I am an Apple person, fully vested, using their computers, their devices, and in general I am very satisfied. But I just had a bad experience, and I need to vent.
I upgraded a few weeks ago to OS-X 10.9 (AKA “mavericks”, and it has gone reasonably well. However, 10.9 seriously broke python. First, Apple is always 2 or 3 releases behind. Usually not a big deal, as I am not on the bleeding edge, more of a hobbyist.
But 10.9 broke it badly. Like it was throwing segmentation faults non stop, and pretty much unusable. Hell, I couldn’t even load the built in math module without it tossing a segmentation fault.
I had set up my python the way I like it, I added the good packages (Apple does include numpy, but they miss a lot of other very useful modules) I use. Took me some time to get it all setup the way I like it, and they frigging broke it.
Sigh, so I spent about 6 hours yesterday. Installing and compiling 2.7.6 which fixes what Apple broke. That required reinstalling the command line tools. Then I had to update and install numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and about 2 dozen prerequisites for these modules. Grrrr. That seriously interrupted my drinking time…
I almost decided to go back to using EPD, but I know that pretty much sucks. Sigh.
Apple does so much well, but when they mess up, they mess up mightily. I hope they fix this soon.
(Oh, and the newest version of matplotlib has the XKCD graph styles. Totally worth the upgrade…)
