Today I'm thankful for ...
... the Interface Builder (IB) in the developer toolset from Apple. Talk about a nifty application that lets you build your applications in a very visual way. Its interface could be improved a little to provide easier properties feedback about the objects you're working with, but it's not that bad.
Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts
14 August 2008
26 July 2008
Thawed
Today I'm thankful for ...
... Apple's Time Machine. Oh heck yes.
Yesterday my Parallels installation of Vista bit it hard. And I mean hard. Its virtual hard drive was so corrupt that chkdsk was trying to recover system files. I blame me dropping my laptop last week, but who knows. Anyways, so I've been using Time Machine quite regularly and so I had a backup of the Vista installation. I opened up the archive, scrolled back to July 20, and there it was: the old versions of the virtual machine. So I just copied them back and Vista is back working again. YAY!
... Apple's Time Machine. Oh heck yes.
Yesterday my Parallels installation of Vista bit it hard. And I mean hard. Its virtual hard drive was so corrupt that chkdsk was trying to recover system files. I blame me dropping my laptop last week, but who knows. Anyways, so I've been using Time Machine quite regularly and so I had a backup of the Vista installation. I opened up the archive, scrolled back to July 20, and there it was: the old versions of the virtual machine. So I just copied them back and Vista is back working again. YAY!
17 July 2008
Halt!
Today I'm thankful for ...
... my Mac sleeping nearly instantaneously. I was at a club last night for an event where I needed my Mac. In a dark corner and on a very short table ledge I perched the Mac. After I was done with a quick bit of work I closed the lid and started to turn away from it. At that instant the Mac tipped off the ledge and made a sickening smack on the floor. I turned back just in time to see it land on its bottom side.
Holy crap.
I picked it up and looked for initial damage. The right side received a dent because I had a laptop security cable plugged in it and it must have landed on that first. But then it must have tipped flat and the whole bottom side clattered to the floor about the same time. Other than that there is no visible damage.
I powered it up to find that it was in fine working condition, no screen cracks, no case cracks, no broken keys or trackpad controls. Then the moment of truth: would the Mac's operating system report errors? After logging back into the computer ... it was fine! Yes! It appears that as soon as I shut the lid the drive stopped spinning and so the heads were already parked when the laptop smacked the concrete. I know the Mac has an accelerometer to suspend the disk in a fall, but I think the Mac was already asleep before it hit the ground.
Back at home I ran a disk check and things looked a-OK. Whew. I'm so glad I set the Mac to hibernatemode 0.
... my Mac sleeping nearly instantaneously. I was at a club last night for an event where I needed my Mac. In a dark corner and on a very short table ledge I perched the Mac. After I was done with a quick bit of work I closed the lid and started to turn away from it. At that instant the Mac tipped off the ledge and made a sickening smack on the floor. I turned back just in time to see it land on its bottom side.
Holy crap.
I picked it up and looked for initial damage. The right side received a dent because I had a laptop security cable plugged in it and it must have landed on that first. But then it must have tipped flat and the whole bottom side clattered to the floor about the same time. Other than that there is no visible damage.
I powered it up to find that it was in fine working condition, no screen cracks, no case cracks, no broken keys or trackpad controls. Then the moment of truth: would the Mac's operating system report errors? After logging back into the computer ... it was fine! Yes! It appears that as soon as I shut the lid the drive stopped spinning and so the heads were already parked when the laptop smacked the concrete. I know the Mac has an accelerometer to suspend the disk in a fall, but I think the Mac was already asleep before it hit the ground.
Back at home I ran a disk check and things looked a-OK. Whew. I'm so glad I set the Mac to hibernatemode 0.
15 July 2008
You so smrt
Today I'm thankful for ...
... B knowing how to write Cocoa apps. With his help I was able to put together my very first app for the iPhone. He gave me a quick tour of Xcode, Interface Builder, and showed me how Objective C sends messages. At the end of about an hour we had an interface that was able to hide and reveal a text label, count the number of times that switch was toggled, increment a page counter, toggle a button bar, and increase a progress meter. It may be ugly as heck, but it really helped me understand how this all fits together.
... B knowing how to write Cocoa apps. With his help I was able to put together my very first app for the iPhone. He gave me a quick tour of Xcode, Interface Builder, and showed me how Objective C sends messages. At the end of about an hour we had an interface that was able to hide and reveal a text label, count the number of times that switch was toggled, increment a page counter, toggle a button bar, and increase a progress meter. It may be ugly as heck, but it really helped me understand how this all fits together.
11 July 2008
No thanks, I'm OK
Today I'm thankful for ...
... not having upgraded to the iPhone 2.0 software today. According to what I've read the AT&T servers have been down part of the day. And, since I'm traveling in Canada right now I really don't want to be stranded up here w/out any phone! Besides I'll be back in the US soon and hopefully all the kinks in the activation process will have been ironed out by then.
