When we lived in Japan we went to Tokyo Disney once, and to Universal Studios Japan several times. At Tokyo Disney, even though we went in the off-season on a school day, the wait times for most rides were over 60 minutes. At Universal Studios Japan (unless you purchase their “Express Pass Booklet” which allows you to go into a faster queue) we have seen wait times of 180 minutes for popular rides. We also went to Disney Paris a couple of times in January, snow and freezing rain tend to keep the visitor numbers down, so we did not have to wait at all for most rides. My expectations for Florida’s Disney world were wait times similar to Japan. I was very pleasantly surprised. The longest wait times we saw were 60 minutes, and for those rides that did have longer wait times, we got the “Fast Pass” and went back to them.

The flights were fine and we were able to get to the “All Star Music Resort” on the Disney coach fairly easily. Little did we realize that escape from Disney would be impossible for the next 7 days. This had us paying $14 for a six-pack of beer, and $2 for a bottle of water for the week. The $10 a day extra for a fridge in the room and $9.95 a day for internet access also made me feel that we were being gouged.

The food was better than I had expected. I had thought that we would be eating burgers and fries for a week, but there were delicious alternatives - the kids meals all came with a choice of 2 sides, Jessica usually chose carrot sticks to go along with her fries, and there were delicious salads available too.

Jessica loved the rides, especially the scarier, faster ones. Space Mountain 5 times, Thunder Mountain 4 times, Splash Mountain 3 times, Everest adventure 3 times, Tower of Terror 4 times, Fast Track twice and Mission: Space. Unfortunately she did not quite make the 48 inch height requirement for some of the water slides at Typhoon Lagoon.

I am glad to be back at work - now I do not have to walk miles every day in 90+ F temperatures Hopefully we can avoid theme parks for a couple of years.

I love this picture. We have to slick back her hair and put it into a bun for her ballet class. Of course, I have no experience in putting hair into a bun, so we decided to practice the other night. There were tears as I pulled at her hair, but afterwards she said “It’s ok, I have stopped crying now, and I really like my hair!”.

Hmm.

Of course the reason that libtool did not use  -exported_symbols_list in the first place is that Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 do not support it, and nmedit did the job just fine up to 10.5. Apple seems to have allowed nmedit to bitrot, it no longer does the same job that it did in 10.4. Filing a bug that you know in advance is just going to be closed with “use ld’s -exported_symbols_list flag” seems kind of pointless, but I guess I should do it anyway.

• http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/administrator
• http://yoursql.ludit.it

Not that I have tried either one, but they can’t be worse than an unmaintained binary that some random person (me) ported to Qt/mac years ago and then forgot about…

Jessica and I at the christmas santa parade. 

1. Fullscreen does not work (I never really used fullscreen, so it is not an issue for me)
2. If you don’t have a three button mouse, you may have some issues, modifier keys do not work.
3. xinerama does not work.
4. The Applications menu has issues.
5. Broken with spaces (I never really expected that people would expect this to work, but they do)
6. xterm does not do unicode

Now, this is disappointing, but remember that people have been complaining for quite a while that Apple’s X11 is ancient, and have been requesting that Apple upgrade to the latest x.org. They did that, and it was a major change, so there are bound to be bugs. Would it be better I wonder to have all the old known bugs forever?

The integration with launchd has thrown a few people also. The DISPLAY environment variable is set when you log in, it points to a socket that is controlled by launchd. As soon as any application accesses the socket X11 will launch if it was not already running. So you can double-click on an X11 app in the finder, and it will start X and run. Pretty darn cool. People who set DISPLAY in their login shells without testing if it was already set have had issues.

Ben Byer has not yet learned that he is not required by his contract to provide help and support on mailing lists, so he has been busy answering questions and being polite, even with all the vitriol on the x11-users list, when he could have just stuck with dealing with formally reported bugs. Some seem to believe that he’s the head of an X11 team within Apple, I’m sure that he just wishes he could devote more of his time to X11.

Today there was more friendly discussion, Ben has asked for help and patches, and there was someone looking for the sources to xterm so that they could fix the bug that bothered them (and then give Ben the patch so that everyone could benefit), now if everyone with a pet bug would download the source and fix their issue we would have a better X11 in a much shorter time.

Apple has committed their changes to upstream git, and hope to eventually do all development in the freedesktop.org repository, with bugs also at the freedesktop bugzilla (open bugs, none of this closed radar crap), so I have nothing to complain about. There are bugs, some serious, if one really bothers me, I will attempt to track it down and fix it. If a bug bothers you, why not do the same.

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00201.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00214.html

Update:

Ben took off his Apple employee hat and made a private release of sources and an Xquartz binary that has a number of bug fixes. How’s that for service!

• http://www.x.org/wiki/XDarwin