Archives filed under "bug"

So true.

It’s not unlike the situation with bugs: you solve one, and 14 new ones pop up.

When starting up Photoshop today I received an error:

Could Not Initialize Photoshop Because the Disk Is Not Available

And then I was told that, specifically, my scratch disk wasn’t available. Huh? I have four of them! They’re right there!

It was all very peculiar, because I haven’t changed anything about my computer in the past several months. Other than to update to Adobe’s newest version of Camera RAW. I can’t say that this caused some problems, but I searched for the error message. Several people suggested checking out the scratch disk’s permissions.

Whilst doing that, I tried a little repair tip that’s useful for a lot of applications: I started up the app with the Command + Option keys held down. Voilà! I was asked to pick my scratch disks, and everything is sorted.

If, like me, you had font problems after applying Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update, there’s a simple solution: delete the font cache. You can easily delete the font cache by using the free tool OnyX—which also does much else besides.

For me, the issue became clear when I went to look at a job in Adobe Illustrator. Opening the file should have triggered Extensis Suitcase Fusion to load a particular font, but it didn’t. In fact, none of my fonts could be previewed in Fusion: instead was a note stating “Font Unavailable”. Once I deleted the font cache & restarted, everything was fine.

Wow! It’s been quiet here. That’s for a lot of reasons, but partly because a) I’ve been getting over a long-term illness that had really had an effect on my work (which is now gone, thankfully) and b) my Mac suffered a nasty failure. It experienced weird symptoms, which were fixed when the graphics card & RAM riser boards were replaced. Good thing I got AppleCare for the machine.

In any event, while the machine was in the process of breaking, I realised that my local development databases weren’t backed up. Why? Because Apple’s Time Machine would want to back up hulking single-file monstrosities every time you modified it slightly. In my haste (and panic), I made an imperfect backup. When the databases were restored onto the machine, they wouldn’t work. I could see that they were there, the databases were listed, but attempts to access them inevitably resulted in failure.

It turns out to have been a permissions issue (Errno 13 in MySQLspeak: I now know that gzipped tarballs won’t preserve permissions). It took some hunting to get to the root of the problem, but if anyone else experiences this problem, the answer is that the MySQL data directory is likely to be owned by root, when it needs to be owned by MySQL. In my example, I’m assuming that the data directory is the one specified in a MacPorts installation:

  
    sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /opt/local/var/db/mysql5
  

Restart your MySQL server, and everything should work!

Something is amiss. From The currency widget in Mac OS X:

A pound sterling equals 0.297 pound sterling? Really?

It looks like Apple’s using Yahoo for their currency widget data instead of… who was it again? In any event, this has been going on for a couple of days. I hope it’s fixed soon!