Monthly Archives: February 2018

FTP on macOS High Sierra

As you may have noticed, FTP is no longer a part of macOS High Sierra. If you are in the Terminal, you’ll get something like this:

Norms-iMac-Pro:~ norm$ ftp
-bash: ftp: command not found

An Apple Forum’s post has this reasoning.

Fortunately, there is Homebrew to the rescue. As pointed out in that post, you can install the `inetutils`, which includes FTP. All you need to do is:

brew install inetutils

Unfortunately, for me, this resulted in a linking error, as the directory `/usr/local/share/man/man8` is not writeable. You can solve this by by issuing the following command:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/share/man/man8

Then run the link command again:

brew link inetutils

I hope this is helpful and happy FTPing!

Installing GCC-7.3.0 on macOS High Sierra

I talked about getting GCC-5.3.0 running in a previous post. As part of some benchmark testing I’m doing for a new computer build, which I hope to write about in a future post, I ventured back into the world of parallel programming. I used the excellent instructions from Solarian Programmer found here to get GCC-7.3.0 running on macOS High Sierra 10.13.3.

Strictly speaking, the link above points to instructions for compiling GCC-7.1.0. While it’s not a big deal to modify these instructions for 7.3.0, here’s a text document with just the command line instructions to get 7.3.0 up.

Note: I did have to make one small deviation from the instructions provided in the link (as noted in the text document attached). I tried to “make” GCC7.3.0 with “make -j 4” but it failed, stating it couldn’t fine “<ctime>”. I retried the make using “make -j 1”, which took a LONG time but worked. I would try 4 first and only if it doesn’t work, try 1.

My previous post also talked about getting OpenMP/Clang running in Xcode and the link provided there works. I did try the steps but couldn’t get it to work. Maybe I’ll try again later but for now, I’m using the command line to compile the OpenMP code.

Allowing different orientations by device (iPad vs iPhone)

I’ve been watching the Developing iOS 11 Apps with Swift podcast (yes, iTunes U content is now available as podcasts, which is cool because you can view them on your Mac) and playing around the Concentration app. This app really wants to be Portrait on an iPhone but Portrait or Landscape on an iPad, given the whole master/detail thing.

I searched for ways to do this and while apparently you can do this in code, this method is super simple. You can add another Custom iOS Target Property to your Info.plist under the Info tab of your project’s target, specifically for iPad. The main one is:

Supported interface orientations

The iPad specific one is:

Supported interface orientations (iPad)

Here’s a screen shot to show it in action.

Hope this helps!