Bah!

I’ve had a major fu-bar episode yesterday evening with my new-ish iMac. While trying to create some bookmarked AAC files from my audio cds, the system started misbehaving. At first, it just couldn’t find files in some applications even tho the Finder would see them correctly, then the terminal would refuse new sessions. After that, I restarted the machine but it wouldn’t boot anymore.

I’m still not sure what caused this but the end result (after a disk repair) was that the mach_kernel and a bunch of symbolic links (all at the root of the drive) were missing. What a pain!

I’ve had to reinstall the OS to get them back but luckily that all went through the “upgrade” process and the only setup I had to redo was my apache httpd.conf file which was nicely saved as part of the upgrade.

The thing that worries me is that I still don’t know what could have caused this in the first place. Kernel gone amok? Why did only the root folder get corrupted?

Hopefully this doesn’t come back …

A week or so ago, I learned from The Unofficial Apple Weblog about a Dashboard widget for Backpack.

I was really stoked about that since at the time I’ve was looking for something simple that will sync notes and todos between my work computer, laptop and my home computer. I wanted something easy to use and requiring little user overhead.

What’s wrong with what is out there?

Originally, I was using iCal todos to fill this void. But those don’t really work that well. They’re awkward to use and don’t sync up right away. For instance, if you enter some information before putting the computer to sleep or shutting it off, you either (1) need to manually sync with .Mac beforehand or (2) you don’t get the data until the next time the computer is on. I also found it annoying to have to open iCal just to make a note of something new or to modify a task. In the end, the list wasn’t being kept up to date.

After my iCal experiences, I used Tada List extensively (Backpack and Tada are both made by the same people). This worked okay, but I had to open Safari and go to my page just to add notes or check on existing todos. This was a little bit of a pain but, at least, the list was always synced up right away. One of my biggest beefs with Tada was that I couldn’t “clear” finished tasks. They always stayed in a list. Very weird!

The sweet stuff.

Now, since I’ve switched to Backpack, it’s been a breeze. The widget syncs up really quickly with the notes and I can edit it just about anywhere knowing that as soon as I’m done, the changes are saved on the server. If I’m at somebody else’s place, I can just login to the account and add notes that way.

Oh, and the “reminders” feature on Backpack has been an added bonus. It text messages my phone with any reminders that I set. The cool part about that is that the Backpack server does this, so I only get one reminder sent and this is regardless of whether any of my computers are up and running or not.

Well, I finally figured out what was causing all the connection problems. This website wasn’t reachable half the time and it’s the result of my router. I tried to make it work and change the settings but as soon as my Mac stopped creating outbound connections, the router stopped forwarding inbound traffic to the Mac. Bah!

This was taking place either with the regular port forwarding rules or with the DMZ settings so now, to fix this, the Mac is all exposed to the harshness of the world …

Be gentle!

Well there was some interesting news the other day when Yahoo purchased Konfabulator and created Yahoo! Widgets as a result.

I was always a big fan of Konfabulator but not enough of a fan to pay for it. When Apple’s Dashboard came out, it seemed like the end for the little guy but they’ve managed to pull thru and (I guess) made some money on the way… Good for them!!

I think that at least initially, this is an awesome move by Yahoo. Aside from putting them on the desktops of a lot of users, it will hopefully be a serious competition to Dashboard on the Mac side of things.

But most importantly of all, it will be a good way for them to start exporting their large array of web services to users in a more concrete (slightly less geeky) way.