To get KDE running under Mac OS X, the secret is simple fink install bundle-kde-ssl and follow the corresponding instructions on the fink web site. Mostly, you have to just have to type starkde assuming that you have appropriately edited your .xinitrc file. The main problem is that it takes a really long time to compile all of this code, but once it runs, it runs well! This has just made Mac OS X that much more useful to me.

Warning: do use the “export KDEWM=quartz-wm” line in your xinitrc. Using the KDE window manager is a sure way to make Apple’s X11 crash when moving windows. This is not documented anywhere, but I have verified it on 3 different machines with slightly different setups.

Here’s a picture in case you want to see for yourself (click to enlarge):

However, contrary to what I claimed earlier, it turns out that XFig does not work. It worked for a time, but now, I can’t seem to make it work again. Update. To get XFig to work, I need to go into the (non-X11) Apple shell and type open-x11 xfig. There is something odd going on with X11 though KDE applications seem unaffected. I might have to switch to KDE Karbon.

Also, OpenOffice under X11 is very sluggish. It seems like NeoOffice is a much better solution right now.

This is very annoying. Each and every time I install a new machine, the command shell has the beep enabled so that, for every ten keys I press, there is an audible “beep!”

Ok, who thinks this is a good default? Why do I want my machine beeping each time I use autocompletion? How is that helping me? What is the case for such a feature? You are in a meeting, checking up on some data, and the machine keeps on beeping? Why is that good? Ever?

I do not want software to make any noise unless I say so.

Now, if at least it was easy to turn off! For future reference, here is the cryptic command to turn off the bell:

xset b off

(I think this only works if you work inside an X server.)

To make sure that your PC speaker remains silent, do this:

rmmod pcspkr

To make sure that your PC speaker remains silent forever, add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist pcspkr

I also like to put the following in ~\.inputrc:

set bell-style off

This seems to work with most shells.

Using only knowledge gathered based on my previous posts, I’m happy to report that I was able to get XFig running under Mac OS X in less than an hour thanks to the magic of Fink.

So far, my most difficult task has been to get used to yet-another-crazy-keyboard-layout and to get my HP Laserjet 1012 running. Turns out that Apple does not support the HP Laserjet 1012 printer through a Windows share, for some odd reason. Downloading the cups PPD for the HP 1010 printer and installing it manually didn’t help. The workaround was to actually use the same printer, still connected to a Windows box, but this time, shared by my Linux box (if you are lost at this point, sorry), as a generic postscript printer. It is a bit crazy, but it works.

Now, the machine is compiling KDE. I’ll probably only know if it worked tomorrow. This time, I’m trying to follow the instructions found on Fink’s web site so I might have better luck than my previous attempts.

I’ve also found this great list of open source software for Macs on nothickmanuals.org.

I might also try to update Apple’s X11 before trying to run OpenOffice, this time.

See also my posts My favorite MacOS applications, PDFView is dead, vive Skim! and I have had it with Firefox under MacOS.

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Contrary to what the name suggests, XMeeting is Mac software (and not X Windows software) for videoconferencing. I just tried it tonight to call my friend Martin Brooks at NRC and it worked very well. It even gets around my firewall (NAT) without any problem. Oh? Did I mention it was open source? Looks like some kind of GPL-incompatible FreeBSD-like license.

As with all things, there is a catch under Mac OS with the use of the camera. If you are using the camera in one application, for example, XMeeting, then it becomes unavailabe under other applications such as skype. However, you may get the misleading error message ‘No video camera connected’. Simply ensure that you have only one camera-using application opened at any one time.

My teachers in high school would use lots of short movies. But this was bad as it took up precious time in class, you couldn’t watch it over on your own, the sound was sometimes terrible if you were at the far end of the class, and so on.

These days, the technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Any time this year, you can watch a high quality video by UCR’s Eamonn Keogh on time series data mining. It is free, it is good quality, and it is here, now, for us to use.

Wouldn’t you want to have James Gosling explain the finer points of Java as part of your course on Java?

Having guest lecturers in college requires organization, time, and energy. A guest lecturer won’t repeat its lecture, and every single year, you have to get him to come back. Also, can you get the Turing medalist Jim Gray to come over and explain what a data cube is to your class? These days, these same students can listen to Jim by following a link. They can do it whether you want them to or not.

Having talks available through video-on-the-web is not any different than the use of textbooks, you use someone else’s content in your course, except that it is maybe even cheaper.

