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10 Sep 2003
It's a measure of the stability of the current incarnation of MacOSX that I freaked out completely when the Finder went all wobbly on me today. For the past couple of years, I've had no serious problems with either software or hardware. Today, every time I tried to open any folder or document in my home folder, the Finder would crash. It wasn't a Finder.app problem though, because Path Finder (a Finder replacement) had the same difficulties. It wasn't a corrupted document or volume either, because I could open the same files and folders over the network, and list them in Terminal. I tried all the old faithful methods (fixing permissions, fsck-ing), but still the Finder was crashing.
After grinding my teeth and tearing my hair out for the best part of the day, I finally admitted defeat and posted a desperate plea for help on the MacOSXHints forum. By the time I had come out of a meeting, someone had posted a reply suggesting a simple fix: trash some specific preference files, delete the system and user caches, and reboot. I crossed my fingers (literally--sometimes I'm very superstitious) and followed the instructions. It worked! MacOSXHints is really worth a try if you ever have any Mac problems. There are lots of really helpful and very experienced Mac users on the forum, and they've made my day more than once.
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re #1: a common misconception. mainwaring was a captain, but i always presumed that it was part of the joke when jonesy, in moments of panic, always reverted to the civilian form of address
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I agree. Macosxhints showed me how to get mail and iphoto to show dates the right way round: dd/mm/yy. Ended months of annoyance.
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pete: I think that mrtn's right about the 'Mr. Mainwaring' issue, though I can't be sure. And I promise that I wasn't going for a Googlewhack there... Just as well--I just checked, and there are currently 2 results, neither of which is this page.
dvd: too right!
geoff: It's a great resource. Their other great triumph for me was in working out why my iMac wouldn't go to sleep. It turned out that the mouse that comes with a Wacom Graphire tablet makes the pointer jitter by 1 pixel, even when you aren't moving it. So the system thinks that there is activity going on, and won't sleep.
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Who would have thought "Mainwaring" and "fsck" would ever appear on the same page?!
(btw, wasn't it "Captain" Mainwaring? (Not that I listened to it by accident on BBC 7 recently...)
Methinks the Jaguar Finder is due for retirement. And it knows its days are numbered...----- it's bad luck to be superstitious.
by dvd @ 11/09/2003 8:10 am • Permalink •