Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

I turned on fast user switching in today to try out some new software I didn’t trust with my normal administrator account. This proved surprisingly useful. I love being able to switch to a clean account while keeping other tasks running in the background. It’s also useful for problems like checking out a site with various different configurations of browsers. As a book author, it helps me set up a really clean default environment to take screen shots in. As a developer it enables me to test my software with various preferences and configurations. As a speaker, it will let me set up custom demo environments, and present to audiences without showing my embarassingly messy desktop to the world. I haven’t tried this yet, but it might let me do some simple load testing by hitting a server from multiple accounts at once.
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I’m about 80% recovered from Tuesday’s minor disaster. I eventually had to a complete wipe and reinstall of the operating system, followed by migrating the old user account over. Bleah. Not everything restored perfectly, but all my data seems to be intact. What’s annoying are the little things, like losing my font settings in Thunderbird, or System Events getting turned off.

The biggest problem so far is that iTunes can’t find my library, although all the files seem to be in the right place. OK. I think I figured that one out. The Tiger installer installed iTunes 4 but I was using iTunes 6, so I need to upgrade again. I don’t know why it didn’t get iTunes 6 when it imported all the old applications.

I have taken the opportunity to fix a few things I should have fixed long ago. For instance I’m now configuring most of my AppleScripts to ask Finder where the home directory is rather than just hard coding it.

tell application "Finder"
	set theHome to home as string
end tell

set quotesfile to theHome & "Cafe au Lait:support:quotes.html"

This will mean I can use the same scripts on my laptop as I do on my desktop.

Saturday I told my editors that I would have the first draft of my latest book finished by Tuesday “barring major disaster”. I should know better than to say things like that.

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Safari 2.0 (and probably other versions) does not reload stylesheets when you reload a page, not even if you hold down the shift key when pressing Reload, not even if you quit and restart the browser. This makes it difficult to debug your CSS. You can force Safari to reload the stylesheet by (more…)

This site is served by an eight-year old, 300 MHz Pentium II, Debian Linux box in my home office. It works well enough for my needs. However recently the system has begin making occasional whining noises for intermittent periods. I’m afraid it’s on its last legs.

I had hoped to replace it with an Intel Mac Mini; but sadly that did not arrive at MacWorld, and seems unlikely to arrive before April 1 at the earliest. In the event I need to quickly replace this system, what do people recommend for small, quite, cheap, energy-efficient X86 box? Here are my requirements:
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My main Mac just warned me that it was running low on space on the startup disk and I should clear some. It seems I have only 239 megabytes left. My first computer’s hard drive had less than 20% of that amount of space completely empty. The first computers I worked with (Apple II’s I think, but maybe Commodore 64s) had no hard drives. I’m not sure how much space there was on a floppy back then, but it was probably about 360K or so. In fact, I remember at least one computer I worked with didn’t even have a floppy drive. You stored programs on audio cassette tapes that recorded the modem tones! You young whippersnappers don’t know how good you have it. :-)