... not having upgraded to the iPhone 2.0 software today. According to what I've read the AT&T servers have been down part of the day. And, since I'm traveling in Canada right now I really don't want to be stranded up here w/out any phone! Besides I'll be back in the US soon and hopefully all the kinks in the activation process will have been ironed out by then.
07 July 2008
Today I'm thankful for ...
... trying to reinstall iTunes. After doing the Leopard upgrade I noticed the iPhone was not syncing at all. The System Profiler did show the device as being connected, but then looking in the Console log I was seeing:
I searched around for "USBMuxListenerCreate" problems and almost nowhere did I see an appropriate solution. I was just about to give up right now when I decided to try to download iTunes again. And, what do you know? It worked! No problems syncing anymore.
... trying to reinstall iTunes. After doing the Leopard upgrade I noticed the iPhone was not syncing at all. The System Profiler did show the device as being connected, but then looking in the Console log I was seeing:
Jul 7 00:03:48 Xxxxxx [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[195]: USBMuxListenerCreate: No such file or directoryI searched around for "USBMuxListenerCreate" problems and almost nowhere did I see an appropriate solution. I was just about to give up right now when I decided to try to download iTunes again. And, what do you know? It worked! No problems syncing anymore.
06 July 2008
SuperDuper saves the day ... again
Today I'm thankful for ...
... SuperDuper. This Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard upgrade sucked beyond belief. The problem: my Macbook Pro had an Apple Partition Table on it when Leopard requires a GUID Partition Table.
(I don't know if it was because this is the new 250 GB hard drive I put in recently and it may have been defaulted to the Apple Partition Table.)
So after backing up my drive to an external HDD in a USB enclosure, I went about trying to upgrade the computer. That's when it put up the error message that my computer's HDD did not have a GUID Partition Table. Well, the problem here is that to change the partitioning to the GUID way requires blanking the hard drive. Which means you have to move all the data off, then back again---to my knowledge. What complicated this is that even though SuperDuper made a bootable copy of Tiger on the external HDD, it's a USB 2.0 enclosure! And booting off of the Leopard install disk didn't let me access the USB device.
So I was in trouble yesterday after having switched my Macbook's HDD to the GUID, but my data lived off on the unreachable external drive. I ended up at Best Buy and found a Western Digital MyBook drive. When I finally got home late I was able to use the Leopard install disk to make the MyBook drive the bootable startup disk. Then running that I was able to reinstall SuperDuper and copy everything off the USB external drive back to the Macbook, and then I was able to rerun the Leopard install on the Macbook as an upgrade, not a fresh install.
Whew.
All told the time expenditure went something like this:
Of course, that doesn't include the extra time required to do all the system updates.
I'm exhausted.
... SuperDuper. This Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard upgrade sucked beyond belief. The problem: my Macbook Pro had an Apple Partition Table on it when Leopard requires a GUID Partition Table.
(I don't know if it was because this is the new 250 GB hard drive I put in recently and it may have been defaulted to the Apple Partition Table.)
So after backing up my drive to an external HDD in a USB enclosure, I went about trying to upgrade the computer. That's when it put up the error message that my computer's HDD did not have a GUID Partition Table. Well, the problem here is that to change the partitioning to the GUID way requires blanking the hard drive. Which means you have to move all the data off, then back again---to my knowledge. What complicated this is that even though SuperDuper made a bootable copy of Tiger on the external HDD, it's a USB 2.0 enclosure! And booting off of the Leopard install disk didn't let me access the USB device.
So I was in trouble yesterday after having switched my Macbook's HDD to the GUID, but my data lived off on the unreachable external drive. I ended up at Best Buy and found a Western Digital MyBook drive. When I finally got home late I was able to use the Leopard install disk to make the MyBook drive the bootable startup disk. Then running that I was able to reinstall SuperDuper and copy everything off the USB external drive back to the Macbook, and then I was able to rerun the Leopard install on the Macbook as an upgrade, not a fresh install.
Whew.
All told the time expenditure went something like this:
- Back up the Macbook to the external USB HDD via Super Duper: 5.25 hours
- Install Leopard on the MyBook drive: 35 minutes
- Copy all data back from the external USB HDD to the Macbook HDD: 3.5 hours
- Upgrade the Macbook Tiger to Leopard: 1 hour
Of course, that doesn't include the extra time required to do all the system updates.
I'm exhausted.
23 April 2008
Polly wants a song, Polly wants a song
Today I'm thankful for ...
... iTunes' duplicate detection. I'm merging all of my music onto my little laptop's hard drive which doubled in size recently. As a result there are a bazillion duplicates since I'm copying several backups en masse to it. But there's a little menu option in iTunes now that lets me manage this mess. Yay.
... iTunes' duplicate detection. I'm merging all of my music onto my little laptop's hard drive which doubled in size recently. As a result there are a bazillion duplicates since I'm copying several backups en masse to it. But there's a little menu option in iTunes now that lets me manage this mess. Yay.
