Snow Leopard blues

On Friday afternoon, I went to give a presentation about MySQL advanced features at the Sardegna Ricerche technology park. The presentation included a quick introduction to MySQL Sandbox, something that I have been doing for years, and I thought I could do blindfold, if required. However, something didn't go as expected.

Just when I was showing off how easy is it to install a MySQL sandbox from a tarball, I was faced by an unexpected error. The tar application was not among the recognized ones. As soon as I saw the error, I immediately knew what had happened. That morning I upgraded my Mac OSX to Snow Leopard. And, unknown to me, Apple has changed the default tar, which is not a symlink to the GNU tar, but points at bsdtar. Not a difficult fix (I released a new version of MySQL Sandbox this morning) but not something that you want to deal with during a live demo either.
Apart from that, Snow Leopard seems to behave nicely. Somebody else had nasty compatibility problems but so far I have been spared.
One annoying problem is that Safari crashes with Java applications, because of the faulty Java 1.6 package released with Snow Leopard. Apparently, Java 1.5 and 1.6 both point at the same binaries, on the grounds that 1.6 is backward compatible. Well, it is, but it crashes the browser, so I looked around for a remedy, and I found out that someone else has fixed the issue and shared the recipe. Thanks, folks. It worded for me as well.