Random MomBlog

My T42 has gone from half-display (the left 1/3 of my screen would be black) to display wiggles (hard to read, hard to know exactly where to click; the jiggles were just the external monitor, though) to shorter times after cold boot with b(l)acklight. At first, it seemed like I only had the display problem if I didn’t use this laptop continuously, so I thought I thought I had the display stays black after resume problem; you know, back in the days where I had some runtime before the backlight turned off. Right now, I get about one minute of backlight before it turns off and the screen is essentially black unless you squint in a bright room. Sounds like I’m not alone, so I have switched from massive abuse of my xorg.conf to asking the spare parts guy. I hope this new tactic works!

A good place to start my workday of Expect scripting: The 8 most common errors:

1. Have you mis-spelt a variable name?
2. Have you mis-spelt a command name?
3. Have you used a $ when setting a variable, or left one off when using the contents of a variable?
4. Do your brackets balance?
5. Have you left spaces in the right places?
6. Have you added a new line in the middle of a command and forgotten the \ on the end of all lines except the last?
7. Do you need \ protection on anything?
8. Have you got () {} or [] mixed up?

I’ll keep those in mind.

Something weird happened while I was testing some tagging applications. I ended up with a contextual menu item (right-click in the Finder) of “Tag Selection” that didn’t do anything. I was going nuts trying to find how it got there, and what I could uninstall to get rid of it. Things that don’t work just seem like an invitation to trouble! I had decided somewhere along the line that Tag Folders had gone crazy on me, but its manual is thorough on how to uninstall (hurrah!). I was also wondering about Tagoman since I downloaded it at the same time (no installer, I just left it in my Downloads folder). Well, thanks to AppCleaner and browsing what it listed under Other, I found TagoManCMPlugin.plugin! I removed its symlink from ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items and the contextual menu item also vanished. Whew, mystery solved! I’m certain the reason why Tag Selection didn’t do anything is that TagoMan never made it to /Applications, so don’t blame it. I just never grok’d its workflow.

I installed SIMBL today so that I could install OMSavePanel. For a while, I thought I might not have installed OMSavePanel properly, so I also installed SafariStand. I like the Stand menu, and when it didn’t show up, I knew I had a problem with SIMBL. MacoOSXHints had one on InputManagers with the line I needed:

sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers

Now it all works! Look out tags, here I come!

(Adding tags when you save a file is the best time for many reasons. One is that it’s fresh on your mind then, but another is that dumb backup programs won’t have to check ctime, just mtime, to back up your tags with the file, assuming it supports extended attributes but not ctimes.)

I like to test things before I go on a trip. I was hoping to go on a trip without my laptop (this may be the first in years for a week-long trip), and I wanted to be sure I could charge my Treo from my iPod’s wall charger (a small adapter from wall current to USB). Cell phones come in handy on the road, at least while the battery lasts.

My Treo 700p failed the test! It would not charge from anything but my actual laptop. The closest I could come to faking it out was to plug a powered USB hub into my laptop, plug Treo cable into hub, plug Treo into cable, let Treo start charging, and then sneakily unplug the hub from my laptop. That’s a lot of hassle just to get it to charge!!!

I’ll just bring the spare battery instead, but it’s annoying not to be able to charge how I wish, so I had to ask Google why. From Treo charging in cradle from Palm Support Forums:

Besides using the charger to charge the phone, the PC will need to be on to use the trickle charge method. Some motherboards can allow continuous current even if PC is shut down but clearly your PC does not have such motherboard. The reason why your powered usb hub is not charging the phone is that the hub itself regulates power by “On Demand” and that demand is active data xfers from A to B or vice versa. So if no data is moving, then there will be insufficient power from that usb port to initiate a trickle charge.

Phooey. At least the mystery is explained; too bad my Treo wall and car chargers died (I think it wears out the connectors somehow since new cables work, but that’s another story).

So I noticed that my Spotlight application icons were corrupted (just like the screenshot) … annoying! However, I have since noticed two important facts.

