Cowell Computer Consulting

If inDesign is crashing when you quit it, launch it, when you activate fonts or at any other time, you should consider removing or replacing the following file:

$HOME/Library/Preferences/Adobe\ InDesign/Version\ 5.0/InDesign\ Defaults

It appears to contain font information among other things. You care about this because if you were to have activated a corrupt font, or a font with a duplicate postscript name, your problems may continue even after you resolve the font issue because that font will still be cached in here.

eg.

...
@Semibold
@MyriadPro-Semibold
@Myriad Pro Semibold
@Semibold
@Myriad Pro Semibold
8@Version 2.007;PS 002.000;Core 1.0.38;makeotf.lib1.7.9032
@Semibold Italic
@MyriadPro-SemiboldIt
@Myriad Pro Semibold Italic
@Semibold Italic
...

Posted by Luke Cowell on October 01, 2009 at 12:17 PM

For some reason the gem tries to build against a PPC library, which on my intel machine, doesn't not work.

sudo su -
ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386' gem install rmagick

Note: you might need to fix the quotes.

Posted by Luke Cowell on June 01, 2009 at 09:59 PM

I recently had a reader write in about a problem with their Mail program. Here's what they had to say:

Dear Luke Cowell,

I am a big fan of your blog, where you explain how to make beautiful christmas trees out of incomprehensible code that outputs a hilarious parody version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that I don't really get.

Perhaps you can do a blog about why my Mac Mail program doesn't save my window size settings. When I close the program, and re-open it later, the window is small, and the "preview" pane, which I like to have hidden, takes up half the window.

Sincerely,

Murray Inkster
Vancouver, BC

Dear Murray,

Thank you for writing in. Apple mail stores most of its preferences in a file called com.apple.mail.plist. This is located in your home directory, under Library/Preferences. Make a backup of this file.

Quit Mail and open terminal and paste the following lines in: defaults delete com.apple.mail ActiveViewers defaults delete com.apple.mail ActiveSingleViewers

These will delete any information Mail.app has about window position and will hopefully allow you to put your windows in all sorts of compromising positions again.

If that doesn't work you could also try deleting the com.apple.mail.plist file I mentioned above. Be warned that you'll need to set up your mail rules and accounts all over again.

Hope this helps,

Luke Cowell
www.lukecowell.com

Posted by Luke Cowell on February 25, 2009 at 09:52 AM

I had a problem with one of my clients powerpoint installation today. They had recently updated to Office 2008 and since then, powerpoint wouldn't display fonts correctly. In particular, arial (regular) wouldn't display correctly, no matter what size, but as soon as I changed it to the bold or italics version, it worked.

The fix was pretty surprising. It turns out that Powerpoint is somehow dependent on the 'symbol' font being present. The solution is so bizarre that I did a number of test to ensure this was the fix. Seems like <cough>bad programming<cough>.

So, if you're having problems with powerpoint 2008 and fonts. Make sure Symbol.dfont is enabled on your system.

Posted by Luke Cowell on October 22, 2008 at 02:02 PM

143MB uncompressed. For those of you who are used to right clicking on a package and choosing 'show package contents' you may have notices that since leopard came around you can't do that any more. To convert the package back from a flatfile package to the previous version do this:

pkgutil —expand /Volumes/MacBook\,\ MacBook\ Pro\ Software\ Update\,\ 1.2/MacBookMacBookProSU1.2.pkg destination

Now you can root around, see the install scripts and view the files that were in the package.

Apple says this about the update: The update improves compatibility with external displays and includes a variety of software fixes. This update is recommended for all users of these systems.

One things I noticed in this update is that there's a lot of files relating to bluetooth being updated. This is interesting because apple only talked about graphics updates. So, if you're getting one of these new macbooks make sure the bluetooth is working correctly.

/usr/libexec/cups/backend/bluetooth
/usr/sbin/blued
/System/Library/Extensions/IOBluetoothFamily.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext

Posted by Luke Cowell on October 15, 2008 at 09:43 PM

If you get the message the iCal has unexpectedly quit. Deleting the following from your home directory may help you:

Library/Sync Services
Application Support/Sync Services

Sometimes you'll have an application that will register itself as part of sync services, but it's busted, so it will crash iCal when the sync happens.

