Apple
Do Not Start iDisk Sync in Leopard
After the upgrade to Leopard, I found my Mac was slow to respond to commands, the Finder was constantly crashing, and I couldn’t restart or shutdown my computer anymore. I ended up doing clean installation of Leopard thinking something went wrong during the update process. No dice. My computer was great for about an hour after getting all caught up on my updates. Then the problems started to occur. I posted this question on the Apple Support forums in hopes someone else had a similar issue. I really didn’t want to send my computer into Apple. After getting a good reply about the possibility of my RAM failing, I purchased memtest and ran it thinking that it had to be a bad RAM module. I was sure it would come back with a bad test for one or both of the modules. Nope. Then I thought one of my WD Firewire hard drives were failing. Or maybe my Firewire controller was bad. So I unplugged everything from my computer, force-restarted my computer, went into single-user mode and deleted all of my cache files from /Library and ~/Library and booted up. Still wouldn’t restart or shutdown and my Finder was as unstable as ever.
It began to occur to me that my MacBook Pro at work was experiencing similar issues. But they weren’t as extreme as the problems I was having on my iMac. I couldn’t restart or shutdown about 50% of the time but I could occasionally restart or shutdown so there weren’t any alarms going off in my head. When I started to think about what these 2 machines had in common, the only thing I could think of was Leopard. In every other way, they were different. I felt like I was running out of options.
I’m not an Apple Certified Technician or anything and I just never think to look at the Console. But for some reason I did (probably because I was really trying to get out of sending my iMac in for repairs). And I noticed this line:
FileSyncAgent[147] LOCK /.FileSync (FAILED)
I didn’t even bother with a Google search for .FileSync. I immediately knew who the culprit was after reading that line. I jumped to my System Preferences, clicked .Mac and stopped my iDisk Syncing. As soon as it was stopped, I went to the Apple Menu and selected Restart. Bingo. That was it. My computer was back to being a bad-ass.
What really irritates me about this whole story is that I didn’t check the console sooner. No, that’s just a shame since I wasted so much time. No, what really irritates me is that this is Apple’s own product. Their product which has some really great uses but is also a big, fat lemon. The .Mac suite has to be one of Apple’s biggest failures over the course of the last few years. The idea behind it is solid but the implementation just sucks. If it weren’t for the amazingly simple way to get photo gallery pages up online for my family, I wouldn’t have any use for .Mac.
I don’t know, after this whole episode I’m pretty soured on .Mac anyway. Maybe it’s time to just give up on it since I don’t think they’re ever really going to fix it.
Blogging Through TextMate
I’m trying out blogging via TextMate (Warning: QuickTime movie link). MarsEdit seems like a great application but I already own TextMate and it’s a very versatile application. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s kept me from buying a copy of Coda from Panic, one of my favorite Mac software developers. Coda is good, but the text editor pales compared to TextMate. When I combine TextMate and CSSEdit, there’s little justification to buy Coda. I’m going to try TextMate for a few blog posts to see if it’ll do the job and then I’ll take MarsEdit for a 30-day-free-trial whirl and see how much better it is.
This is definitely more fun that using the web interface.
I Used To Visit Spymac
From the Cabel-Yay Awards:
Remember when SpyMac was famous for posting laughably fake Apple rumors, then they became some kind of weird .Mac-like service? Does anyone understand what the hell is going on over there now?
Seriously, what the hell happened to that site? I used to go there all the time a few years ago, it was a great place for Mac-talk and rampant rumor speculation. I left when they started forcing users to sign up for stuff I didn’t want. I eventually left the site altogether and haven’t checked it in a while. I just went over there after reading this post and was completely and utterly confused by what I saw. It has nothing to do with Macs.
Firefox is Un-Mac
I know that Mozilla put out the call to Mac users asking them why they felt Firefox wasn’t a good Mac citizen. I’m sure they got their fill of complaints. But as is the case with many developers when it comes to design, as hard as they try they just can’t see the difference between their version and a professionally designed version. For instance, check out the photo of the Proto Theme for Firefox Beta 2. To me, it’s like a polished turd. It looks close to the Safari design but details (which aren’t the Proto developers fault but rather the Firefox implementation) are decidedly un-Mac. For example, why on Earth are Firefox tabs so damn wide? They’re that wide across the board, not just on Mac. And what’s with the site icon on the tab? Not only do most of these icons suck but if they happen to have a white background or other poorly-chosen design elements, you’re stuck having to look at it on your tab. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose but Firefox is just too clunky looking for me to use day-to-day.
