So, I bought IWork ‘08 the other day and started playing around with it. I was glad to see they fixed a couple of things with IWork ‘06–there was some bug with gradient fills and tables that ended up leaving a thin line of background near the top edge of the cell… but only when you printed or made the PDF.
One thing I was kind of excited about was seeing Apple’s spin on Excel: Numbers. So, being an engineer, I opened up to a blank worksheet, filled column A with 0-360, and column B with SIN(RADIANS(A[X]))–where X is the corresponding row in A, and then created a chart from column B. So this chart has 361 points in it–relatively small considering some that I’ve done in Excel where in upwards of 40,000 points. Well, with 4 processors and 5GB of RAM, Numbers couldn’t be responsive while doing anything with that chart. In fact, I tried tweaking the chart in a couple of ways and ended up crashing the application. Backing the number of points down to ~180 made things work much better. It was a little disappointing. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to want to use 360 or more points in a graph. Anything that involves daily costs, or maybe daily inventories, or… well, you get the idea. I hope the next version takes care of some of these issues. From an engineering perspective, I really need to see more.
Yesterday I was setting up a new VM under VMWare Workstation when I noticed that mouse grabbing was not working. Now I use my VMs extensively, so I expect this feature to work as it slows productivity when it doesn’t. After digging around, I found that the VMWare Tools installer hadn’t modified the xorg.conf to handle the mouse. It turns out that they released the Xorg drivers as open source and now they’re maintained by the Xorg team! So, in this case, I fired up Synaptic and installed the vmmouse input driver, modified the driver line in my xorg.conf to be ‘vmmouse’ instead of ‘mouse’, and restarted X. Tada! I now have mouse grabbing without having to start the vmware-toolbox.
So, I was at work yesterday, trying to troubleshoot a problem we were having with our customer’s build system. For some reason, we’re seeing make fail with a complaint about a missing endif—an error that they’ve never seen. So we proceed with the usual check of tools and found that we were using the same versions of everything. Same gcc, same make, same binutils, same everything… except the Linux distribution.
To make a long story short, we discovered that their build system does not support make 3.80, because 3.80 has a nasty bug that doesn’t allow you to use eval within a conditional. Fedora Core 4 patched make, and low and behold, it works on our customer’s system. However, my distribution—SuSE—did not patch make, and therefore, did not work. So much for supporting make 3.80.