Mac OS X Server Maverick upgrade

Today I have dealt with the aftermath of a Mac OS X Server Maverick upgrade.

Mac OS X Server has an integrated http server. The configuration files for the http server are now under /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2

During the upgrade the configuration files are transformed.

In my case the loading of the .so files for Subversion in the httpd_server_app.conf file was removed, a special site file svn.conf was disabled by being renamed to svn.conf.SyntaxError, Also ProxyPass directives present in several of my site files were removed.

Maybe I should communicate these problems upstream to Apple ... or stop using the web server of Maverick and set up my own.

Oh and on top of that my Mail services were not working any more. I was not able to receive outside mail any more. It looks like I was receiving outside mail on port 465 and this does not work any more, I have had to open the port 25.

Screen Sharing Issues with my Mac Mini running Maverick

Hi,

I have recently upgraded my Mac Mini to Mavericks.

The screen sharing from an IMac running Mavericks too is bad. When my mouse pointer is on the screen sharing window, the mouse pointer moves slowly by itself making it difficult to click on the proper window or control.

I found that article http://www.tristanbettany.com/2013/06/17/slow-screen-sharing-in-osx-vnc-performance-issues/ which gives a potential workaround.

In fact I am ending up using JollysFastVNC which works great.

Voting today for French Conseil des Francais a l'etranger

Hi,

I am voting today for the French Conseil des Francais a l'etranger.

The vote is implemented by an applet which seems to want to run only with JRE 1.7.51

I looked in my Java Control Panel on the Mac, it displays the version which of the JRE which is installed but does not give the possibility to switch JRE.

The JRE used by the applet is under /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/bin . It looks like this is an actual copy of the JRE - currently I have a JDK 1.9, so there does not seem to be a soft way of switching the JRE version used to run the applets on the Mac.


So I have do download again a Java SE Runtime Environment 7u51.

I do that, and I try to install the DMG. Now I am getting an error message saying "newer version exists, refer to java.com/newerversionexists" which is a non existent URL.

Installing Java 1.9

Java 1.9

In order to be able to help implementing initial support for Java 1.9 inside Apache Ant,.I have downloaded and installed JDK 1.9 on my Mac.

Here is the Java 1.9 download site : https://jdk9.java.net/download/

In order not to be caught off guard with software starting suddenly to use Java 1.9 spontaneously, this Stack Overflow page : How can I change Mac OS's default Java VM returned from /usr/libexec/java_home comes in handy.

Now I can set  JAVA_HOME to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.9.0.jdk/Contents/Home and see for myself the test failures that Jan Matèrne has reported on the Ant Dev list.

Upgrading Emacs on my Mac, using Homebrew

Yesterday, I realized that my Mac was slowed down by a process called distnoted.

A Google search taught me that Emacs was to blame for this issue.

I found this article on Stack Exchange. This is also mentioned on an emacs distribution list.

So I decided to upgrade Emacs from the 23.x build I got from EmacsForMacOSX.

I first tried the method described on The Wicked Dutch blog, building Emacs for Mac OS X.

This did not work for me.

I got this error :

configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details


This was happening after 10 minutes of build, pretty much in the last step, and I did not find an easy way to debug this, since especially the build directory gets deleted by the build script.

What did work was to use the methods described on the Installing Emacs on OS X wiki page of emacswiki.

Using the IntelliJ SBT plugin, and fighting the default Java version on MacOSX

I have downloaded the IntelliJ SBT plugin from this location.

The plugin's Github page is here : orfjackal/idea-sbt-plugin

I am running this on Mac OS X Mavericks.

I noticed a problem when opening the console : the Java version used to run the console was 1.8, which was generating a lot of errors. It looks like some scala or sbt basic libraries do not work fine with Java 1.8, or maybe it is the plugin.

So I was wondering where the SBT Console is pulling the Java version to use from. After a little bit of Googling, I found this article on Stack Overflow : How can I change Mac OS's default Java VM returned from /usr/libexec/java_home

This suggestion :

I think the only thing we might do is to change the plist:  
sudo vi /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0.jdk/Contents/Info.plist 
and then modify the JVMVersion from 1.8.0 to something else that makes it sort it to the bottom instead of the top, like !1.8.0.

has allowed me to run the SBT console under Java 1.7.0 until all issues related with Java 1.8.0 are solved.

Emacs

I cannot really work without emacs. I am using emacs since about 1994 when a colleague introduced me to emacs. For me, the true meaning of emacs is "editore maximo" - the best editor. Anyway, today I was trying some scala code and got frustrated that I could not get out of :paste mode by typing Ctrl-D in my emacs 22. I just downloaded an emacs 24.x found on the railwaycat / emacs-mac-port|download page and this is great.