TeX woes

After a recent macports update I had issues getting TeX to recognize the local files installed in

~/Library/texmf

. I re-ran texhash, but to no avail. Long story short, it turned out that the issue was not with texhash, but with the search path for kpathsea in

/opt/local/share/texmf/web2c

. Changing the 'TEXMFHOME' variable to the default setting did the trick. In addition, to prevent further updates from overwriting the change, edit the first line and alter the word 'original' (to, for example, 'custom').

E-reader on the Mac

You know, when you search "mac+lit" on Google, the top results tell you that you can't read those files unless you convert them. BULLCRAP I say. You just need to get Stanza.

Tomcat on OSX

Forget about using macports. It wants to get xercesj 2.9.1, but apache only serves up to 2.9.0. Instead, I followed the instructions listed here.

Jailbreaking

Having recently purchased an iPod Touch 2g, I figured I'd go ahead an jailbreak it. Being on a mac, that was a little bit more difficult than normal, particularly since I was running the 2.2 firmware. But following the steps here I managed to get that done all right. Some particular notes:

* The rslite tool didn't recognize my macports copy of libusb - I had to make a symlink for the required file.
* I also found that I did not need to run DFU mode on my macbook running OSX 10.5.6. This was odd, but probably just a side-effect of me running other development tools. I'm not going to count this gift horse's teeth.

One thing I'm still peeved about is the weak antenna on the Touch, it would be nice to have a way to boost its power, particularly when dealing with medium-range networks.