Douglas F Shearer

Leopard

I installed Leopard this morning before work. From a day’s work I can say it’s faster (better multi-core support) is general use. A bonus too is having most of the development tools I use day to day build in. No more struggling to get the Ruby version changed and Gems installed.

One issue though, ScreenCapture (Command + Shift + 3 | 4) won’t capture screnshots, and instead crashes.

Process:         screencapture [98636]
Path:            /usr/sbin/screencapture
Identifier:      screencapture
Version:         ??? (???)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [1]

Date/Time:       2007-10-29 20:26:40.211 +0000
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5 (9A581)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  0

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0xa0752a70

*snip*

Why? I have no idea at the moment, but it does leave me without a feature I use several times a day.

A few sites mention this if you do a Google search, but none suggest a fix. I’ll post a fix here once I discover one.

Update. There is now a thread on the Apple Support Forums about this. It seems to be caused by importing a user and their files from a previous install. If you create a new user on the same machine, the problem does not exist.

The Fix. The thread I linked to above has the solution. Basically if you delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist, then log out and in, the problem should be resolved. Enjoy.

Good Week - Bad Week

It’s been a good week. I’ve finally taken on some work after a month or so spent learning new stuff, plus I feel motivated about doing it.

Today it became a bad week. My Macbook wouldn’t start up this morning, the only life from the hard drive being some nasty ticking sounds. Oh dear I thought. A quick tinker with Disk Utility and System Profiler led me to the conclusion that the drive was in fact dead!

I dropped it off at my local Apple service centre and waved OS X goodbye for 1-2 weeks. Just as well I do regular backups and keep my working code in version control, I had only lost about 2 hours work at the most through the failure.

So what am I going to use in the meantime? I borrowed a laptop, and quickly set about replacing it’s Windows install with linux. I decided to go to my favourite distribution of late for my server, Ubuntu. A stroke of luck here, the new version came out today; 6.10 “Edgy Eft”. So now the AMD Athlon powered HP laptop in front of me is singing along updating itself with all the latest patches.

No doubt I’ll have more to say about my experiences in later posts, but for now I am left with the dilema; What IDE or editor for Ruby on linux?