- Gordon's Notes: Parental controls - not an Apple thing
- Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - Remote Access and other tips
- Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - The wikipedia problem solved
- Gordon's Tech: OS X parental controls still broken in 10.5.7 (this bug now fixed I think)
- Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5: Apple engineers need more children
- Be the Best You can Be: OS X 10.5: time limited computer access
- Gordon's Tech: Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.
- Gordon's Notes: The software Apple can't do
- Gordon's Tech: LEGO Digital Designer is pure evil on OS X
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Subsite filtering - harder than it looks
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Where did my Access 2007 object descriptions go? SP2 killed them.
Sometimes I have to use Access 2007. It’s always painful, but one of the worst agony comes because there are no object descriptions anymore. It’s hard enough to manage Access entities with object descriptions, but with Access 2007 all of my Access 2003 table and query descriptions are gone.
It’s weird because I swear I used to see them buried away in Access 2007 when I used it a year or two ago. Not in a useful place mind you, but at least they existed.
Turns out Office SP2 killed ‘em off:
After you apply 2007 Office system Service Pack 2, the description of an object does not appear in the Navigation Pane in Access 2007. This problem occurs when the Navigation Pane is viewed by Details.
There’s an August 2009 hotfix for this and sundry other Access 2007 bugs, unlike some hotfixes it is downloadable. I assume it will be included in Office 2007 SP3 when that comes out.
Wicked bug.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
MobileMe vs. DropBox
Saturday, February 27, 2010
My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise
My now flicker-free fairly new 27" quad core iMac is crashing.
There are two common failure modes. One is that it locks up when displaying photos in the screensaver. The clue is that the same images display repeatedly. The second mode is that iTunes becomes unresponsive, and then the Finder as well. I get the SBOD/SPOD/spinning beachball of death.
If I kill both I can restart iTunes, but not the Finder. I've tried several fixes. First I ran Safe Boot (shift restart). Then I installed the latest version of Onyx and ran the usual clean, check, maintenance, etc. Everything passed but the problems have persisted.
So I've begun uninstalling anything invasive. First I removed CrashPlan, and today I uninstalled 1Password (a quite involved uninstall, see OS X defect: The missing uninstaller).
I've been suspicious of 1Password for a while. I'm also monitoring Console.app, which is full of "missing bundle identifier" Office 2008 related messages. I've found mention of this problem in association with kernel panics last November, with a more recent responses. For example:
... 2/27/10 8:10:35 PM [0x0-0x28028].com.vmware.fusionDaemon[296] 2010-02-27 20:10:35.581 pkgutil[299:60f] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/Office2008_en_proofing_brazilian.pkg...
Tonight I'll run the Apple hardware test that came with my machine in loop mode. (I think you need to attach a physical kb to get this to work -- holding 'D' on my bluetooth kb didn't seem to do anything.) If the problem persists, VMWare will be the next to go (For example). I want it to run my XP VM, but if need be I can move that VM to a MacBook running 10.5 and Fusion 2. If I figure this one out, I'll update this post.
PS. Bundle Identifier via Apple Dev:
The bundle identifier string identifies your application to the system. This string must be a uniform type identifier (UTI) that contains only alphanumeric (A-Z,a-z,0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. The string should also be in reverse-DNS format. For example, if your company’s domain is Ajax.com and you create an application named Hello, you could assign the string com.Ajax.Hello as your application’s bundle identifier.
- I moved the suspicious Office 2008 .pkg files to another drive. I'll see if I can reduce the Console messages.
- I realized that when I drag things to the trash they're being deleted immediately, rather than put in the trash. I found an old article on this that's being cited by 10.6 users recently. Naturally it's a permissions problem. I wonder if it's related to the odd way my account was created when I used migration assistant (long story). I'll try some of those fixes.
Ok, this is interesting. As described by the X Lab document I was getting the "will be deleted immediately" trash message because I had lost read/write privileges to my home directory. On inspection my User directory folders all refer to an user "_unknown". I think this was a side-effect of how I set up my account, which was:
- I setup an account called "jfaughnan" on my new machine.