Posted by Luke Cowell on October 15, 2008 at 12:57 PM

Sites that incorporate flash are often draining your battery. You can disable flash from automatically loading using safari stand.

• Install Safari Stand: http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html
• Go under the Stand menu
• Choose SafariStand Setting...
• click on advanced
• check load Plug-in manually in the flash section
• restart safari

Unless you're one of those people who browse with your activity monitor open, you're probably not aware that many sites are sucking your battery dry. Many sites incorporate flash, in particular to display annoying advertisements. These little flash tidbits are often poorly written and will make your CPU work really hard, which will drain your battery. Now when your browser encounters flash, you can click the box where the flash would have been to load it.

You can also add exceptions to the site alteration area. For example, you might want to let flash automatically load in if you were at youtube.com.

Posted by Luke Cowell on July 02, 2008 at 07:18 AM

Symptom: after installing 10.5.3 your computer will not get past the initial grey startup screen.

Verify that directory services is causing the hang by booting into verbose mode. (Apple-V) You should see repeated messages about directory services crashing.

Fix:

-boot into single user mode (Apple-S)

-mount your drive in read-write mode

 mount -uw /

-boot into single user mode and remove (delete or rename) this folder:

rm -ri /Library/Preferences/DirectoryServices

When you reboot these files will be recreated with the defaults.

NOTE: this will delete any configuration you make in directory utility.

Posted by Luke Cowell on May 31, 2008 at 08:56 PM

Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should.

A little sleuthing let me to a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created as well as the apple rules (eg. junkmail rules and 'news from apple' rules). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.

My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it as well as MessageRules.plist.backup and restarted mail. I made some new rules and it worked! I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.

In Summary, remove these files:

~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

Wait, that's not tedious! You said this would be tedious! OK, as promised here's the tedious part:

Go and remake all your rules in apple mail again.

Ta-Da!

Posted by Luke Cowell on December 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM

I use mozy backup. It’s a great product, but I think development is still a little behind on the mac. Long story short, the application ends up taking about 500MB of resident RAM over time. The mozy status app that lives in your menubar is actually embedded inside the main mozy application.

/Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/Mozy Status.app

This means that if I kill the process, it’s going to be tedious to relaunch it.

Or is it??

I know that this is called as a startup item and so here’s how to get mozy to index your statup items.

Click on catalog and create a defaults reader under custom in quicksilver. Any defaults reader in quicksilver can parse a defaults file (a plist) and return certain results.

I know that the file I’m looking for is loginwindow.plist, so I enter loginwindow without the .plist as the Bundle ID. Similarly if you wanted to index your sidebar items, the file com.apple.sidebaritems.plist would be entered as com.apple.sidebaritems.

Now I open loginwindow.plist in the property list editor. Many of these files are now binary, so opening them in ‘vi’ is no longer an option.

• The next item is AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary. Add that to the first line in your quicksilver keys. Now press option-enter to start a new line.
• Enter ’*’. This tells quicksilver to parse every item under AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary.
• Press option-enter again and enter Path. This is the final key and this tell quicksilver that we want to know what is in that key. Because this is a key that represents a path we indicate that the type is a ‘path’. Your settings should look like this:

And if you did everything right, you should have all your login items under contents (after a reload of course).

Posted by Luke Cowell on July 17, 2007 at 08:03 AM

The new beta of safari is out and its available for mac and PC.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

The new interface is almost identical to the 2.0 interface we became familiar with. There are a few interesting tweaks that aren't immediately obvious.

1. You can rearrange tabs.
2. You can drag a tab out to put it in its own window.
3. Searching now highlights your search results as Firefox has for the last couple of years.
4. Spellcheck ? I don't remember it having this functionality before.
5. You can resize text entry boxes.

and more...

Why make Safari for Windows ?

Apple does a great job of designing software and hardware that is easy to use. Those of us who use macs know this already, but many windows users don't and live with obtuse key combinations and UIs that are unnecessarily complicated. Releasing Safari for Windows is yet another avenue for a windows user to make the realization that: "Hey, I like what these apple guys are doing".

