Josh Babetski : Quixotic Bravado

• @thorpus Congrats! Retweet: Clearspring acquires AddThis http://tinyurl.com/4pzwvb
• @Malarkey: Ditto! An Espresso Beta copy would be nice. I mean seriously, if you can’t solicit beta invites on Twitter, what’s the point?
• Hurrah! I tied in the football pool this week. Would have been split three-ways if there was a pot, but it’s all friendly.
• In news completely unrelated to my last message, I seem to have found some money on my desk I must have forgotten about. Interesting.

• forgot cars floatation device. @tracibabe, my sis and I will sync with pub crawl at 915. happy swimming!
• bad: Tesla is playing on the jukebox. worse: I knew the band, song and was within 2 years of when it came out.
• @lfaren man up and get out here! you’ll miss the dancing on the bar.
• $1 lagers ’til midnight at 915… just sayin’
• gang just invented a drink called the fail whale and did a round at quips. well… almost, they are out of sardines.
• Behold the genius of last night’s Lancaster, PA Pub Crawl: The Fail Whale Drink!: http://failwhaledrink.com/

• Watching the Mythbusters guys shoot silverware out of a cannon in HD rocks!
• So far getting good debate drinking game tips from the tweets on Current. #current
• McCain’s going to be hurt by his campaign “suspension.” Foreign policy was his category, now debate will be economy, economy. #current
• Want to hear McCain or Obama quantify why it’s a “crisis” and how these “solutions” will actually solve anything. #current
• Looks like the @current debate system just crashed.
• Impressed that McCain knows a web address. #current
• Foreign policy debate’s 20 minutes in, no mention of foreign policy. Not holding breath. #current
• “Festooned!” Triple word score for McCain.
• Wonder how long until “googleforgovernment.com” is registered. #current
• So we can hand over Wall St. to the Federal Government, but not health care? #current
• 38 minutes in to first mention of “maverick.” #current
• Loving watching all these great tweets during the debate! Thanks @current and @twitter! #current
• Thought it was awesome I had a tweet on during the debate on @current.
• @TRezendes I’m for debate parties. Next one is the VP debate on 10.02.
• Politics out, time to plug in a movie or something.
• @iamkyle Awesome! Wasn’t familiar with this Meetup group. Starting to see some organization and traction around Central PA tech communities.
• Home invaded by women — not in the good way. @tracibabe’s having a Pampered Chef thing; hiding in office. Can’t wait for pub crawl 2night!

• @tlberglund You say that now, but when all the 2.0 gardens start getting all the sunshine, you’ll open source. Beware of weed hackers!
• @twitter http://election.twitter.com/ is sweet. I can see it will be impacting productivity today; leaving it parked on the other monitor.
• iPhone lightsaber battle just broke out in front of me. Geek alert has redlined.
• Small impromptu debate party at our place tonight. Ping me if interested. We’re watching on @current to see all the @twitter craziness.
• @kirstenm McCain finished “fixing” the economy and somehow found the time to show up. But a town hall Q&A with Obama would have worked too.
• @icelander Happy Birthday dude! Another year closer to death. Lucky you!
• @ethand_local Does Damon’s have @current?
• Inbox at 2 messages. Good enough. Time to start the weekend!
• Why does Lou Dobbs seem to be the only one pushing on WHY we need this bailout and how it will fix anything?

• Car repair day. Slow leak in tire caused by large screw embedded in it. Seriously… how do all these screws get on the road?
• @icelander I fully support public screws. It’s nailing a tire I take issue with.
• New Blog Post: Address Book Crashes http://icanhaz.com/addressbookcrash If the 10.5.5 update has your Address Book hosed. This may fix it.
• @microformats: MapQuest Local supports ‘em. hCard, hCalendar, and Geo goodness. http://tinyurl.com/4op857

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• Five CSS design browser differences I can live with | For A Beautiful Web
• Macworld | Close the ports Firewall / port management on Leopard.
• Atomic Lemur » Living with Leopard’s Firewall
• Microformat Support on MapQuest Local - MapQuest Blog MapQuest Local supports the hCard, hCalendar, and draft Geolocation Microformats.
• Feed IE 6 with a basic stylesheet - Simon Clayson design | Reportage

So sometime over the past week, when I launched Address Book on my Mac (running Leopard), the application hung. I would either get no Address Book window, a partially rendered window, or it would render but not respond to any selections.

I had been doing some development and testing with Microformats over the past week or so, exporting all manner of malformed hCards into my Address Book; I’d assumed I’d imported a corrupted card and it corrupted the entire SQLite3 file somehow. Either that or the often flakey syncing with Google Contacts hosed something.

My only other clue was an error in the Console app that occurred every time I tried to launch or interact with the Address Book:

[NSCFArray insertObject:atIndex:]: attempt to insert nil

After some hit-and-miss searching I finally came across the culprit and an easy fix. This was a relief over diff’ing a 3 month old back-up and manually retyping the missing entries back in, using my iPhone as my “back-up.” The bug turned out to be from the recent 10.5.5 OS X update. It seems if you have a Smart Group in your Address Book and your rules include “not a member of” “any group,” Address Book will hang and throw that error.

The diagnosis and solution came from one “Jean Christie” on the Apple Support forum thread: “Address Book hangs on open.” Thanks go to them for the fix.

The solution is pretty easy, depending on how buggy Address Book is acting.

1. Open Address Book
2. Right-click the Smart Group with the “not a member of” “any group” rule
3. Change the rules to something like “name contains” “please work!“
4. Re-save the Smart Group (Note: this took me a few tries for the save to actually take)
5. Once the save takes, delete the group
6. Restart Address Book

If you’re having a similar issue and found this searching for a solution. I hope it helps.

• @tlberglund a party about a party is like a meeting about a meeting — agile huh?
• Fixed my crashing Address Book! There’s a bug in OS X 10.5.5 when you have a smart group for cards which don’t belong to a group. Delete it!
• Subject line in an email I just got: "Caught a cold bug." My first thought was to reply: "Warm it up."
• @current, IMHO is doing on of the best jobs of brand/customer interaction on Twitter right now. Real tweets; right mix of convo. and promo.
• @current Looking forward to the Twitterized Debate on Friday and keep up the awesome engagement on Twitter.
• Observing a good deal of "hedgeadodgeaflectory" today.
• @TRezendes I have Ooma: no telecom bills. Of course, I need them to not go under in the next 13 months to break even.

• OH: “Once there’s a cookie, there’s a cookie!”
• @icelander How did you do at the doctor’s office?
• Had a long day at the office, home for a few hours, then going back in tonight. Why? Find out later/tomorrow.

• Woke up to a loud beeping from somewhere, followed by two fire trucks out front, then a burned up microwave tossed on the neighbor’s lawn.
• Invited the entire office out the Saturday’s meet-up/pub crawl/@icelander’s bday shindig.
• @icelander It means we’ve bypassed it being a “gathering” but we haven’t quite worked it into being a “hootenanny” … yet.
• @lfaren And I too applaud your geek pop culture credentials for picking up on the wisdom of Buffy’s Oz.