[sword-devel] Back Home! / MAC

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Yeah!  I'm home finally.

BorCon was cool.  Kylix stuff looks promising, but not everything I
expected.

They had a few Macintosh G4's running a prerelease of OSX in the lab
(they were showing off JBuilder running on a MAC).  Supposedly OSX will
go to pubic beta next month.  I was impressed with all they've done
actually.  You can open a tcsh and move around just like you were on a
real unix box.  They had gcc and many of the gnu libraries available.  I
spent an afternoon and managed to get our code to compile on a MAC!  CVS
was on the boxes, so I have committed my updates.  You will see a new
option, macosx, in Makefile.cfg.  This should be sufficient to get the
code to compile on OSX.  The command line tools that I tried seemed to
work well.  Now we just need someone with 'COCO' experience to write a
frontend.

CD's are done and almost gone.  I believe I still have enough to fulfill
the backlog of orders.  I'll have them keep feeding me a supply so we'll
always have some onhand.  God's hand was blatantly evident in the
completion of the CD.  3 Weeks ago, Monday, was the absolute deadline
for the CD if I still was to get them in time for C-Stone.  There was
way too much to finish to pollish the installers and such that I knew I
could never do it.  I just asked God to provide somehow.  The preceeding
Thursday I was up until 5am working on the CD.  Friday was spent
preparing a laptop for my 3 week trip and then after work, spending time
on the CD.  My flight left for New York Friday night (actually Sat
morning) at 12:30am.  I believe I finished the CD at about 10:00pm and
began the download process from the server.  Got the image around
11:00pm before I was leaving for New York and started the burn process. 
Got the final image onto a physical CD around 11:30, got home at 12:00
where my friend, Eric, had been waiting to take me to the airport. 
Packed in about 45 seconds and sped hastily to catch my flight :)  Well,
got there just after the flight had left.  boooo.  Went to the ticket
counter and they told me that they could put me on standby for the next
flight at 6:30am but it was oversold and there wasn't much of a chance
I'd get on.  Now remember, I have to fedex this CD Saturday for Monday
delivery to CA.  If I'm on a plane all day (I lose 3 hours to New York),
I might've had toubles.  Just then, discouraged, I look up and lo and
behold, an old friend of mine is working behind the counter at the
airport.  He comes over to the lady helping me and says, "You have to
take care of this guy."  Well, she managed to get me on a flight out
immediately on another airline with only 1 stop (instead of 2) and I got
to New York 1 1/2 hours before I was supposed to be there!!!  wooohoooo.

Ok, now the plane ride...  I had my laptop and decided that it might be
a good thing if I actually tried the CD before I sent it out and had
1000 copies made :)  Well, I found bugs.  So, my flight consisted of
debugging the setup and installmgr process on linux and burning a copy
at my 1 hour layover in Dallas for a man I sat next to on the plane that
was really interested in what we do.

When I got to NY, the hotel messed up my room and I had to wait until
3pm to checkin, so having some 'free time' and the assurance of the
receptionist that fedex came at 8pm, I decided to investigate the
business center at the hotel.  Well, it turns out that they had full
high speed internet access and I realized that I had completely
forgotten to include the GnomeSword stuff on the CD!  So, anyway, I
spent 2 hours adding the GnomeSword stuff to the CD, the Linux install,
and updating the swordbase.tar.gz module.  When I went back to checkin,
I reconfirmed that fedex would, indeed be by later so that I might have
time to go up to my room, burn a new CD and drop it off.  The mail
center desk said that they had ALREADY COME and that they only come on
Saturdays if you call them (which they did for another guest).  I
explained my emergency and they said they would do what they could to
coerce them to return.  I went up to my room and began the burn
process.  They called and said that fedex would be there sometime
between 4 and 7pm.  It was 3:30 and I was just starting the burn.  It
finished at about 4:05, I went down and dropped the CD off at the desk. 
Apparently a shift change had taken place at the message counter.  A new
person at the desk informed me that FedEx was just by and that I had
missed them.  Frantically explaining my situation to the new person, I
asked if anything could be done.  They said they would do what they
could and they managed to get FedEx to come out a 3rd time to the
hotel!  weeee.  :)  CD finally got to Cali on Monday and I got them sent
to me in Nashville on Friday.  It amazes me the turn around time these
places can get on these CD orders.

Anyway.  They came out pretty good.  After work on Monday I'll post all
of my intransit hacks to the server so that others might download the
'final' CD image.  Glory to God!

	In Him,
		-Troy.