Apple's market-share is growing, I just hope that Apple doesn't become the next Microsoft.

Posted by Luke Cowell on June 11, 2007 at 12:59 PM

This will be a useful read for you if you are looking to speed up the time between when you start the login process and when your key startup items are loaded.

There are a plethora of tutorials out there on how to improve your login startup times in OS X. Some suggest adding delays between startup items. Some suggest using an applescript to do your launching.

Time to usefulness

It is possible to measure the amount of time that has passed until all your login items have loaded, but let's get real, many of the startup items could be started at any point within the first few minutes logging in. Unfortunately, when your login items (from your account preferences) are executed they are all started at once. This means that most of the programs aren't ready until all the programs are ready. We should then be measuring how long it takes before you can use your key startup items, rather than timing how long it takes until all startup items are launched.

The problem with the applescript solution

I've seen some very elegant applescript solutions. For example:

 tell application "Firefox" to launch
 tell application "Apple Help" to launch

Unfortunately, when you use an applescript in this way, the applescript will scan through your applications folder to find the apps you've told it to launch. That means lots and lots of unneeded disk activity, which is your primary bottleneck on startup.

Shell script

I recommend writing a shell script. This code sucks, but it works. I've added a start delay aka. startup as this is called with the other startup items and I've added delays aka. between between the items to stagger the launch process.

#!/bin/sh

startup=15
between=1
sleep $startup
open /Applications/smcFanControl.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Spirited\ Away.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/Mozy\ Status.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft\ AU\ Daemon.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Palm/Transport\ Monitor/
sleep $between
open /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunesHelper.app/

You may need to wrap this in an applescript ala:

do shell script "mystartupscript.sh"

add this to your login items.

Pros

-I can start using quicksilver much more quickly now.

-My computer is more responsive in the first couple minutes after login.

Cons

-How often do I actually restart my computer ? Rarely, so the benefit is minimal.

-More difficult to maintain than using standard login items.

I'd also recommend that you check out Lingon for speeding up your startup in general.

http://lingon.sourceforge.net/

Update: Avi Flax has some comments about startup optimization

http://aviflax.com/post/os-x-tip-staggered-login-items/

Posted by Luke Cowell on May 17, 2007 at 07:08 PM

I been using quicksilver for a while and it's a great tool. One thing that disappointed me was that when building triggers I could figure out how to couple several commands together. I found this article which does a great explanation of it.

You need advanced features enabled etc. I won't re-explain what the previous author did a great job of explaining, but I will explain how to overcome one limitation they mentioned.

How do I order and add delays between commands ?

-Enable the Terminal Commands module

-For the sake of a simple illustration I'm going to use large type commands. Create and save 2 large type commands using the encapsulate [^+Enter] and save commands.

-Enter the following:

.sleep 5 [tab]

run command in shell [enter]

[^+Enter] (to encapsulate command)

Save command to file [enter]

Let's try it out. Use the comma trick to group your 3 commands together and then choose to run. Neet - delay.

Extending the concepts

-you can use the comma trick to build triggers with multiple commands coupled together.

-you can change the delay between commands by modifying the number after sleep.

-you can couple as many commands together as you want using this technique, adding delays when required.

Posted by Luke Cowell on May 10, 2007 at 07:50 AM

How many of you have a sticky note or a text file on your computer with sensitive information in it ? We sometimes forget that it would be possible to have our computers stolen. Often times the information on our computers is of more value that the computer itself.

Keep your information safe using keychain access (located under /Applications/Utilities).

Keychain will unlock the login keychain on your computer using your account password. If your passwords match then you want have to enter your keychain password on login. This is important to note because it means that anything that resides in the login keychain is not really protected if someone can gain access to your account.

1. Open Keychain Access.
2. Create a new keychain if you don't already have one. (File->New Keychain).
3. Create a new secure note in that keychain (File->New Secure Note Item).
4. Give your note a name and enter your secure information.

Don't forget to lock your keychain (Apple-L) before closing the app.

Posted by Luke Cowell on April 30, 2007 at 06:51 PM