Mac Xcode Fail

I have a brand spanking new MacBook Pro Retina since this summer. I was next in line for a new computer and they were just out, so I decided to get one.

It was beautiful -- wonderful graphics, sleek design. I reported on some of the setup hiccups back in August, haven't been blogging much since. I didn't start putting stickers on it, because since I began to use it, I began having headaches. I soon realized that the non-Mac programs were not using the Retina display properly. I debated whether to sell the Retina off to a colleague and get a non-Retina for myself, but finally decided to keep it. I've started off just with a WikiData, a CC, and a FSFE sticker.

But problems keep arising. I have to order an Thunderbolt-2-Ethernet adapter when I am suddenly in a place that doesn't believe in WLAN. I want to plug in a microphone and I discover there is no jack anymore for my super fancy room microphone. I want to leave my laptop in the library and go for coffee, so I whip out my Kensington lock - and find that there is no place to attach it to! My choices are no coffee or no Mac. I settled for the former.

Then suddenly, Keynote is crashing regularly. Or PowerPoint. Or both. Or picd crashes and wants to tell me about it many times. Urgently. Or the TimeMachine interrupts a presentation to tell me that it can't find the TimeMachine. Duh, I'm not home, dude.

I finally narrowed it down to Keynote / PowerPoint crashing when I plugged in the HDMI beamer. It also crashed with the VGA adapter. I tried plugging in and then turning on the beamer, turning on the beamer and then plugging it in, with all variations. Crash, crash, crash. Today, it didn't crash. No idea why, maybe because I installed Xcode last night?

I had avoided installing Xcode over the summer. It didn't get transferred, and is a 4 GB (GIGAbyte) package to download. Since I only have 5 GB a month on my plan, I delayed this until the fall when I could use the line at school. Last night a friend challenged me to a simple task. Should be a 20 minute job, just need to compile a tool in C.

Except that there was no Xcode installed. Okay, let's start downloading ....... Got it, now install. It now expands to 9 GB (!!!!!) somewhere on the disk. My new, larger disk is rapidly evaporating. It gets installed, I now have gcc, go to set up the code for the challenge.

BZZZT. Error.

LLVM ERROR: Cannot yet select: 0x1009eda10: f32 = fp_round 0x100a53310, 0x1009ed810 [ORD=1412] [ID=40]
  0x100a53310: f64 = fdiv 0x100a56910, 0x100a52e10 [ORD=1411] [ID=38]
    0x100a56910: f64 = sint_to_fp 0x100a56a10 [ID=36]
      0x100a56a10: i64,ch = load 0x100543bc8, 0x100a52710, 0x1009ed910 [ID=32]
        0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
        0x100a52710: i64 = add 0x100a56b10, 0x100a06c10 [ORD=1405] [ID=26]
          0x100a56b10: i64,ch = CopyFromReg 0x100543bc8, 0x1009eee10 [ORD=1405] [ID=18]
            0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
            0x1009eee10: i64 = Register %reg16385 [ORD=1405] [ID=6]
          0x100a06c10: i64 = Constant<24> [ORD=1397] [ID=2]
        0x1009ed910: i64 = undef [ORD=1398] [ID=4]
    0x100a52e10: f64 = sint_to_fp 0x100a56d10 [ID=35]
      0x100a56d10: i64,ch = load 0x100543bc8, 0x100a56510, 0x1009ed910 [ID=31]
        0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
        0x100a56510: i64 = add 0x100a56b10, 0x1009ee610 [ORD=1407] [ID=25]
          0x100a56b10: i64,ch = CopyFromReg 0x100543bc8, 0x1009eee10 [ORD=1405] [ID=18]
            0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
            0x1009eee10: i64 = Register %reg16385 [ORD=1405] [ID=6]
          0x1009ee610: i64 = Constant< [ORD=1399] [ID=5]
        0x1009ed910: i64 = undef [ORD=1398] [ID=4]
  0x1009ed810: i64 = Constant<0> [ORD=1404] [ID=3]
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [sim_c] Error 1 

Right.WTF is LLVM. I googled. It's a linker. I haven't tussled with a linker for 25 years! I scoured the forums. Lots of people have an LLVM error, and there are various incantations that may or may not work. I clicked through Xcode, looking for something to set. Nothing looked useful. At 2 am I gave up and went to bed.

