL 5.5.x and get everything we do aligned with that.

The PostgreSQL version is the current latest, 9.0.4. There's a PostgreSQL bundled within Lion but I haven't figured how to turn that on. But there's an advantage to using our own because I think we can keep up with the changes at Postgres faster than if we depend on Apple and our installer upgrades our database data automatically with each update. And, finally, we can get rid of our own PostgreSQL setup cleanly when we don't need them.

OS X Lion's 3000 new APIs

If you get to see Apple's Developer pages, you will see this page about the 3000 new APIs in Lion :

But the other side of the story, about the APIs that are lost or being pruned away (being deprecated in developer-speak) - that is not so well known.

Among those being deprecated are two specific API calls that I've used to build all these server setup apps. They're the calls that allow my system configuration tools to acquire admin privileges from the user so that they can move files into protected directories like /Library and /System/Library and /etc. These calls are going away and they don't look like being replaced. So if I don't find a way to get around this, I won't be able to build any more server setup apps going forward.

I would leave the conspiracy theories to others, like Apple wants to own everything (well, I'm not even allowed into the App Store with these apps - Apple specifically forbids apps that require escalation to admin privileges).

But I think I can build pretty good server administration tools, if at least only for my own use. So I will need to find another way. And soon.

But before that, I need to get Luca, my accounting app, working in Lion. It's not just a simple re-compile for Lion because Luca needs to go through database frameworks (like my version of Microsoft's ODBC calls) to get to the database servers and these frameworks need to be built from source for Lion and often they can fail to build when the Mac OS changes or the MySQL or PostgreSQL versions change. "So you want to charge even though you have no new features?" It's work, man, and I'll probably build this version of Luca only for the people who really need it.

(And I've got nib user-interface files that I can't now open in Lion because the system for building Interface Builder plug-ins change in Lion. There isn't even an Interface Builder.app in Lion. It's all built into Xcode which has changed, drastically.)

OS X Lion's AFP

OS X Lion doesn't support FTP, i.e., you can't share files from one machine to another using FTP. It's all AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) now.

I've been building my own Adobe GoLive/Dreamweaver replacement because I want to be Adobe-free on my Macs. (I'm now totally free of any Microsoft product). It's called Duomo. But when I try to connect to my server, so I can upload this blog entry (I built a blog editor into Duomo so I can see what the blog entry looks like, exactly, as I am typing it), I got an error with AFP. But I'm sure I tested this with the developers' GM version of Lion and it was OK. So this is a mystery and it makes me worry about what else might break.

P.S. : I've been installing and re-installing Lion today. I thought I had finally settled on a fully equipped system on my iMac today, with the developer resources all set up properly so I can finally dive deeper (and much deeper) into Lion and Lion Server. But I found I made the partition too small for what I planned to do and, for some reason, I couldn't use Disk Utilities to increase the partition size. So back to doing another installation. Hope this will be really it, so I can get back to work.

OS X Lion

And I'm glad to say, I'm now also able to make these new OS X Lion versions of all my apps - MailServe, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent and WebMon, etc. - available here, right on time. There were times, during Lion's gestation, when I felt that my stuff were all breaking apart so much that I couldn't put them back together again, Apple being in the habit of changing its innards each time they upgrade their OS.

Even now, I fear things might still break with the shipping version of Lion. I've done the testing against the developers' Golden Master relaese of Lion. The shipping versin from the App Store appears to have the same build number. But once, when Apple released Leopard, the final shipping version was different from the GM release and my apps broke and I had to pull them from my site. That taught me never to take things for granted.

Am also really glad that OS X Lion is now upon us. I haven't slept much the last two days. I hope that the changes Apple has been making to the system's innards can now stabilise so that I can finally start to build on top of it.

Lion Developer Preview 4

I've installed OS X Lion Developer Preview 4. It restores the stability that was lost with release 3, especially with Safari. So it feels good to be working with Lion again. Not sure about the GUI changes though, especially the scroll bars. The iOS scroll bars feel clumsy on the Mac.

New Lion, Dev Preview 3, Worst of the Lot

Developer Preview 3 of Lion doesn't work on the Thunderbolt MacBook Pro. Fortunately I backed up all my Lion-related work before I did the Software Update. The MacBook Pro refuses to boot up after the update.

I dropped the Lion partition, re-created it, and then installed Developer Preview 3 from scratch. Again, the MBP hung on startup and I gave up at this point.

I hate the look of Lion. Will this be Apple's Vista? That's a distinct possibility. Has Apple been hiring a lot of refugees from Microsoft? Use Lion and you'll feel that thought creeping up on you.

I've no doubt that Apple has done a lot of performance tweaking in the innards of Lion. Lion does feel faster than Snow Leopard for tasks like mounting a remote shared volume. But the user interface really sucks, I finally decided, and that's not what you want to hear about Apple. (NeXT's grey interface has a dignified, understated elegance - if that's what they wanted to bring back, they failed).

Postfix and Dovecot on Lion

I've managed to get Dovecot and Postfix working again on Lion. This is version 2.0.12 of Dovecot. There were so many changes to Dovecot especially, and to Postfix, and also, most importantly, to the underlying operating system, that I despaired of ever being able to figure them all out again, at one stage.

But these are just the basics. There are still a whole lot of issues ahead - Fetchmail, SMTP authentication, POP and IMAP, SSL, spam filtering, user account creation, etc…

Going from one cat to another, from Jaguar to Lion, has never been easy. Apple has never been one for staying still.

Running Lion on the Thunderbolt MacBook Pro

I'm now able to run the OS X Lion Developer Preview on my new 2011 Thunderbolt MacBook Pro (15 inch). Besides finding the MBP unable to wake from sleep a couple of times, plus a corruption of the screen when I tried to run the iPhone simulator (for some reason Spaces was triggered and the video output froze beween the two screens I had set up for Spaces), I'm enjoying the Lion experience. It feels somewhat zippier than Snow Leopard, plus there are many nice touches, though aesthetically, I miss the colourful exuberance of Aqua. Lion is unremittingly grey.

By now I've got DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, WebMon and Liya running again on Lion, so that settles the basics - DNS (because the DNS admin tool in Lion Server still looks wanting), the web server (so I know my PHP scripts still run and I can get at least get my web site up on Lion), and my access to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Lion has a PostgreSQL database built-in. I'll get the code from Hai Hwee to make a Preferences Pane to turn that on

I'm using my own tool, which I'm tentatively calling DuoMo, to update my web site and weblog, and not a moment too soon because there is no FTP in Lion (or at least a GUI for starting FTP). It's all AFP now.

As usual there are changes under the hood for all three servers that I work with - the web, dns and mail servers. I've fixed the stuff for web and dns, and now I move on to mail. Only after I've made MailServe work again for Lion, can I come back to the question, what new stuff do I build for Lion?

I've got quite a bit of these "enhancements" done as experiments over the years, but it's time to put them together.

Especially the question - what do I do with Lion Server? How do the servers I set up coexist with it, and augment it - to take advantage of Lion Server's ability to set up a Calendar and Contacts server, etc...? These are things I've always wanted to do and so I'm looking forward to the challenge.

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