I can see this becoming a way for authors to boost the sales of their books: watch me talk for free and, if you like it, buy my book!

The world is changing.

In my we-do-not-have-strong-AI-yet category, I found this juicy quote on slashdot:

Investment firms fall over themselves advertising their latest, most esoteric systems,’ said Mr. Lo of M.I.T., who was asked by a $20 billion pension fund to design a neural network. He declined after discovering the investors had no real idea how such networks work.’ Why did he decline? ‘I’ll build a stock market neural network for a couple thousand (you’ll just need five thousand years of market data to train it before it actually works).

I was approached myself to work with a company that did stock picking by computer. When I suggested they look at having the computer help the human being make better decisions, they dismissed the whole notion as being silly. Why help the human being when the machine can take over? Why have so little ambition?

Well, the truth is, now wait for it, computers are less intelligent than human beings! I can’t believe I need to write down something like this, but it is fortunate that there are still Machine Learning researchers (at MIT) who do not fall in love with their topic to the point of living under the illusion that it is easy to mimick human intelligence.

Now, you’ll excuse me, I have my daily batch of spam-that-got-through-12-layers-of-machine-learning-spam-filters to delete.

Source: Slashdot.

Kamel, post-doc in data warehousing in our lab., gave a talk a few days ago (in French).

His slides are also available.

After all the bad mouthing I did over Fink and X11, I got to my office and did this:

cp /private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
chmod +w ~/.xinitrc
vim ~/.xinitrc (add . /sw/bin/init.sh as the first line)


Then, a bit later, I got this (click to enlarge):

Update. Since I wrote what follows, I’ve managed to find ways to install X11 and KDE and all my favorite software with minimal pain. So Fink is not broken, but it could be friendlier. Same holds for Apple’s X11. In fact, Fink is an incredibly powerful tool when combined with something like KDE. It extends Mac OS X in incredible ways.

Fink is a tool to install most common Unix applications (gnuplot, Xfig, you name it!) on MacOS. It has a nice and simple command line interface which I love.

My friend Scott Flinn seems to maintain that Fink is a good solution, even if you want to run X applications (such as XFig, but he went so far as to include KDE appllications!!! Daring!!!).

Ok. One wasted afternoon and one wasted evening later, I beg to differ with Scott.

(Disclaimer: I think that MacOS X is about 10 times better than Windows XP. I’m very happy I bought Apple gear. But when things are poorly layed out, poorly organized, someone has to say it. Even when volunteers do the work.)

Let’s review some of the claims people make:

• Fink supports X11. This is true, but you end up with a primitive X server, without any sensible integration with the OS. I can have the same deal with cygwin/X for Windows, and who uses that? I read somewhere that MacOS was a Unix platform. If it can’t do better than Windows at emulating a real Unix box, well, I will not be impressed.
• Apple supports X11. This is true, but not by default, and you need to be clever.

  First of all, do not confuse “MacOS X Server” (which is expensive payware to run MacOS version 10 as a server OS) with “support for X11″. I don’t even want to think about what will happen down the line when Apple comes out with “MacOS XII” (Mac OS 12) and offers “Mac OS XII Server”. If your font is slightly bad, you might be lost at this point. Short story: Apple sells a Server OS which has nothing to do with an X server.

  Second of all, Apple has a nice and convenient download page for its X11 server. Except that it says: Note 10.4 customers can install X11 by using the Tiger DVD installer disk. What this means, in Apple talk, is that if you have 10.4, you need your Tiger DVD. It won’t tell you this even as you try to install the freshly downloaded package on your machine: it will tell you that you already have “more recent software installed” (which wrongly suggested to me that X11 was already installed!). Yes, I know, they don’t say “must install”, they say “can install from DVD”, but apparently, for Apple, if you can do at thing, you must do a thing. Did you lose your DVDs? Too bad. Ok, turns out that in my case, I still have them. I put the “Tiger” DVD in (which, interestingly, is not called “Tiger” at all, but “Mac OS 10.4″). Then a window pops up with a few icons, mostly a README, and two reinstallation option. I try to reinstall the bundled application, reboot. No luck. Ok, now I go for the full reinstall of the whole OS. Still no luck. At this point, I reinstalled my OS and rebooted twice. Now, wait… Oh! When you put the DVD in, in the window that opens, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you see “optional installs”. Ah! I run this! Ah! X11. Ah! Cool. Looks like I installed it, but there is no instruction, nothing. The installer just quits without telling me anything. Now, where is that X11 thing? It has to be on my machine now! In Finder, under Applications, maybe? No. Nowhere to be found. Hmmm… Did it install the thing? Why won’t it leave a trace? Searching for X11.app in Finder gives me nothing. I search for “X11″. Ok, now, beside a bunch of files derived from Fink, I have something called X11 as an application. Where and how I’m supposed to find it usually is beyond me. (Later on, the X11 application appeared under “Applications / Utilities”, but how was I supposed to guess this?) I launch X11 and it looks good. I get some kind of shell. I can’t test it yet, but it looks hopeful. At this point, my afternoon is completed and I must go home.

