Tuesday, 21 January 2003
Some bugs I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, which made last week a bit more painful than it should have been:
1. If you do a selective restore in Retrospect under Mac OS X, and choose to replace corresponding files, it restores the files in the wrong place. In my case, I was trying to restore /Library/Preferences/edu.mit.Kerberos on a disk named “Mac OS X”, but Retrospect restored to /Mac OS X/Library/Preferences/edu.mit.Kerberos instead. I tried a restore three times over and was very confused when the file didn't appear as I expected; finally, I switched restoration methods and it worked. A few days later, when poking around I noticed a “Mac OS X” folder I didn’t recognize and realized what happened. This would have been fine in pre-10.0 versions of Mac OS X, which mounted disks directly at the filesystem root instead of in the /Volumes directory, but in 10.2, it’s simply a bug. On my parents' computers, which have a partition named “Applications”, this bug could potentially cause the entire /Applications folder to be incorrectly overwritten.
2. While I was working from home, my desktop Mac suddenly became unresponsive. I came into the lab to check it out: it was very slow to respond, and top indicated that the kernel task was using over 100% CPU. Several reboots and over an hour later, the culprit turned out to be my old FireWire/USB 2.5″ hard drive enclosure, where the FireWire plug had become loose and was making intermittent contact.
3. I was burning a CD with Toast when it gave me this message:
So, what’s this mysterious error –5000? I didn’t have permissions to access the file. Toast does a scan before burning to verify that the files are accessible, but apparently permissions is not one of the things it checks. I made two coasters before I figured out the problem.
It would be really nice if my RSS feed started including paragraph breaks again. That UserLand is spending time on somewhat more useless things such as custom RSS generation is incredible when my RSS feed is completely unreadable for longer entries. I'm not the only one having this problem. For now, if I double-space my posts in NetNewsWire, they get extra space…
4:45 PM