06 March 2008
A little company from Cupertino
Today I'm thankful for ...
... Apple's Airport Express. Seriously. This is like the most awesome $100 I've ever spent. If you haven't ever seen it, it's part wireless router, part network audio sound card, part network printer hub, part wireless hub. I have been having problems with my old Linksys router---probably a configuration setup---and I was about ready to give up when I remembered I had the Airport Express. So I plugged the DSL modem into it and changed its mode to be a wireless router (all configurable by software) and it worked instantly! Yes, I have wireless back! I just have to move it to the main room where I can route the audio to the speakers...or maybe not. Maybe I'll route it to my stereo in my room?
... Apple's Airport Express. Seriously. This is like the most awesome $100 I've ever spent. If you haven't ever seen it, it's part wireless router, part network audio sound card, part network printer hub, part wireless hub. I have been having problems with my old Linksys router---probably a configuration setup---and I was about ready to give up when I remembered I had the Airport Express. So I plugged the DSL modem into it and changed its mode to be a wireless router (all configurable by software) and it worked instantly! Yes, I have wireless back! I just have to move it to the main room where I can route the audio to the speakers...or maybe not. Maybe I'll route it to my stereo in my room?
13 February 2008
Geek is chic?
Today I'm thankful for ...
... Dad introducing me to computers, and that I stuck with them. Lately this stupid Macbook Pro has been giving me tons of problems. It couldn't see its firewire port and it wasn't able to sleep. I tried resetting the NVRAM and PRAM according to many guides on the Internet. I took it to the Apple store and they said I might incur a $300 repair and would be out of a computer for weeks.
That is just not going to work for me.
I use my personal laptop also as my work computer. I have many professional licenses on this machine and I can't easily transfer them off. I have insurmountable deadlines too.
So my solution was to figure out if it's a software issue or a hardware issue. My guess is that it's both: Parallels taking over my firewire port and not letting a process sleep; and an aging hard disk that probably is littered with errors from being bumped while it was writing. I got a new 160GB hard disk (40GB more than what I currently have) and after reading many guides I decided to crack open the Macbook case...
Wow, talk about a bazillion screws. Seriously. I had a strip of tape where I could tack the screws so I could remember what order to put them back in. There's probably 2 dozen mini Phillips and Torx-6 screws! But I did it, ever so gingerly moving ribbon cables and unlocking this and that. With the new HDD connected and a fresh Mac OS X install the computer functioned as good as new, sleeping and all. Now I knew that it was most likely a software problem.
What's more interesting is that I swapped the drives back to my old 120GB and now the computer sleeps just fine too!!! I don't get it! My best guess is that jostling the laptop around loosened something and one day when I slept the computer while my Mighty Mouse was on probably put it into a weird power state. By taking out the RAM and swapping the hard drive I think that helped to reset any stuck bits, and the fresh Mac OS X install helped cleanse the rest of it.
Anyways, I'm glad that my introduction to technology happened when I was young and I was never discouraged from pursuing it. There are many girls who get frustrated by being too geeky, but sometimes you just have to follow your passion I guess?
... Dad introducing me to computers, and that I stuck with them. Lately this stupid Macbook Pro has been giving me tons of problems. It couldn't see its firewire port and it wasn't able to sleep. I tried resetting the NVRAM and PRAM according to many guides on the Internet. I took it to the Apple store and they said I might incur a $300 repair and would be out of a computer for weeks.
That is just not going to work for me.
I use my personal laptop also as my work computer. I have many professional licenses on this machine and I can't easily transfer them off. I have insurmountable deadlines too.
So my solution was to figure out if it's a software issue or a hardware issue. My guess is that it's both: Parallels taking over my firewire port and not letting a process sleep; and an aging hard disk that probably is littered with errors from being bumped while it was writing. I got a new 160GB hard disk (40GB more than what I currently have) and after reading many guides I decided to crack open the Macbook case...
Wow, talk about a bazillion screws. Seriously. I had a strip of tape where I could tack the screws so I could remember what order to put them back in. There's probably 2 dozen mini Phillips and Torx-6 screws! But I did it, ever so gingerly moving ribbon cables and unlocking this and that. With the new HDD connected and a fresh Mac OS X install the computer functioned as good as new, sleeping and all. Now I knew that it was most likely a software problem.
What's more interesting is that I swapped the drives back to my old 120GB and now the computer sleeps just fine too!!! I don't get it! My best guess is that jostling the laptop around loosened something and one day when I slept the computer while my Mighty Mouse was on probably put it into a weird power state. By taking out the RAM and swapping the hard drive I think that helped to reset any stuck bits, and the fresh Mac OS X install helped cleanse the rest of it.
Anyways, I'm glad that my introduction to technology happened when I was young and I was never discouraged from pursuing it. There are many girls who get frustrated by being too geeky, but sometimes you just have to follow your passion I guess?
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