Technology

Installing Photoshop CS2 on Windows 11

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I was trying to install Photoshop CS2 on an ARM Windows 11 VM (this may affect x86 Windows 11 too), but was blocked by an error that went something like “Error 1926: Could not set file security for file C:\Windows\, Error 0”.

This is because the Windows installation directory has immutable permissions on Windows 11, but the Photoshop installer tried to reset file permissions on it anyways. (It’s quite possible other software might also be suffering from this too.) To fix it, we need to modify the MSI.

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Restoring images without the futility of Disk Utility

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I was trying to put a Mac OS X 10.6 image onto a USB stick to install on another system. To do this, I attempted to do it from a Mac running 13.6 and failed with a message like this when restoring the image to the partition:

Could not validate source - Invalid argument
The operation couldn't be completed. (OSStatus error 22.)

It turns out that Disk Utility is pretty broken at this. What you’re better off doing is using asr. This utility is what Disk Utility does under the covers anyways.

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Why Macs don’t have games, or: Why Vulkan or the Game Porting Toolkit isn’t going to save you

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Recently, one of Apple’s focuses at the latest WWDC keynote has been gaming. Two important pillars for this are an HLSL to Metal shader compiler, and the Game Porting Toolkit. Both are important, since HLSL is dominant for shaders in the industry, but the GPTK has become popular outside its intended target audience, with many videos with end-users instead of developers using it to try the latest AAA games. This has led to a lot of speculation online about what obstacles exist for game developers looking to port their games to Mac. What challenges actually matter?

(This is a bit of a rougher post, more addressing common points I see from Mac gamers on why they don’t have games. I’m not a game developer or expert in 3D graphics APIs, but I do keep up with the space. There is also some Kremlinology on Apple, but that’s inevitable considering the secrecy.)

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Opening System Settings/Preferences to a specific app’s notification settings

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If you need to open System Settings (formerly System Preferences) to a specific preference pane, there’s a URL scheme for that. However, some panes seem to take options for opening specific things. In my case, I wanted open the notifications pane to a specific app. The system Maps application can already do this, so I popped it open in a disassembler and learned the secret – ?id=(app bundle ID). For example, opening the following URL will open the notifications settings for Firefox:

x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.notifications?id=org.mozilla.firefox

Debugging an x86 application in Rosetta for Linux

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Rosetta on Linux has been great for me, as someone who switched to an ARM Mac and sometimes develops in a VM. This is because my dayjob often involves debugging a proprietary database driver that only has x86 and PowerPC versions available for Linux, not 64-bit ARM. However, while Rosetta can make it easy to run x86 binaries, it’s not as obvious how to debug them. If you naively try running GDB on your x86 program, you get errors like:

warning: `/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2': Shared library architecture unknown is not compatible with target architecture aarch64.
warning: `/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2': Shared library architecture unknown is not compatible with target architecture aarch64.
Warning:
Cannot insert breakpoint -1.
Cannot access memory at address 0x66ec48

This is because you’re attaching to the Rosetta binary, which causes all sorts of confusion for GDB. Turns out, Rosetta does actually have a way to handle this.

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Building a static GraphViz for macOS

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Note: This is a very old post from 2020 I had sitting in my drafts. I figured I would publish it in case it was useful for someone else. Notably, this predates Apple Silicon, so yo would want to build another version that’s ARM and use lipo to make a universal binary. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

I recently had the need for building GraphViz without any external dependencies other than what comes with macOS, as part of an application calling into it. While on Windows, I used their provided binaries, I was on my own for macOS since I wasn’t willing to ship half of Homebrew with my application. Instead, I took a simpler way.

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Fixing files marked as stuck as partially transferred in Finder

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Very rough note, but if I don’t write it down, no one else will find it. A friend was dealing with an issue where she interrupted a file transfer of many files and directories to an SMB share on macOS and transferred it via other means. However, macOS thought the files were still in a partially transferred state to be resumed. There was no obvious way to tell Finder that it was OK.

It seems that clearing a file’s extended attributes can clear this out. A quick way to remove all extended attributes from everything in the current directory:

shopt -s globstar
xattr -c **

Be careful with this – you might have files that do need the extended attributes. In this case, it wasn’t needed. Read on for the theory on why this might work and the specific attribute that might be a problem.

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Dealing with key-based polymorphic JSON in Swift Codables

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I’ve been trying to use Swift’s Codable protocol with some data I wanted to decode over the wire. Codable makes it easy to serialize things in Swift. Unfortunately, the schema of the protocol I was using doesn’t cleanly map to something easily represented in Swift. It consists of a single object, with a single key, and the key’s name determining its value and type. For example, various JSON blobs:

{"Chat": {"message": "Hello world!"}}
{"Error": {"message": "Invalid request"}}
{"Hello": {"username": "alice", "version": "1.0"}}
/* there are more, but we'll stick with this set for the example */

How do we decode this cleanly?

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Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks

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One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design of tags for music, and the way we apply tags. This doesn’t just make exploring music harder, it leaves a lot of possibilities on the table that will be very hard to implement without significant changes to our approach.

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Baby’s First iSCSI with ZFS Setup

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I recently got interested in trying out iSCSI, since I had spare capacity on my server. For those unaware, iSCSI can expose block devices over a network. Instead of a file system, it exposes a (virtual) disk, and lets the system connecting to it manage high-level details, including its own file system. This has very different trade-offs from file sharing like SMB/NFS; sharing the disk isn’t really possible, but you avoid a lot of the performance impact from (often different) file system semantics.

This makes it possible to do things you might otherwise not recommended with file sharing, like hosting a Steam library on it. Especially so if you have the iSCSI setup on its own network. Remember, most file systems assume a mostly direct connection to disk. Running this over a shared Ethernet connection, let alone WiFi might not be the best idea.

Also note that I’m not describing a secure setup here. This is very much “baby’s first”, and should only be done on a secure network, or as an experiment. Securing it will involve properly configuring things like portal groups, and isn’t covered in this article. I might cover it in a later article.

This also synthesizes a lot of information I found online; in particular, this basically digests some information in the FreeBSD handbook about the iSCSI target subsystem and ZFS volumes, plus Red Hat and Oracle documentation on iscsiadm.

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