Afterburner

All things worse than Murphy struck again, just because there is a deadline. While working away, I suddenly realized how to solve the rexxutil.dylib loading problem. Because the XCode 2 tools and certainly the gcc 4.0 compiler are not up to scratch yet to compile Open Object Rexx for the Mac, I had to restart from my Panther 10.3.9 disk with XCode 1.5 to compile the fix I just entered. It ran, the Sysxxx util functions are now automatically loaded by the interpreter and it looked like a 5 minute diversion from the productive weekend I planned.

Then the Mother of All Murphies struck when I restarted from 10.4.1. I did not, showing me an Apple and throwing the G5 in afterburner mode, which it apparently does when it loses all track of the temperature sensors and must assume that it is really *hot*. Our two cats came in the room to check out if there was danger.

It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to open the CD door on boot, repaired disk and disk permissions, set the boot partition again, and started. The jets took off immediately. Proceeded by resetting the NVRAM and PRAM as directed on the website (you should always have two computers hooked to the net).

Nothing. I did an archive and install, losing costly time in the future by now having to reinstall all commercial crap software from Adobe and Macromedia that I am using. Avoiding this time wasting on activation and serial number only must be a valid reason to switch to open source only.

After reinstall: the same. I guess there is a faulty track on the disk just where it reads the boot code, or otherwise there is some kind of error in the fastboot, kextchache or other caches that Tiger install did not solve. So I spent the rest of yesterdays evening moving work over to my other disk (you should have at least two disks in every machine) and booting from Panther. And (sigh, see yesterday) compiling emacs again. This time I am certain: their make clean, nor their make maintainer-clean cleans out all of the libraries, you have to do an uninstall, nuke the emacs directory, check out a clean cvs copy and ./configure and make bootstrap. But we're up again, and Object Rexx on the Mac has one error less.