I recently installed a Blu-Ray player. As soon as I ejected the disc, Logic stopped beachballing and loaded the sample fine. It must have been trying to search the Blu-Ray drive for the audio files and gotten stuck somehow.

I’ve also read that turning off the spotlight index for any Windows partitions helps. I would suggest unmounting any network drives as well if you’re experiencing this issue.

However, if the post didn’t contain an image, the whole page would blow up with no PHP error. To make things worse, if the problem was in one of several codeigniter views, it would make codeigniter display the views out of order. None of these tests for images worked:

//didn't work
if(!$images)
//didn't work
if(!empty($images))
//didn't work
if(!empty($images->hasAttribute('src')))
//didn't work
if(!empty($images->item(0)))
//didn't work
if(!$images->children)
//didn't work
if($images->length() == 0)

What finally worked was:
if($images->length == 0)

getElementsByTagName always returns a DOMNodeList and it’s hard to check to see if it actually contains anything. I haven’t figured out a way for PHP to handle errors better with DOMDocument.

Edit: Darn, I’m getting this error when trying to open remote documents: (MacOS Error code: -25293)

When I’m working on two projects at once, or want to grab a remote file from FTP when I already have one FTP site open, it would be nice to run two instances of TextWrangler at once, since it only supports having one FTP site open at a time.

I figured out how:

-Go to Applications/ and right click on TextWrangler and select Duplicate.
-Rename Textwrangler copy to Textwrangler2
-Right click on Textwrangler and choose “Show Package Contents”
-Open info.plist inside the Contents folder
-Change the data from

	<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
	<string>com.barebones.textwrangler</string>

to

	<key>CFBundleIdentifier<</key>
	<string>com.barebones.textwrangler2</string>

Now you can open both TextWrangler apps.


Optionally, grab this snazzy textwrangler alternative icon from this page:
http://sethlilly.deviantart.com/art/TextWrangler-Replacement-Icon-180898652
Right click and choose "copy image". Then get info on TextWrangler2, click on the small icon in the top right, and hit command-V to paste. That way it's easy to tell the two instances apart in the Dock and switching between applications.

item_id rating
1 3
1 4
1 4
1 5

When I ran SELECT AVG(‘rating’) FROM votes WHERE item_id = 1, I would mysteriously get ’9′ instead of ’4′.

It turned out that ENUM and SETs return the index of the ratings, in powers of 2 for some reason, instead of the rating values themselves. So SELECT item_id, rating, CONV(rating, UNSIGNED) produced this:
item_id rating CONV(rating, unsigned)
1 3 4
1 4 8
1 4 8
1 5 16

So the average of the indexes of the set would be 9.

Instead I had to convert the set to a string, then convert the string to an unsigned INT to get the results I wanted:
SELECT rating, AVG( CONVERT( CONVERT( rating, CHAR ) , UNSIGNED ) ) FROM votes WHERE item_id = 1;

I went home, determined to either fix the home button myself (they cost $5 online) or try a software update. I tried updating to 4.3.3 first, the latest untethered jailbreak. This is trickier now that 4.3.5 is out.

First, I ran AptBackup, a package you can find in Cydia to save all of your jailbroken apps for restoring later. (Edit: AptBackup deleted all my AppStore apps, people recommend PkgBackup instead.) I also saved my SHSH blobs in Cydia (important) when it prompted me, so that I could upgrade or downgrade my iOS freely.

I downloaded iOS 4.3.3 from here and tried option-updating or option-restoring in Itunes, but it gave me the error “The device isn’t eligible for the requested build.” I learned this is because Apple stopped signing iOS 4.3.3 in an effort to prevent jailbreaking.

I followed Saurik’s old guide, adding the line “74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com” to my /etc/hosts file to have Saurik’s Cydia server spoof apple’s verification servers. This bypasses the “eligible” error in iTunes, but as described, at the end of the restore I got the error message The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occured (1015)” Saurik writes that you should restore twice, but that you will get this message both times and get stuck in recovery mode, and then you should jailbreak.

Then, I tried using the latest version of RedSn0w to jailbreak. RedSn0w requires you to enter DFU mode by turning off the phone, but in recovery mode the phone turns on automatically when it’s plugged into USB. Regardless, I was able to enter DFU mode by holding down power for 2 seconds, pressing the power and home button for 10 seconds, and then releasing the power button and holding home for 10 seconds. Then, the phone hung on the “Installing Activation Bundles” screen and then rebooted and was stuck on the recovery screen.

