I remember when shareware was a novel concept, and I used to download it by the dozens : nagging screens were part of the deal, something to be expected until you paid for a registered version. Since when those “features” have become cricket for bought wares ?

After wondering if I should open a support ticket, I’ve just reported the pestering behavior as a bug. Lets see if the development team will agree.

This has lasted for the last few months, so it’s not just a rotten update: it’s a whole series of rotten updates. It has become so serious that before I found the problem I considered abandoning Firefox altogether. Nowadays I just keep Flash disabled, except when absolutely needed.

Interestingly, living without Flash has been much less nightmarish than I anticipated. Half of the time, even embedded YouTube videos will play (once you sign up for the HTML5 beta). Often, the only thing lost are the more aggressive forms of advertisement. (To which I say good riddance, of course.)

Like, when I visit a (not that popular) website, type another URL a few minutes later and get an ad from the previously visited website ? Coincidence ?

Apparently the detrimental effect this has on consumers is old news. I can attest that I was not positively impressed.

The system is so unreliable that my only option is to reformat the machine and restart from scratch (basically what I had to do when I used XP — but XP usually lasted a good year and a half between reformats).

With that and all the software incompatibility problems, I am seriously considering switching to Windows 7 + Cygwin and thrashing this whole Mac OS experiment in the huge pile of “tried: didn’t work”.

More and more, for better and for worse, MacOS is the new Windows.

So, I bought (actually, I was given) an HP Mini 1000 (modelo 1030NR) netbook computer. I would have find it useful for talks and short trips if it weren’t for the incredibly absurd choice of HP of: 1) including a non-standard external video port; 2) failing to provide the adapter to a standard VGA or DVI for more than a year after the machine has hit the market. No, I’m not kidding. Nevertheless, I still found it rather convenient for leisurely browsing the web or doing quick jobs on Microsoft Office.

However I’ve been noticing that the netbook has become slower and slower with the passing months, to the point that, lately, it’s been as useful as as self-heating paperweight. That’s when I’ve decided to do a fresh install of Ubuntu Netbook Edition and use it only for web browsing.

After not little struggle to have Ubuntu NE installed in an SD Card (I ended up using the Universal USB Installer in Parallels, since the solution described in the Mac section creates a filesystem that apparently will only boot on a Mac machine — on a PC, it is recognized as “unformatted”).

I’ve booted — finally ! — to Ubuntu NE, but only to discover that the default installation does not include the proprietary Broadcom firmwares for the (in)famous B43 kernel module.  But, wait ! You can still install then quite easily, by clicking an icon on the system notification area: “Install Additional Drivers”. The only thing is: you have to connect to the Internet. Which you can’t, since you don’t have the drivers in first place. Talk about a Catch-22 !

Fortunately, I’ve found an walkthrough to solve that circular dependency. I quote:

If you do not have any other means of Internet access on your computer, you will have to install b43-fwcutter and patch packages from the install media. After that you will need to setup firmware manually (without the firmware automatically downloading and being set up).

Step 1

b43-fwcutter is located on the Ubuntu install media under ../pool/main/b/b43-fwcutter/ and patch is located under ../pool/main/p/patch/ or both in the official repositories online. Double click on the package to install or in a terminal (under the desktop menu Applications > Accessories > Terminal) navigate to the folder containing the package and issue the following command:

/b43-fwcutter/$ sudo dpkg -i b43-fwcutter*

Step 2

On a computer with Internet access, download the required firmware files from http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o and http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

Step 3

Copy the downloaded files to your home folder and execute the following commands consecutively in a terminal to extract and install the firmware:

~$ tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
~$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
~$ sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Step 4

Under the desktop menu System > Administration > Hardware/Additional Drivers, the b43 drivers can be activated for use. Note: A computer restart may be required before using the wifi card. LiveCD/LiveUSB Note: The install media contents are mounted under /cdrom of the filesystem.

Step 5

For temporary use with the LiveCD and LiveUSB environments, instead of a computer restart, in a terminal issue the following commands:

~$ sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb
~$ sudo modprobe b43

Note: Allow several seconds for the network manager to scan for available networks before attempting a connection.

End of the drama ? And they connected happily ever after ? Not quite. I’ve got the wireless card working — for about 4 or 5 seconds. And then it would either drop the connection, or fail to connect altogether, or even stop showing the available networks. What sortilege could be keeping my card from its ethernet blessing ?

A quick inspection on dmesg revealed the matter:

b43-phy0 ERROR: Fatal DMA error: 0x00000400, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
b43-phy0 ERROR: This device does not support DMA on your system. Please use PIO instead.

Again, Saint Google had a pointer to the solution. To load the modules durint an active session,  type:

sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb
sudo modprobe b43 pio=1 qos=0

For making the settings permanent, type:

sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/b43.conf
echo "options b43 pio=1 qos=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/b43.conf

Then, and only then, I’ve got the system working !

