Technocrank

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It Done Broke.

Safari 4 Beta

Well, looks like I can retire WebKit for a little while.  The Safari developers have released a beta of version 4.  I had a bit of trouble starting it at first (Mac OSX 10.5.6).  It was the Glims plugin which was crashing it.  I removed it from /Library/Application Support and Safari started up nicely.

Update: Turns out Google Gears doesn’t work in this Safari 4 beta.

Update 2: The Glims developers have release a new version which doesn’t crash Safari, but is missing a chunk of functionality.

Update 3: Safari, even in the development WebKit nightlies exhibited an irritating “bug” with the WordPress 2.7 administrative interface.  It would cause a modal overlay dialog to hang.  The dialog appears when editing a post with the visual editor (e.g. add a link, upload images, etc.).  This is still quite present in 4 beta.

Update 4: (June 11, 2009) The bug mentioned in Update 3 with the modal dialog has been fixed in Safari 4.

Google Apps Sent Box Spam

I’ve been noticing in the past few days that there’s been backscatter-like spam showing up in the sent boxes of some of my Google Apps account. This hasn’t happened on any Gmail-proper accounts but that could just be because the Apps accounts are more “publicly advertised”.  Anyone else noticed this?

Hostgator, WordPress, Xinha4WP

Spent a whole day on this. Thanks Hostgator.

PHP 5.2.8
Apache 2.2.11
Wordpress 2.5
Xinha4WP 1.2b
WPG2 3.0.2

A client’s WordPress install recently started giving them trouble. It’s installed alongside Gallery2 with the WPG2 and Xinha4WP plugins. They hadn’t touched their site in a while but now they found that when trying to invoke Xinha4WP’s Image Manager they would get a 404 page popping up instead. So it would have seemed that the path that’s either getting passed to the plugin or the way it’s being parsed had changed.

Disabled all the other plugins. That didn’t work. Upgraded WordPress to 2.6.5 (in case they’d made some changes that accounts for PHP quirks). No change. Contacted Hostgator and asked if anything would have changed in server settings that would affect the path (e.g. mod_rewrite, etc.). Nope. Reinstalled the Xinah4WP plugin in case Hostgator had somehow corrupted. Nothing.

Finally Googled (okay, now, this is after hours of Googling various things) “WordPress” and “hostgator” and it came back with the WordPress forums. Turns out, there was a recent modification to their Apache setup involving mod_security and suphp.

Contacted Hostgator, and oh yes. That was the problem. They did something on their end and it’s now fixed. &!^(#*@

USB Timing Out

I was having problems transferring files from one external USB drive to another. They were both attached via a powered USB hub. I tried running TechTool Pro on the drive I suspected with having a problem but it kept hanging.

The system.log showed this whenever it happened:

AppleUSBEHCI[0x6dfc000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! 

I finally switched cables and removed it from the hub and plugged it directly into the computer. Seems to work fine now…but I should check it with the old cable again…

OSX Leopard Folder Actions

I have a little Folder Action set up on a “dropbox” type folder that automatically adds a given file (usually MP3s) to my iTunes library.  I created a dumb-as-bricks Automator workflow and saved it as a plug-in of type Folder Action.  Worked flawlessly in 10.4.

With OSX 10.5, for some reason it runs the action but doesn’t actually execute it properly.  I found this little article which provides a workaround but doesn’t actually fix anything.  You have to edit the AppleScript file from something like this:
[sourcecode language=’plain’]on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
tell application “Macintosh HD:Users:MyUserName:Library:Workflows:Applications:Folder Actions:Name Of My Workflow.app”
open added_items
end tell
end adding folder items to[/sourcecode]
to this:
[sourcecode language=’plain’]on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
tell application “Finder”
open added_items using alias “Macintosh HD:Users:MyUserName:Library:Workflows:Applications:Folder Actions:Name Of My Workflow.app”
end tell
end adding folder items to[/sourcecode]
…essentially getting Finder to do what you’ve already done.