Safari 4 still not Kerberized

I still get 303 errors when trying to access Secure HTTP (https) sites. It’s the damn ISAProxy server again.
This means I can’t even log in to WordPress, unless I use Firefox. This doesn’t bother me, I like FF.

Safari 4.0.1 acting bizarrely, interface problems

I thought that it had major problems, I had screen redraw issues, and unresponsive behaviour.

Turns out it was probably SafariStand, a plugin which I had installed but forgotten about. I don’t normally equate Safari with plugins, and of course it doesn’t automatically update like Firefox does.
Solution: Remove SafariStand from InputManagers folder and relaunch Safari!

iTunes store error -3231

I can’t subscribe to new podcasts via iTunes at work.
“iTunes store error -3231″
I’ll be its because its trying to use a port which is blocked by the damn ISAproxy server.

More Mysterious Leopard Failures

So this error goes back a few weeks- I am late in posting but I dont think it matters.

I had upgraded a 1.25GHz PowerPC Mac to 10.5.5. Leopard and all went well for a while.

Then for some reason it hung at startup.

When I checked the console, I saw this:

ERROR 1 [Login1 resetDevicePermissions] | CGSCopySessionList returned NULL
_RegisterApplication() FAILED to establish the default connection to the WindowServer

So that’s why it wouldnt start! I mean really, you wouldn’t start if you couldn’t establish the default connection to the WindowServer either.

Anyways I was stumped. This new-fangled (to me) Leopard thingy had me by the short and curlies. Not much found via web searching. So I:

• Tried fsck
• Deleted kernelcaches
• Deleted launchservices cache

All to no avail. Then I found a clue somewhere on discussions.apple.com, suggesting it was a permissions problem that might be solved by Repairing Permissions.

That didn’t work either. But by trying that I did discover that the file

com.apple.windowserver.plist

was completely missing! That’s odd. Why doesn’t OSX check for this and just create a new one?

In any case what I had to do was to

Boot up from another drive (my trusty external firewire or the other internal drive) and copy that file from the Leopard installer DVD into the correct Preferences folder, and reboot.

Life is Good!

Yoono making Firefox run slow

Not long ago Firefox had slowed to a crawl. I have a lot of Add-ons installed.
It appeared to be the previous version of Yoono doing this. I have just updated it.
But here’s the warning to you all. I was copying my Firefox user profile, and noticed it was enormous.
Turns out Yoono had written a 1.2GB Log File.
This was possibly the cause of the sluggish behaviour. There were also a couple of others, one 200MB and one over 400MB.
That’s not nice to eat up all the space like that, Yoono. Very naughty of you.

Writing to NTFS drives on Mac OS X is slow!

Well I followed instructions for installing both MacFUSE and NTFS-3G (the NTFS-3G_1.5012-stable-catacombae.dmg download) and it works fine.

However, at least on my G5 it’s really slow. So slow, in fact, that it’s faster connecting one drive to a real PC and the other to the mac and connecting them via FileSharing.

Lastly, it doesn’t stop the Mac from writing “._” or “dot underscore” cruft, so perhaps using BlueHarvest might help that.

In search of a webcam

I had a look on eBay for used iSights a while ago. Hundreds of dollars! That is crazy talk.

Looking further I of course found the Macally icecam, the iMage and the Agent.

At the time, I wasn’t aware that UVC specification cameras work with built-in drivers on Mac OS X.
I knew that macam has support for a growing list of cameras, and it worked on the Logitech, however it seemed to be slow and I couldn’t use it to record a movie using the provided capture software.

The iMage has a downloadable app to test if your computer is suitable! That’s nice. The icecam seemed to be coming out with a new version so I chose not to wait. I bought the aGent instead.

Now it does look quite nice, it’s got a chrome finish. However the audio is not integrated. The cable splits into a mini phono and USB cable at the end. This is no good for my Powerbook, as it needs a powered mic. They do provide a USB audio adapter, but there goes another USB port unless you get a hub.

Orientation

Well one problem is that you can’t actually rotate the aGent on all three axes. You have Pitch and Yaw but no Roll. See this article on Flight Dynamics to see what I mean. The USB cable sticks out at a funny and awkward angle like it has been poorly designed.

Software

iMovie 5 did not recognize the camera. I upgraded to iMovie HD, but that doesn’t work either. Why? iMovie only recognizes FireWire cameras. So the software that ships with the aGent includes iVideo. Nice name, but this is unfinished- that is to say buggy freeware that has a number of interface elements in French and worst of all it crashes routinely under OS X 10.4.11. The developers have given up on it and gave away the code for their last version but no one has taken the project on.

Luckily there are other choices, even though you shouldn’t really need to go hunting for software after you have already shelled out for the cam. The one I found that work are iVeZeen and DreamCapture. I bought DreamCapture because it was on special, so why not.

The last problem with the aGent is that is was flickering every once in a while on my G4. This was under 10.4.11. I haven’t tried it with Leopard yet.

Entourage 2008- Mac OS X- Daylight Savings Problem

We just ran Microsoft’s tool for correcting Daylight Saving affected Calendar entries.

One of the invitations has a curious line:

“This invite is out of date”

What is that supposed to mean?

I think it means it is out of my range of allowed times, set in  the Preferences:

General Preferences -> Calendar -> Work Hours

Uninstall Version Cue CS2 before upgrading to Leopard?

From a sample size of one, it may appear that the Adobe-supplied uninstaller does not uninstall Version Cue CS2 properly. Well, it never finishes, it just hangs.

I’m not sure where it is getting stuck. Perhaps a manual removal would be a better option. Now to find the list of the folders it uses. I tried using fseventer to see what files were being touched recently but it seems to have stopped working on 10.5.5.

Syncing Calendars: iCal, 30boxes, Google Calendar

I have finally got around to installing the trial version of Calgoo, which purportedly synchronizes the calendars listed above.

Boy did it make a mess. Syncing is obviously hard because no company can seem to get it right.

On my 29th of July, I have received about 20 all day events from my past. Very bad! I have also entered a new appointment in iCal in the correct place and chosen Sync, and it doesn’t show up in 30boxes.

Plaxo seems to work much better. I will have to revisit iScrybe and perhaps 8apps again to see how they are progressing.

Also a warning; when I try to sync now, it tries to sync Calgoo, Plaxo, MobileMe and iCal. It’s a nightmare.