Torsten Curdt’s weblog

This weekend I got myself a ticket to Brant Bjork and the Bros. He is playing at the Hifi Ballroom in February. For the ones who don’t know …he is one of the founders of ‘desert’ or ’stoner rock’. He played with people like Josh Homme, Chris Cockrell, Nick Oliveri and John Garcia. If you still don’t know what I am taling about …you at least might have heard about bands like the legendary ‘Kyuss’, ‘Fu Manchu’ or ‘Queens of the Stone Age’. If you like that kind of music – be there! ….Yeah! Rock, baby!

Today’s weather really reminded me on the last time I had a sauna. I especially like it when there is a big difference between the inside and outside temperature. So first your body heats up and then you go outside and it cools down. Now imagine there is noone making the hot wind after a steam session but it’s just the natural wind! And also imagine: it’s cold inside …and hot outside – so the other way around. Well, ..welcome to Australia :)
Today we had a temperature of 42°C! Uff …although it can also get hot in Germany in summer (up to 35-38°C) that’s a bit more than what I am used too.

I’ve just found a way of keeping installed plugins across eclipse upgrades. I am not sure whether it is a better way than the usual export, update, import, download process …but it works and saves you the re-download. What I’ve done is to create an eclipse extension. I’ve created the an extension folder containing the “features” and the “plugins” directories as well as an empty “.eclipseextension” file. In eclipse go to the “Help” menu and under “Software Updates” select “Manage Configuration”. There you can add the eclipse extension and after restarting the IDE it should have all the old plugins available. This works at least with eclipse 3.2.


Update: this can done even easier! On the install dialog there is a “Change Location” button. I’ve pointed it to my “.eclipse” directory and it create the extension for me. Sweet!

Last week I got my introduction to the rock bible of Melbourne. It’s a free magazin that basically lists what’s going on where. It has a dance music part too …but you can easily rip that one out ;) Especially important is the part with the concert listings. Right away I got a ticket for ‘Presidents of the United States’ and the famous Big Day Out’ open air festival. (to buy tickets down here you can go to Ticketmaster and Ticketek) Last night we went to the ‘Cherry Bar’. This place is also definetely ‘rock’ and I was told that sometimes even celebreties show up there.

Instead of just waiting for the mozilla folks to apply the addressbook patch I thought I just give it a go myself. Unfortunately I could not apply them to the latest trunk source. But at least I was able to build the lastest trunk version. Here is how…
First make sure you have all required tools installed. That means Xcode (1.5, 2.x but not 2.0, I’ve use Xcode 2.2) As you can see from the build requirements you can now also build with gcc4 (I’ve used 4.0.1 build 5247). Not sure whether you really need the 10.4 SDK – but I’ve had mine installed already. Then some other tools and libraries from fink (or darwin ports)

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install orbit
$ sudo apt-get install orbit-dev
$ sudo apt-get install glib
$ sudo apt-get install zip unzip
$ sudo apt-get install pkgconfig

And you are set. Make sure /sw/bin/init.sh is getting “sourced” in your .bashrc (no idea why – just found it in some instructions) and then you can create your mozconfig e.g. via cgi script. Mine looked like this:

# Options for client.mk.
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@

# Options for 'configure' (same as command-line options).
ac_add_options --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility
ac_add_options --enable-plaintext-editor-only

save it into the mozilla folder as ‘.mozconfig’. You can find documentation on the build options on the mozilla developer site. Then you need to check out their makefile. It can then be used to checkout and build the application. (On some sites they suggest you to download a source snapshot instead of checking it out via the makefile …but at least for me that totally screwed up my build. CVS worked just fine)

$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot
$ cvs co mozilla/client.mk
$ cd mozilla
$ make -f client.mk checkout
$ make -f client.mk build

After quite a lengthy checkout and even more lengthy build I found the ‘Thunderbird.app’ in the dist directory. Starting it up showed 1.6a1 as version number. Sweeet! :) I’ve contacted the author of the patch and hope to get some insights to get it applied.