Revenge of the Sith

I went to see Episode 3 yesterday. Except for the first 30 minutes or so, the movie was very good. The beginning was too comedic.

Google Maps

This must have been added while I was in Japan, but in Google Maps, you can now toggle from normal maps to satellite imagery.

Mac OS X multi user startup items

For a while, I've been wondering how "Nikon View Monitor Carbon" was starting automatically on my Macs independent of any particular user. This is installed with the software that came with my Nikon film scanner. After some investigating, it appears that besides the usual places (Login Items in System Preferences and the various Startup Items folders), there is a /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist file which contains items to startup automatically. There doesn't appear to be any application to view or edit this file outside of the generic Property List Editor or a text editor. It does appear to be in the same format as the ~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist file which is what the Login Items tab in System Preferences saves it's information..

Xcode 2.0 installer bug

Supposedly, some files that were in the previous Xcode package are now part of the BSD package on 10.4. As a result, when upgrading to the Tiger development tools, certain files are deleted. To get them back, BSD.pkg must be reinstalled from the Tiger DVD. Better yet, uninstall-devtools.pl should be run before installing the new development tools.

Show Movie Properties in QuickTime 7

The found one other problem with Tiger on my desktop Mac that involves QuickTime. For some reason, selecting "Show Movie Properties" in QuickTime Player would cause it to crash. Going in to System Preferences and adding and then removing a language fixed the problem.

Another oddity which I noticed (probably not Tiger related) is that the sound coming from my iMic would sound staticy after running Audacity. Moving the iMic to a different USB port would fix the problem until using Audacity again. Once a port sounded staticy, it would remain staticy. Fix: delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist. The settings for USB audio devices must be stored based on some combination of USB device ID (or whatever) and USB port and Audacity must be hosing these settings in certain situations.

Source of iSync problems

After trashing the DivX 5 QuickTime Component, iSync stopped crashing. Very strange. I guess that DivX component is not compatible with 10.4. I wonder if this might have also caused some of the flakiness in iPhoto.

X11 on Mac OS X 10.4

I tried running some Java apps from a Linux box via an X11 forward in ssh (-X switch), but the program wouldn't display properly. I thought the problem might be due to something that changed with X11 on Tiger, but it appears that the problem is actually ssh. Connecting with the -Y switch (trusted X11 forwarding) allows things to display properly.

iSync on Tiger

I tried starting iSync to see if anything was new, and it would crash immediately. According to Apple's support site, deleting "/Library/Application Support/SyncService/501/*" (where 501 is your uid) would fix it, and it did. Unfortunately, iSync still crashes if I try and go into it's preferences or add a device. I tried it on another user account, and it appeared to work fine, so there must be something odd with my account. Looking at Apple's discussion groups, it appears that some other people have encountered this as well, but no solution as of yet.

While playing around with iSync, I tried plugging in my old 1st generation iPod to see if I could add it as an iSync device. I thought this iPod was pretty much dead due to bad harddrive sectors, but on a whim, I tried running Disk Utility on it, and it was able to correct an error (leaf record count in the catalog file). Then, I tried moving my MP3s over from iTunes and it didn't get hung up or anything like it used to. So, it appears that my old iPod is back from the grave. What's strange is that I had tried reformatting it's harddrive before, and that didn't work, which is why I was (and still am) sure it's hardware related and wasn't file system corruption.