I just fired up Firefox 3.5b4 and did a Check for Updates, downloaded 3.5pre and restarted. The profile didn’t quite load up and seemed to be hanging (and working the hard drive) so I killed it. I then noticed my disk space had dropped precipitously. I searched around and found that the profile directory had 117 new files named “places.sqlite-*.corrupt” occupying 1.7GB of space.
When I restarted Firefox, no problem…weird. I guess this sometimes happens?
Given that Fluid is having this disagreement with Gears, I thought I’d try creating a Mozilla Prism-based SSB instance for Google Reader. There’s a nifty theme for Reader called Helvetireader that I was using with Fluid. It also works with Prism but the instructions on this page didn’t work for me.
I had to take the webapp.css file from the helvetireader.webapp (which is just a zip archive) and drop it into the Prism instance (at /Applications/Helvetireader/Contents/Resources/webapp/). You could also just directly create this file – it’s contents are just a CSS import as described in that last link.
Unlike the Fluid-based SSB, Prism instances seem to require extensions, plugins and themes separately, i.e. per-instance. I guess this is a good thing and avoids the kind of snarl that Gears and Fluid are having.
I found this a few months ago but forgot to post it: Fluid, the OSX WebKit-based single-site browser application, floods your /var/log/system.log with errors regarding CGWindowContextCreate failing:
FluidInstance[3592]: Failed to create window context device
CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create context delegate.
_initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x18343, window:0xffffffff
The bug was being discussed here (in which commenters pointed their fingers at several plugins) but the discussion seems to have ceased. The last suspected culprit is the Google Gears plugin (located in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins). Indeed, when I removed every plugin and added them back, the Gears plugin was the one that caused the flooding.
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I don’t know if people still use Last.fm. I think they do. At least, that’s what Last.fm’s statistics claim. Anyway, if you’re an artist or label and you’ve been trying to upload new tracks you’ve probably found recently that their import engine has been sucking lately (i.e. completely fubar’d). Uploaded tracks won’t appear, or if they do the actual MP3 file is missing (“We don’t have a copy of this track, why don’t you upload it” – yeah, I did – 5 times). Frequently, after uploading (which depending on your upstream bandwidth can take a while) you get kicked back to the upload page.
Apparently, it’s a known problem and they’re trying to fix it, although their forums are somewhat unhelpful. I’ve yet to see anything actually completely fixed, though.
One of those instances where you thank your stars you did an Archive & Install.
Final Cut’s Compressor needs Qmaster to be running in the background to arbitrate rendering jobs – even if you’re the only machine on the network. Lots of babies get thrown out with the bathwater when you do a operating system upgrade (including some X11 essentials like xinit and startx – more on that later), and migrating your big cat from Tiger to Leopard is no different. Compressor is one of the casualties. There are 4 files in /usr/sbin/ that get tossed: qmastera, qmasterd, qmasterprefs and qmasterqd.
If you did an Archive & Install, you can fish those babies out from /Previous Systems/<YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX>/usr/sbin, but you’ll probably need some Terminal skills.
Strangely enough, the startup launch scripts in /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster will probably still be there, so you can either reboot or again in the Terminal, “sudo /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster start” should get it running again.
Also, perhaps this works but I haven’t tried it. Anyone?