This morning I showed the mess to one of our engineers. He had a bright idea, he had run into this trying to install Github on our iMacs. "Open up the preferences in Xcode", he said. "Go to Downloads and Components. Look, you don't have the command line tools installed!" It turns out, when you install 9 GB worth of Xcode in order to have a make around, it doesn't bother installing 150 MB worth of command line tools. So we downloaded them, installed them, and by magic, I was now able to create the tool for the challenge.

Look, Apple. It's not just the creative types that like to use your systems. There's Linux under the hood, so that it is possible to program without all the window-y stuff and 97 million checkmarks or buttons to set up for an Xcode project. That might be fine if I'm preparing an app for an iPhone, but when I want a trivial little thing built to fire off a simple task, I don't want to first have to install 9 GB of stuff just to get the compiler put somewhere where I can find it.

CS people in ties?

As noted above, I'm currently at the yearly conference for computer scientists in Germany. If you think of CS types you think of geeks, or at least I do, being a geek myself. Geeks don't tend to give much attention to how they look, I used to think. And the GI conferences have been legendary. Okay, Manfred Broy's tie collection is legendary, but he used to be pretty much the only one sporting a tie every day of the conference and they were outrageous ones. But I remember Leslie Lamport at the conference in Hamburg many years ago, dressed in a geek T-Shirt and ratty tennis shoes and nailing the suit-wearing speaker on incorrect mathematics, or Christiane Floyd madly knitting in the front row of the Kaiserslautern conference on the military uses of computing.

It's day 2 of the conference here, and the place is full of suits and ties. Even women are running around in pinstriped skirt-suits. Pretty much only the students have T-Shirts, and that is because it is the helper's uniform.

Oh, wait - there's a geek with unruly hair, a bit of a tummy and a T-Shirt! Cool, he's a local professor! But I'm worried about computing people dressing up like this - we should be focussed on how to develop systems, how to solve problems, and how to think about how our technology will affect the world and whether we really want a world like that.

jPod

Gawd. What a *funny* book, but I've loved everything I've read by Douglas Coupland. It is a bit corny that he has himself in the book as himself, but I guess that is supposed to be a bit of self-referencing.

I mean, how many current books have the first million digits of Pi printed in them? All of the prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000? Some really, really screwed C++ code (okay, I understand that typesetters don't understand that you *cannot* change the lines around, closing them up or breaking them where ever in order to make it look nice. And backslash-else is not a command.)

This book is probably only really hilarious to geek-types like myself. I laughed myself silly over the line one of the women says when the main character's parents explode into really crazy craziness "Oh, right, I forgot that your family still runs on Windows." The really silly situations here are so great, that one's own crazy family looks absolutely sane by comparison!

Coupland's description of the Lesbian commune is so rich - how on earth did he manage to sneak into one in order to observe what goes on?? And the games played by games programmers (especially the google games) are hilarious. BTW, the Swedes have some new words: "bildgoogleat" means "to have googled for a picture".....

A must read for all geeks - don't let the size put you off. I finished it in 2 2/2 autistic days ....

She's Such a Geek!

I don't just go to movies, I also still manage to read the occasional book :)

Found this referenced in a blog somewhere, purchased it via Amazon and had it delivered pronto. Twice. Apparently I clicked on the "purchase" button twice. Oh well, got a Christmas present for a nice geek girl I know.

It is a collection of biographies of geek women: why did they become geek, how do they survive, what is it that they love about their work. I toted it everywhere with me, reading it in a bar in Sweden, on the train to work, etc. I suggested it to my students in my "Gender & Computing" course, and had it on my table waiting to be blogged.

Then I went to 23c3 for a day and planned on staying until the bitter end for a talk called "Revenge of the Female Nerds" by someone called Annalee Newitz. Turned out she is one of the editors of the book! It was a great talk, and there were so many men present (wanting to see what was meant by revenge, maybe, or hoping for some dismemberment of some poor hacker). They even participated in the discussion, if somewhat cluelessly at times ("I know of 2 situations where women slept their way to the position they are in so women always do this". Sigh. Analee made it clear that there is a difference between the sexual, private life, and the public life. And gee, guess what, guys do it too. Yawn, next question.

She runs two blogs, techsploitation and shessuchageek. I had a nice chat with her afterwards with some interested parties (male, female, transgender), was very interesting to talk with the person responsible for the book I just read :)