As I mentioned before, I recently made the switch to a mac. I have been pretty happy, although I still don’t quite feel at home in terms of my development environment. Xcode and CMake don’t quite seem to get along (and yes it is still broken with CMake 2.6.0, I just tried it), so I’m actually using the CMake Makefile generator and Eclipse as my IDE. I could probably still use Xcode, but I’m comfortable with Eclipse from linux. Also, it appears that the provided al.h has a pragma that is unrecognized by Apple’s gcc, so it generates a warning. I should report that…
Anyway, the other day, I shut my laptop so it went to sleep, put it in my bag, and ate lunch. After lunch, I opened the lid and found that my keyboard and trackpad no longer worked. I tried rebooting, etc. and even a workaround that I found on the apple support forums, but nothing made any difference. I was pretty sure it was hardware, since I couldn’t even get the a boot menu for bootcamp. I managed to find a USB keyboard and mouse on campus, and confirm that the system still worked otherwise.
I was near an apple store, so I just ran over there and had one of their “geniuses” look at it. That name kills me, but I think it’s just a part of the sort of smug apple culture. My “genius” was helpful, but all he did was confirm it didn’t work. He didn’t seem at all surprised so I don’t think this is a rare issue. Apparently, a keyboard firmware update was supposed to prevent this from happening, but I had it installed and it didn’t do me any good.
They ordered me a new keyboard and trackpad, and I kept my laptop until it came in, so I only had to be without my computer for a day once the part got there. After that it worked fine for a few weeks. However, it has stopped working again. At first, I would be using the trackpad and somehow OS X would think I was trying to eject the CD drive so I’d see the eject icon on the screen. A little while after that, I would get a kernel panic with a stack trace in the trackpad driver. From there, it just kind of slowly degraded to not working at all. For a little while, it worked in XP but not OS X, but now it doesn’t work in either OS. That means I get to have another appointment to see a genius this week.
That is pretty inconvienient. I am trying to do work on campus this summer for a research project, but I can’t when my keyboard isn’t working. I also need to be able to VPN in to work in case an issue comes up, but again, I can’t do that without my laptop working. I thought Macs were supposed to be wonderful pieces of hardware (and that was why I paid extra for it), but after talking to the Mac owners I know it seems like almost every one of them has had to have their system replaced at least once since they got it. Maybe we are all witless users who screw up our systems so badly they can’t be salvaged. However, I never had these sorts of issues with my old Dell. I am pretty disappointed in Apple at the moment…
Any updates? Hoping to see this project progress from the rewrite. Rewrites kill most projects, I hope it hasn’t happened to Crown & Cutlass!
We are still working, but things have slowed down as I’m in grad school now. That’s coming to an end (soon I hope!), so things are picking up a little bit. We should have some more info about what we are working on in a new blog post soon!