I found out why I can’t name a calendar in iCal “Mason” today. This had been kinda bugging me, since my name is Mason.
Apple’s sync service (currently named “Mobile Me”) is nice when it does work. In my experience, it seems to be pretty reliable after you get it set up and working, but it does tend to shit all over itself every time I buy a new Mac or iPhone, and try to add the new device to my sync group.
Last time, it corrupted all my keychains irrecoverably, the first few times I attempted to add a new Mac Pro to my sync group. I had to restore from my backups from five minutes before, several times, until it somehow just worked. (Same steps each time.)
Today, I tried to add my new laptop to the group of Macs that syncs my stuff. Instead of syncing my calendars, it decided to:
a. not get any of the calendars onto the new MacBook Pro
b. create a bunch of random duplicate calendars, and propagate them to the other machines that do sync
So the end result was that my new Mac did not have any of my calendar data on it, but all my other Macs and iPhones now had a bunch of useless garbage magically added to them. (Wow, the power of the cloud.)
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Posted 01 July 2009
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You know, like for the record and shit.
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Posted 15 June 2009
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UPDATED 2009-10-30 for new shit involving Snow Leopard and VMWare Fusion 3.
This gives me a headache every time I try to remember it when setting up a new Windows environment, which is unfortunately quite frequently these days.
So at first I try to type for a while without doing it, using Windows’s fucking pinkie-finger shortcuts, and that gives me another headache on top of the first one.
Finally, I grit my teeth and re-figure it out, which gives me another headache, so I am sitting here typing in Japanese on Windows on VMWare on Mac and I have THREE MOTHER FUCKING HEADACHES AT THE SAME TIME. Ugh. So, this time, I am writing it down.
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Posted 26 May 2009
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A few years ago, friend of mine worked on a large specialty retail web site, which had been built-up over the years by people using Dreamweaver. This week, as I was helping to retrofit a legacy (as in EUC, SJIS, Dreamweaver, Flash) web site here in Tokyo and bring it into the modern (as in Unicode, revision control, machine validation, and not-Flash) world, I was inspired to dig up a snippet of truly amazing Dreamweaver-generated code.
This code was live on the retailer’s production e-commerce server circa 2005. It’s a great demonstration of why you should ALWAYS use Dreamweaver for ANY web authoring that you do.
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Posted 18 May 2009
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Just an FYI to the world: if you need to get online via cellular in Japan, the FOMA A2502 HIGH-SPEED card from NTT Docomo works great. No crashes, supports 10.5 (and 10.4), and gives reliable 7.2Mbps down and 0.4Mbps up within the FOMAハイスピードエリア service area. (0.4Mbps up and down in the older service zone.)
They now have a new card, the L-02A from LG, which also claims to support the Mac, but I haven’t tried that one. UPDATE: I bought one of these yesterday, and it also works great.
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Posted 13 May 2009
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So today people are all like, “Woooahh! from the ‘out-of-left-field‘ department,” and all like, “Huh?? Oracle buys Sun in a totally unexpected move, wooawww!” and shit like that.
Well, *I* fucking expected it!
However, that’s not because I am a keen analyst of the valley’s machinations, or anything like that; it’s simply because I happened to read Neil Mcallister’s Developer World article almost two weeks ago, when it was published.
Spoiler alert: peep the URL.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bought-sun-microsystems-859
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Posted 21 April 2009
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YouTube has a very depressing video of an American standing up for his commonplace civil rights[1], in a reasonable and composed manner, when his vehicle is stopped at a “checkpoint”.
There a several things about this video to make a real American cringe:
First and foremost is that fact that you yourself would not bother to stand up for American principles in this way, because it would be too inconvenient[2]. 99% of people (sadly, myself included) would just allow the cops to perform a warrantless search with no cause whatsoever. But: that’s obviously how police-state creep begins. (I mean, has begun.)
The “our justification for the search of your vehicle is that you won’t let us search your vehicle” line of reasoning is disturbing.
As a summary of post-9/11 America, the smirky and insincere “right now, I’m pretty sure you’re a terrorist” line from the Border Patrol agent, when he fails to come up with any logical response, is too pithy for comfort.
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Posted 18 April 2009
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You know your buddy’s neighbor, whose dog always shits in your buddy’s lawn, but who that one time when your buddy took a shovel and chucked all the shit back over the fence where it belonged got all indignant about somebody’s dog shitting in his lawn? That’s Digg’s Kevin Rose.
(I appreciate Gruber’s war against the Douchebar.)
UPDATE: Gruber wins.
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Posted 14 April 2009
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Executive Summary: the über-hightech fix for the insanely annoying pulsating humming noise coming from my piece-of-shit 2008-model 8-core Mac Pro
I’ve previously documented some of the ways that the Mac Pro I use at home sucks, but the many initial problems with it were eventually solved, so recently it’s been getting creative. First it started making this very annoying noise[1].
I really don’t mind a constant noise from my workstation, but this noise is this pulsating, oscillating low bass-tone hum, something like “ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…” (that’s my take on the spelling; one guy on Apple’s forum described it as “ehuuuuuuu, ehuuuuuu”, while another thought it was more of a “ahuuuuuuuu, ahuuuuuu”).
It is not a very loud noise, but because it varies like that it was extremely motherFUCKING IRRITATING (!!!) and difficult to tune out.
Anyway, it was a somewhat long and considerably annoying process (detailed below), but here’s how I fixed the problem:
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Posted 11 April 2009
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LOL. This rant from some Mozilla weenie is kinda awesome:
- It’s written by some some Firefreaker, blog-raging at Dave fucking Winer. That’s sort of like MC Hammer sending hateful singing telegrams to Mick Jagger[0]. It’s the freetard vs the me-tard.
- Everything Asa says about Dave is basically true[1].
- Everything that Asa says about Firefox, except one thing[3], is a crock of shit. So you can tell he must really sincerely believe it! Otherwise… you know, he’d notice.
- “The Awesomebar has changed the Web.” LOL, jesus fucking christ. The “Awesome bar”.
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[0]: the many, many ways that this analogy works are left as an exercise for the reader
[1]: which is actually why I do keep Dave in my RSS reader, albeit pretty far down the list
[2]: The fact that a non-MSIE browser got significant market share really did help the world, of course. But it was also utterly inevitable. So is Firefox better than the browser that would have come along a bit later had Firefox not come along? Nobody knows, obviously. But is Firefox in the present day better than Chrome/Safari/whatever? That’s knowable.
[3]: There is no footnote 3.
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Posted 25 March 2009
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