Re: CFFA card and the Mac

[Rob Greene <greener@charter.net>]

Wolfgang <w@work.com> wrote in news:ekmnbi$qpn$1@home.itg.ti.com:

> John,
> I tried AC and like the tool but it does not recognize the MMC when the 
> card is formatted for the CFFA.
> 
> I guess main problem is that OSX is not mounting the device as it is 
> unrecognizable for OSX (instead it likes to format it)
> 
> Does anybody now how this problem is solved with Ciderpress?
> Is the PC OS ( I will not say the bad W word:-) ) handling this issue 
> differently?

One of the weaknesses of the Java "write once, run anywhere" is that you 
don't have specific APIs to physical devices.  There really isn't any 
direct access to hardware - so no serial, parallel, or USB ports are 
available without a lot of work (or nifty libraries like RXTX).  So, I've 
never gotten Java to hit a raw USB device - nor any physical disk for 
that matter (ie, /dev/fd0).

It may be worth a gamble to try the raw device.  (Actually, I could try 
this on my Linux server. Hmm...)  If Mac OS X follows the /dev/abcd 
naming standard it would be in there.  But, I'm just guessing and in all 
honesty I'm not sure what would happen!!

I do know that the AppleCommander GUI piece has trouble with full 32MB 
harddisks, so a large CF card would be problematic anyway.  Not sure of 
the command line - you can push the memory nice and large.  My Windows XP 
cmd file to launch AppleCommander is just this:
    @echo off
    @start java -Xmx256M -jar AppleCommander-1.3.3.jar
That way I don't run out of memory when playing with a couple of HDV 
images.

I've been toying with using the Eclipse RCP to re-do the GUI piece of 
AppleCommander.  The RCP would make AppleCommander much larger... 
however, it also has native launch capabilities where it discovers the 
Java JVM and has the ability to pass in command-line switches (so memory 
problems could be averted from the get-go).  I'm an avid Eclipse fan and 
would love to find the time to figure out RCP development.

Hope that's worth _something_.  :-)
-Rob