- After a while I deleted it an migrated the "jfaughnan" account from my old machine.
- The new account was given the home folder name "jfaughnan 1". On inspection I found that deleting the user "jfaughnan" failed to remove the original home directory.
Update 2/28/2010: Went through 18 loops without a problem, so hardware seems good. I'll keep hitting on the software issues - esp. VMWare.
Update 3/2/2010: I thought I was getting somewhere, but today it was unresponsive with a faint glowing blue screen. I tried putting it to sleep by pressing the power button, but nothing happened. Then, on a hunch, I turned off an attached firewire 400 drive. The system responded, then went to sleep. It woke up normally.
On resumption there was an iTunes complaint about loss of Apple Store connectivity. Meanwhile my console showed many instances of this message:
3/2/10 3:45:14 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.apple.AddressBook.abd[13839]) Exited with exit code: 1
Update 3/11/10: It's still locking up, sometimes with awake from sleep and sometimes with switching users. It might be less frequent - maybe once a week. I'm suspicious of VMWare 3.02 on 10.6.2. I don't see any useful Console messages. I will try restarting the machine every few days as a prophylactic measure. Maybe 10.6.3 will help, it should be out soon.
Update 3/12/10: Got the faint blue screen, and again turning off the external drive did the trick. The screensaver slideshow uses that Firewire 400 drive. I ran Disk Utility and cleaned up permissions on the drive. It's set to ignore ownership. Looks like yet another OS/firewire problem.
Update 3/13/10: Found iTunes was not responding. Time Machine backup not working. When I tried to add a share got spinning beachball (noted, however, a share reference to a user account that was deleted - bug there). Console said slide show found a corrupted jpeg. Unable to shutdown -- until I turned off external firewire drive. I think 10.6 and new iMacs have serious problems with Firewire 400 enclosures. Errors seem to cause the OS to blow up - perhaps some kind of memory overow issue.
Update 3/13/10c: Apple just truncated the massive firewire complaint thread. Really, it didn't have anything to do with me. I guess they took care of that problem. I've switched to USB for now, I'll try firewire again with 10.6.3.
Update 3/29/2010: Same crash - locked up screen saver - but this time I was using a USB drive. Turning the drive off then on again cleared the problem. So this isn't a firewire problem after all! It's a screensaver and external drive bug. The console is showing "corrupt JPEG data", but that might just be from power cycling the drive.
Update 5/12/2010: I think this was fixed by 10.6.3. I haven't seen it since. I only have a USB drive attached however, so I can't rule out a Firewire bug. The "corrupt JPEG" console message was a red herring caused by loss of the drive when trying to display in the screensaver.
Update 10/27/2010: Things have been pretty stable since 10.6.3.
Friday, February 26, 2010
OS X 10.6 bug: persistent reconnection
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Facebook Lite blank page - no fix
I can't figure out how to get Outlook 2007 notes to be exported as text files for use with notational velocity/simplenote, and I can't fix my mother's blank lite.facebook.com page.
I'd set my mother's FB account to always start "lite". It's a cleaner, simpler, faster UI. Unfortunately, it doesn't get a lot of FB love. There's a bug where the page loads empty. There's no way to convince FB to ignore the default "always lite" settings.
I found a hack that will get me to account settings - use this URL: "https://login.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1".
I didn't have to actually enter my password with this hack, but it did bring me to normal settings. From there I can see her Profile view. Unfortunately, standard settings don't include the facebook lite control -- that's only available from lite.facebook.com.
I was able to fight my way to a report form, but I don't hold out much hope. I'll try from XP at work and see if things are any better.
Once I do get into her lite.facebook.com account I'll turn off the "always lite" setting. That's clearly a bad idea!
See also: disable-facebook-lite-switch-to-normal-facebook
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Weird 1Password related bug with account migration
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)