I tried the application “fixrecovery43″ but it didn’t work. (I got the error: libusb:error [darwin_transfer_status] transfer error: timed out)

What did work for me was installing TinyUmbrella and clicking the “Exit Recovery” option. TinyUmbrella crashed a few times on me, I think because of conflicts with Apple’s httpd server. I had to disable websharing and type “sudo killall httpd” in Terminal first. Then I clicked TinyUmbrella’s “Start TSS Server” and then it ran better. Open up /Applications/Utilities/Console.app for more details on what’s happening if you’re having trouble with TinyUmbrella. Evidentially you can use their TSS servers to restore the phone via iTunes as well but it didn’t work for me (I got a “could not connect to apple servers” error in iTunes).

Note: TinyUmbrella edits your hosts file and deletes everything except the gs.apple.com line. If you have other lines in your hosts file I suggest backing it up.

First I tried DFU mode, but the “fix restore” button didn’t work (the phone got stuck on a greenpois0n screen with the message “unable to find gbdevlist” and “unable to find fs_mount”). What worked for me was leaving the iPhone in recovery mode (iPhone screen on, usb cable icon pointing to iTunes icon), and then it shows up in the list of devices in recovery mode. Then I simply clicked on “exit recovery” and my phone booted normally into 4.3.3. Whew!

Finally, I reinstalled AptBackup and clicked “restore”, which restored all of my Cydia apps, but deleted all of my appstore apps. None of the suggested online fixes (installing an appstore app, resyncing with iTunes, turning on and off restrictions) worked. People online recommend PkgBackup instead of AptBackup, note to self. Anyway I restored my apps and settings from backup again using my old backup in iTunes and all is good. So far so good with the home button. If your iPhone 4 home button is still on the fritz, there are some good voodoo tricks in the comments here.

I don’t have to worry any longer (until AES is cracked, anyway), because it is easy to create an encrypted disk image on OS X. I followed the instructions here:

http://blog.smalldog.com/article/1814/use-disk-utility-to-encrypt-files/

I chose a 2.5 GB image, which automatically suggested a CD/DVD type partition. I’m not sure what partition type to use but don’t think it matters. These were the settings I used:

This will create a .sparseimage file. Sparse images are nice because they don’t actually take up their entire hard drive space until they’re filled with contents.

Note that after you drag the files in, you still have to delete the originals. Then when you eject the encrypted image, they are protected. When you double click on the image again, it will ask you for your password. Don’t forget this password, because it is impossible to recover!

I used spotlight to search my computer for files containing my passwords or social security number. If they were necessary, I dragged them in here, otherwise I deleted them.

“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.”

No matter how many times I deleted, created, and reformatted the partition using Windows’ installer or OS X’s disk utility, Windows 7 said it could not install to Partition 0.

I also got the error “Windows cannot install to a GPT partition”, and when I tried converting it to MBR in Diskpart, the error “Cannot convert partition”.

The solution was really, really, really stupid:

In my BIOS, I had my boot order set as USB drive before hard drive so I could boot from it. Apparently, that confused the installer. I set the hard drive as the first boot device, and then selected to boot from USB by hitting F12 when the POST screen appeared.

Windows is almost 30 years old, and it still has these types of problems? Really, Microsoft?

Edit: While the sound controls work, I’ve been having major issues with soundflower, from audio disappearing to getting stuck and looping on a sample. Looks like soundflower still needs a bit of development. :(

This has been driving me nuts for years.

I have an external firewire audio interface, a MOTU 896, that has served me well for 7 years. It powers my studio monitors, has multi inputs and delivers superior sound compared to my internal computer speakers.

The only problem with it is that OS X’s volume controls don’t work with it. The volume keys don’t work on the keyboard, the apple remote volume doesn’t work, and you can’t control the volume with AirMouse on the iPhone. In system preferences, you get the message “The selected device has no output controls”, and you get an annoying disabled speaker when you try and use the volume controls.

Thanks to this post and the wonderful folks at Cycling 74, there is a free solution. You can install soundflower, which allows you to route all of your audio to a soundflower device. Once you’ve installed soundflower, you can run Soundflowerbed from your applications menu, which makes a finder menu appear that allows you to choose which device to route audio to. Choose your external device, and you’re done!

Finally, you can leave the volume knob on your external device in one setting, and control the volume from across the room with a remote! Glorious!

Soundflower is also a great app for interapplication multichannel audio routing, similar to rewire or jack.