Tag: bugs

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Mac OS X 10.5.7 and Fonts

Had a bit of fun today…. one of our users ran the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update, and all was well, except that which was not, and “that which was not” was the fonts.

Do you work with graphic designers? Then you know they love fonts… lots of them!

So after rebooting, running fsck, running repair permissions, trying to verify the disk, trashing preference files, and on and on… I finally ended up disabling all fonts, and then enabling just the core system fonts, and things started working again. By things, I mean Adobe Photoshop CS3. Sure, Mail.app was having some issues getting up and running, but in Photoshop, every time a file with text was opened, it got a “program error” which also happened if you opened a new document in Photoshop and clicked the type tool.

So the culprit is a font. Probably a bad font. We still don’t know which one… but as they are re-enabled, hopefully we’ll find out… and then work on replacing it.

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Canon Mini-DV Camera & Firewire Bug

I spent way more time than I should have trying to figure out why my Canon ZR800 wasn’t being seen by my Mac. I tested the Firewire cable, I rebooted, I re-installed QuickTime. The Sony PD150 worked fine, but the Canon was a no-show.

Canon ZR800

Finally I dug up this Camcorder HQ post by Doug Van Doren

Actually, there’s one HUGE caveat with that: the new Canon ZR’s 800-850 will NOT work with a Mac that has another FireWire device plugged into it. If you have an external hard drive, your iPod or anything plugged into one of the other FireWire ports on the computer and then you plug in a Canon ZR800 series camcorder and launch iMovie or FCP or FCE, it will crash and freeze the Mac OS.

This is a huge bug I recently discovered when I bought a new Canon ZR-800 and ended up crashing all three of my Macs (I tried it on them all just to make sure).

It was a nightmare. Here’s the technical article from Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61603

It does not mention the ZR800’s specifically, but trust me, it applies to them as well.

If there’s nothing else plugged into the other FireWire ports, it works fine. The only trouble with that is that most people like to use an external firewire drive to put their digitized footage on. This is a big problem if that’s what you’re trying to do.

Luckily I did not experience any real crashes, just the fact that iMovie and Final Cut sort of ‘stuck’ while the camera was turned on, and then resumed when turned off. The System Profiler also failed to show any Firewire device when the camera was on. Everything is fine when no other Firewire devices are connected, so there is a workaround… Still, it’s an annoying bug I hope can be fixed in the future.

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Dear Steve

Over the years I’ve known a lot of people who worked for Apple. (Formerly Apple Computer.) Some have just been acquaintances and some have been friends. Recently, a long time friend of mine went to work for Apple, so asked him to give Steve Jobs a message for me:

Tell Steve to FTFF!

His response:

That’s what is known internally as a "career-limiting action."

Ahhh, that Cupertino Kool-Aid tastes good!

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Application error (Rails)

I know Ruby on Rails is all the rage, but…

Application error (Rails)

Hurm…



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FogBUGZ alternative?

FogBUGZ looks like a nice product, but honestly, I don’t run any Windows servers, and I don’t plan on doing so in the future. I’m wondering if there is something like FogBUGZ that runs on *nix and uses some sort of Perl/PHP/MySQL combination. Bugzilla won’t work, it’s a lot of work to install, and maintain, and if you aren’t root, well, I don’t think anyone other than root can install Bugzilla. I do like Bugzilla, but it’s not right for what I want do to in this case.

So basically something that handles features, bugs and inquiries, can use a web interface or collect issues via email, a nice, simple assigment/workflow, and is easy. Not too much to ask for is it?