I bought a new macbook this weekend because: a) I wanted one, b) I didn't want to wait for Apple's notebook reload and, c) I've become increasingly frustrated by the long compilation times with my (2 year) old Macbook Pro. The good news is its faster, the bad: I don't like it.
It's not that the macbook is a bad machine, it's just not my kind of machine. Having used the macbook pro for so long, in fact having it as my first mac, I became accustomed to its niceties quite without knowing they were extras. The backlit keyboard for instance, is definitely a missed feature in the macbook. I guess you don't really miss your keyboard keys lighting up due to a loss in ambient light until it's gone. The bigger screen real estate was also a nice bonus. Of course I knew I was going to be seeing less on the macbook's screen going into it. The edges are also very discomforting. Resting my hand there is very annoying. Ah well. I only need it for it's processor so I can just ssh into it and do as I please from the macbook pro.

I also got an apple educational discount when purchasing, as well as the "free" 8 Gb iPod touch (after rebates). I used my UMass info to get it instead of my Wright State info though. Why? Wouldn't have been able to remember my Wright State info. Also I haven't gotten IDs and all that. Does that count as fraud? Further, why is UMass still the first thing that pops into my head when I'm asked about school? Per'aps it just means I'm going back "real soon now" }:-) Who knows? Let's start the counter then, 365 and counting.

Having obtained my ill-gotten bootay I tried for the better part of a day to get qt-copy 4.4 set up. It kept on failing while trying to find dbus. Initially dbus didn't seem to install at all, despite me "make install"ing like a madman. I finally realized that I had sshed into the macbook pro and was actually reinstalling there. Ah, the perils of sshing into computers named similarly. Perhaps cube (macbook pro) and cubic (macbook) are suboptimal choices for someone who regularly works from the terminal, but I have a theme to continue here. Speaking of which, I need to get qube (the self built Linux/XP desktop) back from NY sometime. I'll just have to spice up their respective bash propmts to help distinguish them.

ANYWAYS after really installing dbus onto cubic Qt still couldn't find dbus. After far too much playing around with configure options I divined that I needed pkgconfig installed for Qt to find my copy of dbus. Macports to the rescue! I'm even building universal binaries this time. I also made some custom changes to /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf (to make full use of my dual cores) and /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/port1.0/portconfigure.tcl (to use gcc 4.2 by default). No, I'm not going to tell you how.

After that I ran into some problems with Qt using gcc 4.2 again, so this time I submitted a patch to the release dude Thiago. Well, actually, I was just going to drop it into kde's qt-copy patch dir but he asked for the patch. Hopefully it makes it into 4.4.1. I also compiled Harald's ImageIO thingamabobber and am going to try getting kdelibs to play nice with it. This will probably fail miserably, but I give myself a week before I give up.

So that's the story so far, things were a bit touch and no go there for a moment, but we've comfortably graduated to "Touch and go" status. Booyah! Speaking of which, I've got to get back to compiling kdesupport so I can see what kind of punishment kdelibs is going to dish out.