Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Over the past few weeks Safari started chewing up the CPU and causing my MacBook Pro to sound like it’s going to take flight. This of course chews up the battery as well.

At first, I thought there was Flash running in one of the pages I load regularly since Flash has a number of issues running well on a Mac. My other thought was that one of the sites I visit regularly has some weird JavaScript bug. The CPU usage would just start climbing at some point; I couldn’t pin down what the cause was or the exact steps to recreate it.

So today I fire it up and Safari immediately starts to devour system resources. Fed up, I do all of the usual things: disabled plug-ins, moved the contents out of ~/Library/Safari, watched the Console for odd messages. Nothing seemed to do it.

Then in occurred to me to try something as a web developer I do all the time: Empty the Browser Cache. (Safari > Empty Cache…)

Disco! It seems once the cache gets to a certain point in Safari, it begins to struggle.

Sometimes the answer is simple.

Hope this helps.

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.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• iphone-universal - Google Code
• Bakumatsu Koshashin Generator Upload or point to an image URI to generate an aged view.
• Ciarán Walsh’s Blog » TextMate Plug-in: ProjectPlus
• Google Calendar CalDAV support - Calendar Help Center How to add Google Calendars to iCal.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• » 30 Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download :: Positive Space :: The Graphic Design Blog
• Happiness as Your Business Model Great Slideshare presentation.
• SproutCore JavaScript Framework

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Lighthead - Caffeine Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers.
• Fluid CSS TextMate Bundle at Meta | ateM Helpful bundle for EM based designs.
• Download YouTube & Google Video clips via bookmarklets
• Stacks Power Tweaks: Power Tweak Your Mac’s Stacks

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• A List Apart: Articles: Conflicting Absolute Positions
• Sketch paper for the mobile designer | labs.boulevart
• plainview : software : the barbarian group Plainview is a full-screen web browser.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Beginners Tutorial: Routing in Rails 2.0 (with REST) - Part 1 of n « YAB
• Pixar?s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation - GigaOM
• Julius Eckert - Projects Quicksilver Interface plugin - SilverFlow

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• The Django Book
• Mule Design Feed Store
• Cynical Peak Software - Rivet Rivet allows you to access your digital life on your Xbox 360. Browse, play, and view all of your pictures, movies, and video through the Xbox 360’s media blade right in your living room.
• Anatomy of a Twitter Bot

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Git.tmbundle - Gitorious cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles git clone git://gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle
• Mac 101: fine tune your Mac’s volume - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) You can also tweak the volume by holding down the option shift keys and tapping the volume up/down keys on your keyboard. Note that this is a Leopard-only trick.
• AppleScript: Control your Mac with an e-mail - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Adobe Fireworks Tutorials and Downloads Best of | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine
• Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, which is very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying.
• Git Magic - Preface
• DryIcons
• Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator
• Capistrano A tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines.
• Django Pluggables Find reusable applications for your Django project, quickly and easily!
• InsideRIA: LFFS (Learning Flex from Scratch)
• Safari 3.1, Mac OS X 10.5.2: Bookmark syncing issues with iPhone, iPod Touch, .Mac defaults delete com.apple.safari RegisteredSafariSyncClient