Yesterday, I have noticed interesting thing related to Finder and "beach ball of the death". Suddenly, for no obvious reason, the top menu became unavailable and cursor changed to beachball every time I moved it there. The Bluetooth mouse stopped responding. Finder stopped responding. All symptoms as if Finder would hanging ...
The cause of the issue was crash of unrelated application (iShowU, if you are curious), which brought up the crash report window. For some reason - maybe because it happened while changing spaces - the window was not visible. After closing the window, everything came back to life and even mouse reconnected (after disabling and re-enabling Bluetooth).
It happened few days ago for the first time: after opening the lid on my MacBook Pro, the machine woke up, but the screen stayed dark. Whatever I did, I just could see cursor and nothing underneath. I had to resort to unthinkable - reboot :-(
Some research showed this is known problem - which is from certain point of view good, because many people found hopefully many workarounds. The more information can be found here, here and here. Very helpfull was also this page.
Here it comes, first occurence: one of my VM's BSOD-ed on me yesterday.
To be completely fair, I did have experienced an occurrence of something similar twice in last moths: after wake up from sleep, the screen was collection of the color pixels, completely unreadable. After reboot, everything was normal.
I found out that the issue may be related to the "safesleep" mode. For now, I disabled the mode by
One of the languages that I managed to completely ignore for almost 20 years was Objective-C. I always saw it as less developed, dead-end version of C++ that has little perspective - despite that GCC supported it since early days. I guess I was wrong on two of three counts - that of little perspective still holds as long as you want to stay outside of OS-X platform.
One of the issues I had was strange syntax and that from not too many books on subject, they were
As long as you are using OS-X, this is something worthy looking at: the MuPromo is running the annual bundle offer with (currently) 8 applications, worth $534 for the mentioned $49.99. The sale is on for 4 more days. The way how it works is that at certain marks, additional applications will be added to the bundle (for the same price) and will be made available to everybody who purchased the bundle. Including me :-). Currently, the sales are at > 1600, the next app will be added at 2400 (pretty sure it will happen) and the last one at 5000 (fairly likely).
Today I got to trying out the major feature of Leopard: the Time Machine. I was postponing it because I did not have proper external storage. Although I do have several USB disks sized from 100 to 260 GB, they are not empty and to clean them would take too much time that I currently do not have. Backing up on network drive would be technically possible - with some tweaking - but copying over network is always slower than USB2 or FireWire. Besides, the drives are so cheap nowadays: I have picked the 500 GB "The Book", Western Digital in Costco (Kanata) for $149. You have to agree that one cannot resist this price and product with this name (I have a weak spot for anything Book ;-))
As time passes, I am discovering more little features that either fill in the still existing gaps from my Windows toolchain or add new features. Today, at Apple presentation about Leopard Client and Leopard Server I have heard great tip.
The QuickView in Leopard is extensible with plugins. One very obvious and very useful plugin is ZIP View that gives you content of the ZIP file in preview without unzipping it. This is finally a workable replacement for Ctrl-PgDn of TotalCommander that allowed to "walk into" archive and treat ZIP file as part of the file system.
I have been running the Unix only workstations for over a week now. During this week, I have managed to clean up and convert two Windows boxes to VMWARE virtual machines, but actually had to resort to use the VM's only in two cases. Everything else worked just fine.
The first case was requirement to review an non-trivial Excel file. Normally, Numbers does very decent job when it comes to loading Excel files and for the most the remaining cases, the OpenOffice (in it's more polished Cocoa version NeoOffice) works just fine. Well - as long as you do not open spreadsheet with pivot tables. In my case, the spreadsheet contained pivot tables and charts based on these tables. Numbers warned during import that this feature is not supported and the converted spreadsheet was very good looking - nicer that in Excel, but not quite so functional :-). Strangely enough, the charts were imported OK but lost the drill-down capabilities. After trying out the NeoOffice, the imported spreadsheet had retained some pivot capabilities of the original, but lost charts completely. The only resort was falling back to Office 2003 in virtual machine and using Excel. Fortunately one of the two VM's created from old hardware had Office 2003 installed, so that worked out OK.
I have already worked through full week solely on Mac and Leopard platform with excellent results. The productivity in using Java is actually higher, thanks to faster machine and Spaces allowing to have opened few Firefox windows with Spring documentation, terminals for Ant builds, Tomcat, Eclipse and Spype/Adium to keep in touch. Spaces is about as good as having multiple monitors - the ability of switching between both with mouse and keyboard fits well in my working habits.
Last year, when I got my first Mac, it was a wild ride of discoveries and trying out new software. As result I have ended up with many programs installed that I do not really need or use. Fortunately, the uninstall process is as simple as install and there is no registry that could get corrupted, so it was not really a big deal. With the new one, I am going to be much more selective what I put on the harddrive and what not.