• Fink supports Apple’s X11. This would be the best of both worlds. Fink provides the applications, and Apple provides an X server with a nice integration to the OS. Unfortunately, this is painful and can be a lenghty process.

  Here is what fink tells me when I want to install an X application:

  You have an existing X11 installation in /usr/X11R6 and/or /etc/X11.
  This package refuses to overwrite these. Remove them, then tell Fink to
  install xfree86 again. (The package won’t be recompiled.) If you want
  to keep your X11 installation, please see the FAQ entry at
  http://fink.sourceforge.net/ faq/ usage-packages.php#apple-x11-wants-xfree86
  for more information on how to configure your system.

  The link basically says this:

  If you have a current version of fink (>=0.18.3-1), typically what you need to do is reinstall the X11User package, since the installer application occasionally misses installing a file. You may need to do this multiple times.

  Right there, I have to stop. What is X11User? I’ll save you the trouble and about 3 hours wasted. X11User is the very thing I installed from the “Tiger” DVD. Turns out that you can do the install from a shell, so let’s do it again, and again, and again. (They say to do it multiple times. They say that the application sometimes does not install all files? What a piece of software engineering!!! Way to go Apple!)
  cd "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages"
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /


  Ok. I did it about ten times to be sure. Every time the installer tells me “The upgrade was successful”. Now, I’ll save you the trouble, but later on, we learn that we better have something called X11SDK. It is not clear that I need this, but let’s be safe. (Earlier, I reported, on my blog, that “X code”, which is “Apple talk” for “dev-tools” was installed.)

  cd "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Xcode Tools/Packages"
sudo installer -pkg X11SDK.pkg -target /


  Ok, so far so good. I repeat this about ten times, just to be sure given the, apparently well known, randomized behavior in Apple’s installers. Now, I’m told that “fink list -i system-xfree86″ should output some pseudo-packages. It outputs nothing except “Information about 4816 packages read in 1 seconds.” Given that I have two processors in this machine, I’m not impressed that it takes 1 second to parse 4816 packages, but I presume that Fink is not written in assembly. Fine.

  Not all is lost! Fink tells me that if nothing works, I can try to “flush out my X11 installation and remove any old placeholders and partially/fully installed X11-related packages”. Oh! Ok. The command line is long and it remove my precious X11 application (this is scary! what else does it remove?), plus it tries to update Fink using what appears to be a very slow pipe (I have selected the rsync update method after the CVS method just hung there for over two hours doing nothing). What gets to me here is that clearly, Fink is in error, why do I need to remove Apple’s X11 to fix Fink? Can we say “bad engineering”?

  Ok, now I try to rebuild from the ground up:

  cd "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages"
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
sudo installer -pkg X11User.pkg -target /
(repeat many times)
cd "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Xcode Tools/Packages"
sudo installer -pkg X11SDK.pkg -target /
(repeat many times)


  Now, I run the damned command “fink list -i system-xfree86″ and get…

  
i system-xfree86 2:4.4-2 [placeholder for user installed x11]
i system-xfree86-dev 2:4.4-2 [placeholder for user installed x11 development tools]
i system-xfree86-s... 2:4.4-2 [placeholder for user installed x11 shared libraries]


  I’m hoping this is good. Short story: Fink is trying too hard to be smart and ends up making you work like a madman.

