I’ve been in California (the OC) for the past two weeks helping my parents through an unexpected medical issue. Thankfully, everything went well and they’re doing fine now. Apologies for the unreturned phone calls, slow email and the delayed release of the next beta of Joe’s Filters. I’ll be back in New York tomorrow morning.
I need to rethink the main column width on this page. Probably also need to think about using fewer words.
iPhoto and Image Capture suddenly stopped importing from my digital camera. Same problem using the camera as a reader or my little thumbdrive adaptor. Plugging in my Fuji F10 would immediately crash the Mass Storage component of the Image Capture thingie. I was also having all kinds of trouble sharing my iPhoto library and movies downloaded from the camera would play until the last frame, which was inexplicably all white and would crash QuickTime player. Before figuring out the following I was afraid my camera was broken or the xD card was defective.
It took me a bit of sleuthing to determine that Flip4Mac was causing this. First, I confirmed it wasn’t hardware; the camera worked fine on Michelle’s nearly identical PowerBook.
To try and figure out what was preventing the camera connection from working, I opened Activity Monitor, made sure “All Processes” was selected at the top (I always have that option selected) then sorted the list by Process ID descending. Because Process IDs count up, whatever launched next would appear at the top of the list.
Plugged the camera in and watched. MassStorage popped up, then disappeared, followed by CrashReporter. Fine, now I knew what was crashing. Off to the Console.
In the main console.log, I saw the following lines:Jan 22 22:57:52 joemaller-powerbook crashdump[295]: MassStorage crashed
Jan 22 22:57:53 joemaller-powerbook crashdump[295]: crash report written to: /Users/joe/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MassStorage.crash.log
These confirm that MassStorage had crashed and show the location of the log file. Use that path to navigate through the log listings in Console.
Crash Reports are 90% meaningless unless you wrote the application. However, they are full of clues. Scroll up from the bottom until you see a line of asterisks, these are the beginning of the last crash report. Below that are some details about the application and a thread-dump of the crash. Below the listing of threads are the components active at the time of the crash.
There were several third party binaries near the top of my list. I unloaded them in order, restarted then plugged the camera in again to see if it was still crashing.
Flip4Mac was installed in “/Library/QuickTime/”, with a bunch of other codecs. Removing it solved all the problems I listed above. Later I noticed they included an Uninstaller, here’s yours.
Flip4Mac is a recommended replacement for Microsoft’s discontinued Windows Media Player. There’s a tired old joke in there somewhere. In the meantime, tons of people are complaining about various problems related to this. One posting somewhere claimed the problem was related to DivX being installed, but I still had issues after removing DivX. Something to remember for future troubleshooting; bizarre problems, check for Flip4Mac.
Integrating Windows Media files as Quicktime Components is long overdue. Microsoft deserves some credit for recognizing how good Telestream’s product is and for spending the money to support their work. WMVs have never played as well on my machine before this. However I am worried this instability might be a precursor of things to come, and I hope Flip4Mac won’t break in strange new ways with each subsequent QuickTime point relase.
Telestream has released a v2.0.1 update which claims to fix these issues. After making sure everything was working without Flip4Mac, I installed the update and immedately checked my camera connections. Happy to report it’s all working.
Update: Spoke too soon, movies from my camera ended with white frames again. Uninstalled Flip4Mac and they play fine. 2.0.2 anyone?
I just posted updated versions of my iPhoto Date Manipulation AppleScripts which now work with iPhoto 6.
This is definitely the best version of iPhoto yet, but the biggest positive change regarding scripting is that dates are now read/write properties. Before dates were read-only strings whose format would sometimes vary. Because dates can now be set as AppleScript date objects my long nightmare of UI scripting can finally come to a end. No more need to internationalize ambiguous dates, no more counting interface splitter groups to figure out what was visible, no more “keystroke”, and no more appallingly slow performance.
Another good part is that all my date logic was abstracted using proper date objects, so that all translated perfectly. Once I noticed that dates were finally writable, it took very little time to update the specific routines to work with the new version.
Now I feel like it would actually be worth my time to create Automator actions, the absurdly delicate nature of UI scripting would have previously made that a nightmare.
Problem: The subdirectory (/school/dept/) needs to be accessed via password. The parent subdirectory (/school/) is otherwise empty and should redirect to the main page for any attempted requests.
Solution: Change options to deny Indexes, then use the main page’s url as the 403 error page. Here’s the complete file:
Options -Indexes
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.joemaller.com
On my previous MacBook Pro post, Ted asked, “Will the new intel Apple computers allow us to load our current version of Final Cut Pro 5?”
Probably not, but I ordered one anyway.
Jobs said in the keynote that all Apple’s pro apps would be universal binaries in March. Also on Apple’s MacBook Pro Core Duo page they list an FCP benchmark with an footnote indicating they tested with beta apps.
Apple will be offering a $49 crossgrade for pro apps.
Universal applications are designed to run flawlessly on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Mac computers. Universal versions of Final Cut Studio, Logic Pro, Logic Express, and Aperture will be available by March 31, 2006.
If you own a current PowerPC version of one of these products, you’re eligible for a low-cost “crossgrade” to the Universal version when it becomes available.
“Not supported” doesn’t mean “doesn’t work”, but for $49 (yes, another $49) the apps should be good to go. Based on past history, whatever new thing is announced at NAB will be another paid upgrade (there are already FCP6 rumors). So if you’re not going to be immediately updating your hardware to Intel, it would probably be wise to wait until April to see what’s next for FCP. That $49 could be put towards the next upgrade.
I’m guessing March is when we’ll see the pro towers refreshed. I’m also expecting to see new 17 and 12 inch MacBooks sometime in February, maybe just after the MacBook Pros start shipping, much like the iPod Video was announced on October 12th, only 5 weeks after releasing the iPod Nano on September 7th. My longshot prediction has the end of the iBook brand as well, with iBooks becoming sans-pro MacBooks based on single-core Intel chips. Too bad, I liked the name iBook much more than MacBook.