First, if On My Command were installed before OS X 10.5 / Leopard (meaning I installed it when I was running 10.4), I didn’t have the corrupted icons in Spotlight. So my old Mac is fine, my new Mac has the problem.

And second, now that I’ve updated to 10.5.7, my Spotlight application icons aren’t corrupted. So it was a problem, but now it’s gone. Whew!

UPDATE July 2009: the corrupted icons are back on the same Mac (On My Command installed after Leopard/10.5). They seem to go away just after a Software Update to OS X, and then come back until all application icons are corrupted. *sigh*

Error Message: Application Launch Failure
The application "Transport Monitor" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "
<__ct__16ctransportrelmacfp18opaquetransportrefuc>”
(OK)

In addition to that error window, I had these errors in Console.app: [0x0-0x46046].com.palm.HotSync.TransportMonitor[732] /Applications/Palm/Transport Monitor/Contents/MacOSClassic/Transport Monitor[732] Launch failed with error code -2807 (cfragUnresolvedErr) for application /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Support/LaunchCFMApp
com.apple.launchd[223] ([0x0-0x46046].com.palm.HotSync.TransportMonitor[732]) Exited with exit code: 9

Solution: from MacFixIt,

Error: Transport Monitor could not be launched; fix

Some users have reported receiving the message “Transport Monitor” could not be launched because of a shared library error” when starting up Mac OS X or performing other operations.

This error message indicates a problem with one of the components included with the Palm Desktop software, and you may need to re-install the software.

First, uninstall Palm Desktop via these instructions.

Next, re-install Palm Desktop, which is available as a standalone download.

If you have recently performed an Archive and Install and are experiencing this problem afterward, the HotSync libraries (part of the Palm Desktop package) may be located in at /Previous Systems/Previous System(1)/Library/CFMSupport/HotSync Libraries.

You can move these files to the /Library/CFMSupport/ directory in order to obviate a re-install.

I’m pretty sure this is a conduit conflict from having both Palm Desktop and Missing Sync installed, so you could just remove all non-Apple conduits and re-install the one you want to use.

So I’m headed to un-install, then side-step to Missing Sync (they sent me an upgrade coupon, so I’ll bite). (I don’t like that they have a spotty reputation for customer service, I think Missing Sync is a bit over-priced, and I think it has bad software design from that one time right after I bought Missing Sync it wasn’t giving me the underlying error message that I saw when I reverted back to Palm Desktop. I recognized the error right away, fixed it, and went back to Missing Sync with mistrust. Error messages, even cryptic numbers, beat no error message with no sync.)

Since I upgraded Missing Sync, I’m happy with sync again. So I didn’t test this tip out, but removing conduits from the “active” location and re-installing really should have fixed it too.

So I got a new MacBook Pro, and it’s taking me forever to migrate over to it. One of my steps was to install iWork’08; I got it on sale on campus this summer. So here I’ve got a new retail CD and a new laptop … that won’t install it!!! I couldn’t believe it, but I asked Google and learned about the iWork ‘08 trial trick. Thank goodness for broadband at home! I used the trial installer that I downloaded, and the retail key, and it worked (last week). I just want to write down the trick before I forget it!

Oh, I was getting so frustrated that I couldn’t use my new Canon Pixma MP620 printer with wireless on my Mac! I gave it a static IP address, and went through IP Printing. Crash! from CIJAutoSetupTool, and Console said 12/24/08 10:25:29 PM com.apple.launchd[202] ([0x0-0x1e01e].jp.co.canon.ij.print.cijautosetuptool[294]) Exited with exit code: 255 . Grr! I read this thread, and discovered the answer is to use

System Preferences>Print & Fax>+>More Printers>Canon IJ Network

So when I had IP selected, I was already on the wrong path, because I needed to select More Printers instead. D’oh!

This morning I was trying to copy a permissions-customized mysql.users table from the production server to its backup and development servers. Of course in about 2 seconds, I get a message of “Duplicate entry whatever for key numever” because these servers are already pretty similar. So with a little Google, I found the INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE syntax that should help me with the mysqldump I want to restore. Hopefully I can get myself out of the woods.