Two more hints :

1. If you are trying to install Ubuntu on the Netbook and the program is stalling, try to unmark both options (download updates, install third party proprietary software) — you can always do those later !
2. After having all the pains above to make everything working, don’t use the “Install Proprietary Hardware” automated GUI of Ubuntu — it will only mess everything up.

(When computers were created, weren’t they supposed to solve our problems ?)

In the middle of that multitasking chaos — praying to remember what I’d put on the clipboard while feverishly looking for the right window to paste it, suddenly it happened. Out of the blues, an unannounced window jumped in front of me. A cry for help from the page file ? The scheduler telling me “close some processes …or else” ?

Nothing of that. It was one of those old-fashioned, but quite banal pop up advertisement windows. This one coming from… Parallels ?! Tu quoque Brutus ?!

I wish I had the presence of mind of capturing a screenshot of the offending window, which had some ridiculous offer of games and assorted software, but I was so incensed and incredulous that I just clicked the small check box “don’t show me those offers again” and sent the pesky pop-up back to hell from where it came.

* * *

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t see why people should put up with advertisement in products they are paying the full price for. Like movies, for example, or DVDs. Or… software. Advertisement in web sites, and in free (as in beer) software is disruptive enough, but then you are getting what you’ve paid for.

* * *

I’ve stumbled upon a website offering free textbooks, one of which was a “Mathematics for Computer Scientists” which attracted my attention. Well, it turned out that the PDF (obtainable after some suspiciously inconvenient personal questions — which I answered with random strings) had ads every four or five pages. Big, bright, full-color half-page ads.  I’ve found it so distracting, that after a few minutes the file landed right in the bit bucket.

* * *

Synchronicitously enough, the NYTimes has recently announced it will start charging its “heavy readers” (e.g., me) for content. I am still debating if am biting or not. On one hand, I would hate to see NYT sinking, so I feel I should be contributing to keep it afloat. On the other hand, since the light readers are still getting a free pass (and being drowned in advertisement), shouldn’t  Times sweeten the deal for us, the most faithful readers, by keeping ads to a minimum ?

* * *

Am I being just anacrhonist in my quest for advertisement-free peace of mind. After all, in this age of information petaoverload, what is one ad less, one ad more ?

That last one is rather subtle indeed, and few people seem to realize that, while using most of today’s networks you are basically thrusting your juicy little secrets across the whole segment, making the delight of all Eves and Trudies in the area. The effect is, of course, compounded if the network is wireless, because the concept of “area” becomes much fuzzier: you are fearing not the very physical Trudy plugging her promiscuous network card on the neighboring wall-mounted RJ-45 port, but the aethereal Eve, who, three miles away, with the power of her Cantenna, can pry into your packets from the cloistered shadows of her room.

It seems that consumers are finally waking up for that troubling reality, and the proposed solution is end-to-end, application layer encryption. Always. The 2010′s motto: ‘TLS everywhere’.

In this sense, Google Mail has been a pioneer, first letting its users to use HTTPS for the entire session (and not just for the authentication, as services usually do), and a year and a half later setting it as default. Some other popular services, like Facebook, are already following this model. NYTimes predicts it will inevitably become standard.

Other than that, common sense still applies: no secrets exchanged through unencrypted channels, no commercial transaction on public hotspots, WPA protection on home/work wifi (any Trudy worth her name can get her way into  WEP protection more easily than her way out the proverbial wet bag), and long complex passwords changed every few weeks. So when finally Eve and her number-churning devices get ahold of one — too late ! — it is no longer valid.

I will try to reconstruct a walkthrough, but bear in mind that I have installed, uninstalled and reinstalled so much stuff in my Mac that the reproducibility of this recipe should be taken with a grain of salt. If you try it and it works, I would be thankful if you’d leave a note describing exactly what you did.

Without further ado, how to install the trio NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, using MacPorts:

1. Download Apple’s Xcode for Mac OS X, without which nothing else is possible. You’ll have to register on Apple, but there is a free inscription if you are not planning to sell anything;
2. Download MacPorts. This is the package manager which will operate all the magic — it will do for your Mac the same thing yum or apt-get does for a Linux box, so if it doesn’t work properly nothing else will;
3. Install Xcode and then MacPorts. If you want to be extra sure, follow the intructions on the Macports page — basically instructing you to install X11 support on Mac and MacPorts. I didn’t do this (because I only became aware of those instruction very late in the whole process), but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Alternatively, if you already have MacPorts installed, ensure it is up-to-date by typing:
   

   sudo port selfupdate

4. You can compile your dependencies with any compiler — in theory. I found out that SciPy smokes unless compiled with GCC 4.4, but now I have some dependencies compiled with their default choice and some (NumPy, SciPy) in which I forced compilation with GCC 4.4. If you want to try your luck, start by downloading GCC 4.4 and making it default:
   

   sudo port install gcc44
   sudo port install gcc_select
   sudo gcc_select mp-gcc44

