MacHeist

Essentially, MacHeist is a yearly Mac-themed software event. It starts out with some puzzles, or missions and ends with release of a bundle of shareware for the Mac, for a cost of around $40. A percentage of the bundle sales goes toward charity and some bundled apps are only unlocked after a certain sales target is reached.

The missions are time-sensitive challenges. Each mission, or nanomission, has a briefing with clues on how to proceed. To follow the clues, you may have to decode a cryptogram, solve a puzzle or riddle, or even overlay images to find a hidden image.

Fortunately, forums provide a way for people to interact as they progress through the missions and allow users to help each other when they get stuck. The missions for 2009 were very well produced. I enjoyed them much better than previous years.

At the end of each (nano)Mission, users receive loot, i.e. one or more free apps.

After the missions are over, a bundle is released. The bundle usually contains a couple of decent applications and several okay apps, but all-in-all it's a reasonable deal.

Java 1.6 on a 32-bit Core Duo Mac

I have a first generation Macbook Pro (Core Duo 2.0 GHz, 2.0G, etc) with Mac OS X 10.5.X. It's a really nice machine and has held up well for the past couple of years. It works beautifully.

Everything works well, except Apple doesn't support Java 1.6 on 32-bit Intel Macs, which applies to the Core Duo. My primary skillset, (other than UNIX/Linux), revolves around Java. I admit, I was about to sell my laptop and head to the Apple Store, when I found a few links that can ease the pain.

I found a link on Tomas Varaneckas', (Paranoid Engineering), blog about SoyLatte, a Java 6 release for Mac OS X based on a FreeBSD patchset.

I am going to assume you have basic UNIX command knowledge. I opened a Terminal, and changed to the JavaVM.framework/Versions directory.

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/

I uncompressed and extracted the files from the intel 32-bit soylatte*tar.gz archive.

bunzip2 -c ~/Downloads/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3.tar.bz2 | sudo tar xvf -

I renamed 1.6/Home to 1.6/Home.bak and symlinked the soylatte directory to 1.6/Home.

sudo mv 1.6/Home 1.6/Home.bak
cd 1.6
sudo ln -s ../soylatte16-i386-1.0.3 Home

There is general information in the links above for how to use the SoyLatte JDK. I use IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse for Java development. I simply point the IDE configuration to the 1.6 directory to add the JDK.