Dropbox secret revealed

I don’t know much about how these things work, but you pick up a little here and a little there. Recently, I had an occasion where I needed to restart the Finder. It didn’t restart by itself, so I had to give it a little push.

Curiously, I saw a Terminal window open with this inside:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder ; exit;
Dropbox: Entered INJECT_pthread_entry
Dropbox: Installing event loop timer
Dropbox: proc: 0x10d24ee62
Dropbox: upp: 0x10d24ee62
Dropbox: InstallEventLoopTimer: 0x7fff9118451b
Dropbox: GetMainEventLoop: 0x7fff9112daeb
Dropbox: timer installed!
Dropbox: Loading /Library/DropboxHelperTools/Dropbox_u501/DropboxBundle.bundle/Contents/MacOS/DropboxBundle
Dropbox: dlopen returned: 0x7fad43c15440
module initializer in main thread?: 1

So that’s how it works! (Sort of)

FaceTime on Mountain Lion not working!

Damn, Apple is getting sloppy. What exactly have I done wrong? Got a decent Macbook Pro, 2.2Ghz i7. It came with 10.6.8 but I upgraded it to 10.7 Lion almost immediately. Mountain Lion has been on it for a little while now, and I can’t get FaceTime to work. Here is my error:

“The server encountered an error processing registration. Please try again later.”

I checked discussions.apple.com and tried ensuring my Time Zone was set to automatic. Didn’t work.

My console is saying this:

imagent[1022]: [Warning] *** Listener ID: com.apple.FaceTime does not have capability: (Status), not allowing request

Not much on the goog about this.

This version of application Mail cannot be used with this version of Mac OS X.

By now you’re thinking “What? How the Hell™ did this happen? I never touched my copy of Mail. I never did anything to it besides install the updates that you offered me!”

Alas, whatever you did or didn’t do, Mail wont launch.

Some of you may have thought “Run Software Update”. That may not work.

Some of you may have thought “Re-apply last Combo Updater and let Installer work it out for you.” Well, I didn’t think of that. But I did try copying just the Mail.app from a known-good mac across to the non-working one. That also didn’t work. Why? The version seems to be correct— in my case it was Mail 4.5 on OS X 10.6.8.

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

Here is where the file lives that has gone south:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Versions/B/Resources/Info.plist

I have Developer Tools installed so I used Property List Editor to open it. It’s just an XML file so you could use your favorite text editor.

So what we are looking for is Bundle version, string, short. The faulty one was 4.3, I replaced it with 4.5. The Bundle version and ExpectedMailVersion were both at 1081, so I changed them to 1084.

This file must be edited as root. So, either login as root, or use the sudo command if you are using the Terminal to launch your favorite editor, which is of course vi and definitely not emacs.

Voila! Mail launches now.

Can’t Launch Photoshop

“Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked or you do not have the necessary privileges.

Use the get info command in finder to unlock the file.”

What the? Of all the half-assed error messages! Where is my scratch file located? What are the permissions supposed to be? Deleting Photoshop’s preferences doesn’t fix this problem. Looking in /tmp, we found an Adobe file in there. Deleting that didn’t work either. The user is not an admin, and shouldn’t have to be.

Google has some other occurrences of this issue, such as this and this none of which are really useful. You know what worked? Restarting the the computer!

Switching off OCSP in Firefox

Recently we came across this issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3384801 of Captive Portal Hijacking not working in Firefox 7.0.1 on both Windows and Mac, and on the Mac using OS X 10.7.2 Safari and Keychain Access would both hang.

I quickly made these instructions on how to (temporarily) disable OCSP in Firefox. Please note that this lowers the security of Firefox so do this at your own risk.

1. Visit the about:config URL in Firefox

 

 

 

 

 

2. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise button.

 

 

 

 

3. Search for OSCP in the Filter search field

 

 

 

 

4. Double click anywhere on that line and change the 1 to a 0. Then click OK or press Return.

 

 

 

 

 

Further reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCSP

Keychain Error

A few days ago I started having problems syncing my MobileMe from my work mac.

Now I know that it’s all academic as it will be superceded by iCloud, but still.

Upon visiting System Preferences, I instantly get

There was a problem saving to your keychain. Try again or use Keychain Access to verify your keychain.

The console says

Error: SecKeychainItemCopyContent() returned error -25293 while reading in MobileMe password.
— last message repeated 3 times —
System Preferences[xxxxx]: Error: SecKeychainItemModifyAttributesAndData() returned error -25293.

I do not have a clue why this is happening. Talk to me people.

Address Book strangeness in 10.6.4

The Address Book launched fine, but in the left column where you would normally expect to see Directory Services and groups, it was blank.

The Plus button did nothing. You also couldn’t load individual records either.

And this was a system-wide issue- changing users didn’t work.

The console complained thusly:

DS is configured, but a DSSource could not be configured. Could not load local source

In addition the console reported a few quiet crashes in the background, but nothing really useful- the app wasn’t quitting unexpectedly.

Although an Apple-included piece of software, Repairing Permissions as usual did nothing.

Here’s the fix: ran the upgrade from 10.6.4 to 10.6.5. The combo update could have worked as well, so if you were already on 10.6.7 then re-apply the last update you applied, either the 10.6.6-> 10.6.7 or the Combo.

Hopefully it works for you too!