OSX Stuff

Finally, I found a "good" way to handle not only reading mail from everywhere, but also sending mail. First of all, all my mails are stored on my mail/news/fileserver, where I access them via IMAP. From outside, they're accessible via IMAPS (for the usual security reasons, you know, unencrypted protocols are evil). That's not that weird, because it can all be handled smoothly with some imapd, stunnel (on the server side) and mutt (on the client side). But now the setup for sending mail: first of all, when mutt sends a mail, it runs the sendmail binary provided by nullmailer. When nullmailer-send is being run, it connects to localhost:5000 to send the mail. On this port, stunnel in client mode is listening, which then connects to my machine home. On the machine home, another stunnel in server mode received the connection, and hands over the data to a local SMTP server, where it is then transmitted to my ISP's smarthost. This is really the weirdest mail setup I ever had. But so far, it's the only way to communicate securely (or at least more secure than usual) and using mutt at the same time. I had a similar, but simpler setup with Mail.app from Mac OS X, but this mailer sucks, compared to mutt.

boehm-gc, a garbage collector for C and C++, is partially broken on OSX, i.e. it works most of the time, but sometimes it does not. I, for one, triggered a bug in boehm-gc, totally fucking up a linked list in the 'scheme0' interpreter. I was searching for this bug for quite some time, until I tried it under Linux, and there, it worked perfectly. I just don't want to touch a garbage collector's source. Even a few glimpses at the code revealed that this is highly obscure software. So, boys and girls, don't rely on boehm-gc when you have to write a program for OSX/Darwin.

Today, after almost one year of using Mac OS X as operating system on my iBook, Mac OS X crashed the first really hard, where really hard means the equivalent of the well-known and feared Blue Screen of Death of Windows or the Kernel Panic of Linux and other Unix-like operating system. Mac OS X paniced a lot nicer, you can see it on the picture below. Anyway, I'm surprised that it took so long to crash once. IMHO it tells a lot about the real stability of OSX (and I use the system every day, with the iBook and thus OSX running 24/7). For a higher resolution image showing the whole scene of the iBook with the panic screen have a look at this picture (warning: over 900 kB!).