#macintosh Articles


Subtasks and Redirection

Background As part of an ongoing effort to keep Cartographica up to date with recent changes in libraries that we compile from source, notably GDAL and Proj, I'm in the midst of a refresh of those subtrees in the frameworks that I build from them. Over the past few years …

fp-concat Accuracy

My previous post about proj floating point investigation discussed an issue that I'd tracked down to the OS level. However, it's clear that this relates to an underlying change to code compiled by Xcode (and/or the LLVM toolchain that it is built upon). Based on a post about Xcode …

xcodes for xcode switching

As part of digging through my various problems with Xcode 14.3 (Feedback FB12154691, FB12154887, and some test case issues involving floating point math), I needed to install Xcode 14.2 to move my buildfarm backwards. Although this didn't enitrely fix the problem, it was an essential element of the …

Proj Floating Point Error Investigation

TL;DR MacOS 13.3 or 13.3.1 incorporated a change that is affecting calculations in proj for applications running on those versions of the OS. The change appears to be relatviely subtle, only affecting a single test in a single projection and only on x86_64, not arm, but …

First look 2021 M1 MacBook Pro

I last bought a MacBook Pro from Apple in November of 2019, in the midst of a bout of travel that was about to come to an end. In point of fact, I haven't used my trusty MacBook Pro much in the last 19 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic started …

Larry Tesler at NCSA

Today I read of the passing of Larry Tesler, a computer scientist with a long and storied career, spanning Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, and others. He's considered the father of the modeless interaction model (think Cut/Copy/Paste on the Mac). I met Larry in the late 1980s, when …

Overwatch Leaves nVidia's GeForce Now

According to an article on PCWorld, Activision-Blizard has pulled all of their titles from nVidia's GeForce Now. In my days as CTO of Haste (a service that improves network connections for gamers), I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time playing Overwatch as part of our test regime …

Developing on a 2019 Mac Pro

There's been a lot of discussion about the 2019 Mac Pro and various assertions that it's over-designed, overpriced, or underpowered. Since I decided to replace my venerable 2013 Mac Pro[1] with a 2019 Mac Pro, I figured I'd write up my experience with the device as a developer. The …

NetNewsWire rises again!

One of the very first posts on this blog (16 years ago in the beginning of 2003) was entitled All of your favorite sites at a glance which discussed a new pair of apps (NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite) that I'd just started using. Considering the fallout for RSS from the …