• Now, let’s try to install a few things:
  
fink install gnuplot
fink install xfig
fink install kile


  The first two work, but the last one won’t install. for the following reason:

  
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of autoconf2.5:
autoconf2.5 depends on autoconf (= 2.60-4); however:
Package autoconf is not installed.
/sw/bin/dpkg: error processing autoconf2.5 (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
/sw/fink/dists/unstable/main/binary-darwin-i386/devel/autoconf_2.60-4_darwin-i386.deb


  Ok, but so, maybe I have gnuplot working, right? Let’s see…

  
> gnuplot
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11R6/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib
Referenced from: /sw/bin/gnuplotx
Reason: Incompatible library version: gnuplotx requires version 1.0.4 or later, but libfontconfig.1.dylib provides version 1.0.0
/sw/bin/gnuplot: line 6: 24936 Trace/BPT trap /sw/bin/gnuplotx "$@"


  Hmmm… that can’t be good. For completeness, here’s the content of my proud /sw/etc/fink.conf file.

  
Basepath: /sw
RootMethod: sudo
Trees: local/main stable/main stable/crypto unstable/main unstable/crypto
Distribution: 10.4
ConfFileCompatVersion: 1
Mirror-apache: http://www.apache.org/dist
Mirror-apt: http://bindist.finkmirrors.net/bindist
Mirror-cpan: ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN
Mirror-ctan: ftp://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive
Mirror-debian: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian
Mirror-gimp: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp
Mirror-gnome: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
Mirror-gnu: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu
Mirror-kde: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
Mirror-master: http://distfiles.master.finkmirrors.net/
Mirror-rsync: rsync://master.us.finkmirrors.net/finkinfo/
Mirror-sourceforge: http://west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/
MirrorContinent: nam
MirrorCountry: nam-us
MirrorOrder: MasterFirst
ProxyPassiveFTP: true
UseBinaryDist: true
Verbose: 1
SelfUpdateMethod: rsync


  Maybe my problem is that I now use a binary distribution? I don’t know where the “UseBinaryDist: true” came from as I remember setting up fink to use a source distribution and seeing packages compile (must be the reinstallation that was required of me earlier that wiped my setting). Ok. I’ve changed the setting to false, but uninstalling and reinstalling packages does not seem to recompile them.

  So, maybe now I should wipe out all of fink and start again from scratch? Will this even work? Maybe I should try “fink cleanup”? Will it help?

  Fink should learn from portage which also has binary packages. By default, portage always rebuilds packages. This should be the sane behavior. Maybe “fink rebuild gnuplot” will do what I want? Here’s what I get…

  
New package: dists/unstable/main/binary-darwin-i386/text/ghostscript_8.54-3_darwin-i386.deb
Failed: phase compiling: readline-4.3-1028 failed
(...)
Note that many fink package maintainers do not (yet) have access to OS X on
Intel hardware, so you may have better luck on the mailing lists.


  What??? You mean the guys who maintain this have no idea if it even builds and no incentive to find out? Gosh! Maybe this explains why none of this works.

  Hours go by…

  Ok, I tried rebuilding various packages in various orders and things eventually build. I’ve got no idea what will end up working tomorrow though. And it is very scary the way the dependencies are not automated. (Gnuplot now works though, but it did work before this whole mess.) Next, I’m trying this before going to be late: “fink rebuild kile gimp gnumeric kopete swig”.

Unrelated but important nonetheless: My oldest son is 3 years old from now on. No, he can’t help me yet with my computer problems, but he can find the TV remote from time to time which is pretty useful.

There was a day when books were expensive. Then they became cheaper during the last century. Getting in touch with peers was still expensive for a time, but now, you can call, message and email people very efficiently for next to no money. But lectures were still expensive for a time too. Except that now, you can watch, online, for free, lectures given out by Turing Award recipients. It is only a matter of time before someone figures out a better way to get an education than attending 3 hours of lecture in a dirty classroom every week. This model came out because books, chats, and lectures were expensive. It is no longer the case. We need to move on.

In fact, the infamous Will Richardson says you don’t have to go college:

For most of your young lives, you’ve heard your mom and I occasionally talk about your futures by saying that someday you’ll travel off to college and get this thing called a degree that will show everyone that you are an expert in something and that will lead you to getting a good job that will make you happy and make you able to raise a family of your own someday. At least, that’s what your mom and I have in our heads when we talk about it. But, and I haven’t told your mom this yet, I’ve changed my mind. I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree.

Stephen Downes has nailed it with a very sensible question:

(…) are the positive aspects only possible via traditional schools? Could kids obtain (vs. create) these positive aspects without the need for traditional schools?

The answer, for me, is clearly yes. We absolutely need to sit down and rethink our educational models. They are obselete.