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Posts Tagged ‘mac’
Finder Error -10810
March 22, 2010I don’t normally curse (ok, ok, when writing) but fuck!
Update: I ended up nuking and paving the laptop after grabbing data via target mode. The effort late last year to finally organize my apps, data, and such is paying off. The FileVault image works, and I was able to mount it elsewhere (so I expect to drop it back in the laptop after I finish reinstalling). Eating my own sysadmin dog food: anytime!
Update: Really, a little thinking about the chain of events that may have caused this. Just before the Finder bent itself into oblivion, I just attached my video camera and (gasp!) poked around its file system from the CLI. I had attached the camera before without problems (but this was the first time I sniffed around). I’m not sure this has anything to do, other than folks seem to think this issue is related to external disks.
Mac SVN clients: Versions vs Cornerstone
January 20, 2010Although I am not a full-time developer, I do deal with a fair amount of information that benefits from the joys of versioning (including software I write). A lot of that work today happens in an IDE (Xcode), but a lot of it happens in other contexts, so having a pretty (and above all, useful) tool to navigate a repository is quite useful. I have been using Versions for the Mac since it was beta, and it has proven to be a worthy helper. Recently, I ran into Cornerstone, and I decided to try it out of curiosity. Both are solid apps, and either one will service your SVN needs nicely. Hopefully Git will get one in the near future.
Snow Leopard: Exchange Support Rocks
December 24, 2009When Virtual Machines Go Apeshit
December 2, 2009When I nuked and paved the laptop, I cleaned up the virtual machine stable I had been hauling around for some time.
About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.
Sigh.
CNET TechTracker
November 17, 2009Today I installed CNET’s TechTracker and while I do love the concept, it’s likely to get uninstalled. Primarily, it’s not actually tracking the bulk of the software I would like to track because it seems to only pay attention to /Applications. In the fine tradition of sysadmin file system organization (or simply my own personal mental organization) I try to keep most of the apps away from the system’s /Applications directory, so I have a /Local hierarchy where I keep, well, local stuff (so there is such a thing as /Local/Applications where most of the apps I use live; there are exceptions for those that insist on living in /Applications, such as CS4 or Fusion). Looking into the preferences pane, there doesn’t seem to be an option to add other locations.
I realize most people install applications in the system location, which is fine. It simply means TechTracker isn’t of much use to me at this point in time.
Snow Leopard: Up and Running
November 16, 2009I had been wanting to take Snow Leopard for a spin for some time, but software availability at home and time constraints in general had prevented me from doing it. I picked up a copy during my last visit to California, so all that was left was finding some cycles to install it and get going with it. Friday just sort of came up from nowhere and enabled the forcing function: disk.dieByClickNoise(). New drive, some minor surgery, and voilá: ready for Snow Leopard.
It has been running pretty well minus a couple of annoyances: it doesn’t seem to get along with my wireless at home all time and iPulse now asks for an admin password upon login (which, admittedly, I don’t do all that often, so it’s not enough to be obnoxious). Everything else so far works rather well. Having been running on the same Leopard image for nearly two years, I felt it was time to start from scratch (i.e., discarding old apps I no longer use, rearranging some things in my home directory, fully switching to Xcode) and, along the way, verify that things work as expected. I’d say I’m about 80% done, but even at that level, I’m fully functional for work (and blogging, but of course).
Given the starting point, I did push MobileMe a bit by having it sync most of the items it supports (mail accounts and rules, the dock, etc). Everything worked as advertised, so a lot of that work was fairly effortless (and contributed to the cleanup). I also went ahead and updated most of the seed files I keep on the server at home (i.e., the bare baseline of apps, configuration and initialization files, and other data that I share across all the systems I use, which, at last count, was too many). Yes, I do eat my own dog food, and at some point I will polish what I have written about said dog food and publish it.
Once the laptop is 100% done and I’m satisfied with it (say, a couple of weeks of heavy use of most of the work/photo/video stuff), the desktop will follow, although I am thinking that the Mac Mini at home will probably happen soonish given its primary purpose in life is to deliver media into my living room. Alas, this is the end of the line for the trusty PowerBook G4, which turns four in a couple of months, although its current user will continue to enjoy everything Leopard has to offer for quite some time (until the system dies of Leopard is no longer updated or usable in it).
Enabling Remote Disc on non-MacBook Air clients
November 11, 2009Courtesy of bstreiff: Enabling Remote Disc on not-Airs:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true
Context: we have an older MacBook with what appears to be a busted DVD-ROM drive, preventing a clean install of the newly arrived cat. After enabling CD/DVD Sharing on the “server”, nothing would show up on the “client”. After tweaking the above properties and restarting the Finder, it’s all good now. Install in progress.
Dropbox
September 21, 2009I’ve been a lite Dropbox user for some time (since I first read about them via Rands) and while I do use it more these days for more typical file sharing tasks, one of the most interesting uses I have for it has been that of sharing application state. Cloud and all, I am very much a desktop user, and while some of the applications I use do have cloudish counterparts, I find that have a tendency to enjoy my local apps far more than their cloud counterparts. Take ecto, a fantastic blog editor for the Mac. I find myself starting blog posts often, leaving them for “later” from time to time. Given I share time between my desktop and my laptop, it hasn’t always been easy to match available time slot with in-progress blogs.
Enter Dropbox: a simpe symlink from
~/Library/Application Support/ecto
to
../../DropBox/Shared/Library/Application Support/ecto3
and my wherever-whenever-ecto-blogging is a go (something that, by the way, did not work with iDisk, which seemingly failed to sync more ofthen than I was willing to accept). I suspect instant switching from one system to the other might probably confuse ecto, but I never do that anyway, and I can probably add some glue before the app starts to check on Dropbox’s status.
