OS X Mavericks is driving me mad...

In a previous post, I documented issues with emacs on OS X Mavericks, 10.9.1. This has been just one of the annoynances of the new version of OS X:

• When the dock is positioned on the right or left, it looks terrible (I do this to maximise horizontal space availability)
• It is impossible to import music mounted on SMB shares into iPlayer. The workaround is to copy the files to the local hard drive (yes, that works OK), and then import from there, finally deleting the files after import. (See below for my failed attempt at a work around
• Despite ugrading emacs to the latest build, I am still experiencing random core dumps (usually on startup or shutdown)

Unfortunately, this is the latest episode in the very slowly declining experience with Mac OS X. Every upgrade has not provided the additional benefits to overcome the loss of previously working features. Whine, whine, whine...

Well, it's not all downhill. At least the Mail app can integrate with work's Exchange server, using the HTTP protocol. But apart from that...

Setting up an NFS share from Debian Wheezy to OS X Mavericks

I figured I would work around the problem that iPlayer has importing files from an SMB share, by using NFS. It took me a while to figure out (since I could find no useful error messages) that the OS X NFS client needs to use insecure ports (unless you specify the resvport option, it appears). So, the Debian /etc/exports line for OS X looks like this:

  /rep  *(ro,all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000,no_subtree_check,insecure)

However, on attempting to import files into iPlayer from this mount, my hopes where dashed - iPlayer didn't even see the files. Oh, this is so broken...