One day... one day...
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Leopard X11 on multiple monitors fix
The X11 that comes with Leopard seems to not work across multiple monitors. The following is a fix given to me by James Jackson, a PhD student here...
cp /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz ~/Documents/Xquartz-backup
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/xorg-server-1.2a10/Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
bunzip2 Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
sudo install -b Xquartz-1.2a10 /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/libX11.6.dylib.bz2
bunzip2 libX11.6.dylib.bz2
sudo install -b libX11.6.dylib /usr/X11/lib
curl -LO http://cloud.cs.berkeley.edu/~jeremy/X11/X11.bz2
bunzip2 X11.bz2
sudo install -b X11 /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/
cp /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz ~/Documents/Xquartz-backup
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/xorg-server-1.2a10/Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
bunzip2 Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
sudo install -b Xquartz-1.2a10 /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/libX11.6.dylib.bz2
bunzip2 libX11.6.dylib.bz2
sudo install -b libX11.6.dylib /usr/X11/lib
curl -LO http://cloud.cs.berkeley.edu/~jeremy/X11/X11.bz2
bunzip2 X11.bz2
sudo install -b X11 /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
[The following was a post to the 43folders forum, but I realised it ended up more like a blog post than a question, so copied it here, with a few more links...]
I stumbled upon this tip to "attach" files to an iCal event - very useful. But not that useful, I can't drag an drop the file I want to use, so my big clumsy fingers have to go through a number of contortions to do it. Immediately I thought "I bet I could do this with Quicksilver" (I'm new to it and think its great), but it seems I can't. I can find the file and copy the file name to the clipboard, but I can't update/modify the iCal event. Is there something simple I've not turned on?
Also, while I like the neat little two pane window of quicksilver, if I have a complex action (capture file name, prepend file:// to it, add that as this events url, in this instance) I'd like to be able to define this as a new action associated with files (or whatever), so I just call quicksilver once, find the file and type attach (or whatever). Is it possible to define such complex actions (chains of actions) and set them to a known command name? What would be really nice is if quicksilvers adaptive learning could work such complex actions out for me (I'm very lazy), and create new actions on the fly. Maybe now I'm dreaming!
Last but not least, I have an applescript that takes a message from mail.app and makes it an iCal event, I think I can pretty quickly make it save attachments somewhere sensible and attach them to these new events. I guess 90% of the time the files I want to attach are from mail ("The meeting is on Tuesday, the agenda pdf is attached") so maybe I don't need quicksilver to do it in this instance, though I'd really like it to!
[EDIT: after making this post to the forum it spat out a few related links, one being this - sounds perfect! Time to play...]
I stumbled upon this tip to "attach" files to an iCal event - very useful. But not that useful, I can't drag an drop the file I want to use, so my big clumsy fingers have to go through a number of contortions to do it. Immediately I thought "I bet I could do this with Quicksilver" (I'm new to it and think its great), but it seems I can't. I can find the file and copy the file name to the clipboard, but I can't update/modify the iCal event. Is there something simple I've not turned on?
Also, while I like the neat little two pane window of quicksilver, if I have a complex action (capture file name, prepend file:// to it, add that as this events url, in this instance) I'd like to be able to define this as a new action associated with files (or whatever), so I just call quicksilver once, find the file and type attach (or whatever). Is it possible to define such complex actions (chains of actions) and set them to a known command name? What would be really nice is if quicksilvers adaptive learning could work such complex actions out for me (I'm very lazy), and create new actions on the fly. Maybe now I'm dreaming!
Last but not least, I have an applescript that takes a message from mail.app and makes it an iCal event, I think I can pretty quickly make it save attachments somewhere sensible and attach them to these new events. I guess 90% of the time the files I want to attach are from mail ("The meeting is on Tuesday, the agenda pdf is attached") so maybe I don't need quicksilver to do it in this instance, though I'd really like it to!
[EDIT: after making this post to the forum it spat out a few related links, one being this - sounds perfect! Time to play...]
Monday, November 19, 2007
Fixing a broken update
So I screwed up an update (due to having a full system disk - oops!) and all of a sudden my mac will only boot to a flashing bue screen of doom. Not good. So I did some searching around and found out that:
1. Mac updates aren't rollback-able
2. You can run software update as a CLI tool
3. You can mount and install things from DMG's via CLI tools
Skipping over point 1, here's how I restored my system:
First, I was a bit lucky. I could log in from a remote terminal. I ssh'ed in and looked in /var/log/system.log to see what the hell was going on - seemed that the login window was somehow crashing - nice:
I was fairly sure that the problem was due to the failed update, so looked for a rollback tool (404 really useful tool not found). I then looked for a way to reinstall that update.
Following this life hack I tried to reinstall the update. Sadly this isn't possible using the softwareupdate tool, but I include it here for completeness - it might be a useful thing to know one day...
Next up I downloaded the DMG of the update from the apple site (wget is so good), mounted it:
Checked I had the room:
And then set it installing:
It seemed to take a while (it took some time with the GUI interface, too, though there I could see a progress bar), but it seemed to do the trick, the update completed and the login ran fine. I rebooted the machine, to finish the update, and after a wait that was a bit to long, everything was back to normal - phew!
Lessons learnt:
1. Never turn off sshd
2. Install Leopard, run regular backups
3. Never install a software update with a full system disk
1. Mac updates aren't rollback-able
2. You can run software update as a CLI tool
3. You can mount and install things from DMG's via CLI tools
Skipping over point 1, here's how I restored my system:
First, I was a bit lucky. I could log in from a remote terminal. I ssh'ed in and looked in /var/log/system.log to see what the hell was going on - seemed that the login window was somehow crashing - nice:
Nov 19 14:15:01 Hilbert crashdump[5914]: loginwindow crashed
Nov 19 14:15:01 Hilbert /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Nov 19 14:15:02 Hilbert crashdump[5914]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/loginwindow.crash.log
I was fairly sure that the problem was due to the failed update, so looked for a rollback tool (404 really useful tool not found). I then looked for a way to reinstall that update.
Following this life hack I tried to reinstall the update. Sadly this isn't possible using the softwareupdate tool, but I include it here for completeness - it might be a useful thing to know one day...
Next up I downloaded the DMG of the update from the apple site (wget is so good), mounted it:
hdiutil attach MacOSXUpd10.4.11Intel.dmg
Checked I had the room:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 74G 73G 1.1G 99% /
devfs 100K 100K 0B 100% /dev
fdesc 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev512K 512K 0B 100% /.vol
automount -nsl [201] 0B 0B 0B 100% /Network
automount -fstab [212] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [212] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk1s3 205M 144M 61M 70% /Volumes/Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update (Intel)
And then set it installing:
sudo installer -pkg MacOSXUpd10.4.11Intel.pkg -target "/"
It seemed to take a while (it took some time with the GUI interface, too, though there I could see a progress bar), but it seemed to do the trick, the update completed and the login ran fine. I rebooted the machine, to finish the update, and after a wait that was a bit to long, everything was back to normal - phew!
Lessons learnt:
1. Never turn off sshd
2. Install Leopard, run regular backups
3. Never install a software update with a full system disk
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Weirdness
Had some weirdness with my google account today, wouldn't let me sign in and was really unresponsive. Any one else see similar?
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