   If instead, you want to reproduce exactly my crazy (but successful) sequence, install GCC 4.4 but do not make it default (omit the last two lines), and also install GCC 4.5 (I know, how many versions of GCC does one need ?!):

   sudo port install gcc45

5. Install the “non-dependencies” of PIL. Those “non-dependencies” are libraries needed by other libraries in other to provided optional (but often important) functionality, which won’t be installed by the package manager otherwise (PIL itself is a “non-dependency” of SciPy):
   

   sudo port install jpeg libpng tiff lcms freefont-ttf

6. Install PIL. This will install python as a dependency. (I have chosen to install 2.7, so I’ve consistenly chosen py27-* packages through the process):
   

   sudo port install py27-pil

7. Install the binary dependencies of NumPy and SciPy:
   

   sudo port install arpack
   sudo port install SuiteSparse

8. Finally, install the goodies:
   

   sudo port install py27-numpy
   sudo port install py27-scipy

   Again, if you want to do exactly what I did, the process is more convoluted. After typing exactly those commands above, I then uninstalled then (but not their dependencies):

   sudo port uninstall py27-scipy py27-matplotlib

   And reinstalled everything again (but the dependencies) with the compiler directive:

   sudo port install py27-numpy configure.compiler=macports-gcc-4.5
   sudo port install py27-numpy configure.compiler=macports-gcc-4.4

   I don’t remember why I chose GCC 4.5 for NumPy and 4.4 for SciPy — but my history file is a more faithful testimony than my memory (probably I just mistyped NumPy’s and meant 4.4 for both — give-me some slack, it was almost 4 a.m. by then !).

9. Last, but not least, install Matplotlib:
   

   sudo port install py27-matplotlib

I don’t know if all this mix-and-match of compilers is a good thing — all I know is that SciPy smokes if not compiled with GCC 4.4, but maybe compiling everything with GCC 4.4 is the way to go.

To test the installation, call python and selftest the packages one by one:

python
import numpy
numpy.test(’1′,’10′)

import scipy
scipy.test(’1′,’10′)

import matplotlib
matplotlib.test()

I’ve got a pristine regression test for NumPy and SciPy, including the problematic C++ code weaving. My Matplotlib regression smoked, with several “ImageComparisonFailure: images not close” errors with RMS values slightly above acceptable. I compared the images by hand, however, and could not spot the difference — and dismissed the problem as a matter of different engines of font smoothing.

By the way, if you want to make the new python default, there is a python_select for this job:

sudo port install python_select
sudo python_select python27

Both gcc_select and python_select allow you to choose betwen a list of options which include the MacPorts and the Apple versions of GCC and python, to see the options available, type;

gcc_select -l
python_select -l

And a little something I found out at my expense. When using bash, sometimes updating the PATH is not enough: recently used commands will be at a hash table, which will have to be refreshed, lest bash will still be fetching the command at the wrong path. To check and clear this hash table you can use, respectively, the commands:

hash
hash -r

Well, it is not the Seventh Circle of Heaven, but it is half-way through the Purgatory. Not bad for this Dante, who’s got only Google and StackOverflow for Virgile !

1. I have started by signing on the Apple Developer Program, downloading and installing Xcode (without which nothing else is possible);
2. I’ve downloaded and installed MacPorts (without which nothing interesting is humanely feasible);
3. As required, I’ve installed a fresh copy of Python 2.6 from the .dmg, available at python.org;
4. I’ve installed gfortran from the binary, available at AT&T Research;
5. Using MacPorts, I’ve installed the SuiteSparse;
6. I’ve installed numpy from the .dmg available at SourceForge;
7. I’ve installed the setuputils for python, downloading the egg and running it as a shell script, as indicated on its website;
8. Using setuputils, I’ve installed nose, the testing framework, and run the smoke test for numpy (import numpy \n numpy.test('1', '10')). It passed perfectly;
9. I’ve installed scipy from the .dmg available at SourceForge;
10. I’ve run the smoke test for scipy (import numpy \n scipy.test('1', '10')). It smoked badly at all attempts of code weaving with C(++).

This short version of the story does not include all the comings and goings — installing Python 2.7 and discovering very late in the process its incompatibility with Ccipy for Mac, finding out that the concept of automatic uninstallation simply does not exist in Mac OS X, it has been lots of fun ! It feels just like UNIX, only worse — I have fallen in the rabbit hole and I am waiting for the floor to arrive.

I swear that I am this close to just installing Windows on this damn thing.

EDIT 4/feb: I have just found out this very useful script, Scipy Superpack for Mac, courtesy of Chris Fonnesbeck of the now defunct macinscience.org. My scipy.test() still smokes badly, but now on other, fresh new issues. Apparently, I am not alone: getting SciPy to work on Mac seems to be something short of heroic.