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 Mac OS X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac OS X. Show all posts
14 August 2008
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.
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.
09 June 2008
That's good hash
Today I'm thankful for ...
... md5 being installed on Macs. I couldn't remember how to get the MD5 checksum/hash of a file so I just typed "md5" on the command line and voilà it worked!
Easy breezy...
... md5 being installed on Macs. I couldn't remember how to get the MD5 checksum/hash of a file so I just typed "md5" on the command line and voilà it worked!
> md5 Adium_1.2.5.dmg
MD5 (Adium_1.2.5.dmg) = 308b1fc45bb441b44fde48c8a0485e79
>
Easy breezy...
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