Josh Babetski : Quixotic Bravado

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• The Scala Programming Language
• IDEO Labs » LiveView: an iPhone app for on-screen prototyping iPhone app and screen overlay to help with iPhone app and site development.
• Twitter jilts Ruby for Scala • The Register
• 2009 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development environment — GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS Here’s how I quickly got my Ruby web development environment into ship-shape form The Thoughtbot Way.
  Many of these instructions are specific to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Some of them are opinionated (Vim over Textmate). Pick-and-choose what you need but this is everything that I use happily day-to-day right now.
• DD_belatedPNG: Medicine for your IE6/PNG headache! This is a Javascript library that sandwiches PNG image support into IE6 without much fuss.
  You can use PNGs as the SRC of an <IMG/> element or as a background-image property in CSS.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• calaboration - Google Code Calaboration makes it easy to set up iCal to view and edit your Google Calendar calendars. It automatically finds all of your calendars and allows you to add any of them to iCal with the press of a button.
• GitX - Home GitX is a git GUI specifically for Mac OS X. It currently features a history viewer much like gitk and a commit GUI like git gui.
• git-osx-installer - Google Code Installer for Git on OSX.
• git ready » intro to rebase
• Set Font Size Based On Word Count

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 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:

• 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:

• 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:

• someecards.com | ecards for when you care enough to hit send | home
• Those pesky dot-underscore files - Macworld | Leopard?s Unix tricks Type dot_clean /path/folder to join the dot-underscore files with their parent files. Read OS X 10.5?s manual pages (man dot_clean ) for more information.
• FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts
• Git - SVN Crash Course
• 11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft

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

• Coding Horror: I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users Listening to users is a tricky thing. Users often don’t know what they want, and even if they did, the communication is likely to get garbled somewhere between them and you. By no means should you ignore your users, though. Most people will silently and f
• mezzoblue § Chalkwork iPhone & iPod Touch Free Icons
• Secrets Secret Prefs for OS X. Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.

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

• How To Set an Apple Touch Icon for Any Site ? All in the head On adding a page to the home screen, Mobile Safari looks for a file in the root of the site called apple-touch-icon.png. If that file exists, it?s used. Simple as that. Or add: <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/customIcon.png”/>
• MacThemes / [Growl] iPhonesque ? ala the dialog box on iPhone
• iPhone window.onorientationchange Code on devphone Apple has put up some sample code that shows off the new window.onorientationchange and window.orientation ability that lets you detect the orientation of the iPhone.
• Enable Data Detectors in iChat You can enable Data Detectors in iChat messages by entering the following into the Terminal (when iChat’s not running): defaults write com.apple.iChat EnableDataDetectors 1 To disable this, just reenter the code into Terminal, changing the 1 to a 0.

The icon for .Mac Synch mysteriously appeared on my menu bar today. This is odd because I’m not a .Mac user. I can only assume it was some wacky Leopard bug confused when I sync’d my iPhone earlier.

It wouldn’t come off and had no “quit” option.

Fortunately, the issue was quickly solved by this “Removing items from the menu bar” thread on Mac Forums: Cmd+drag the item off the menu bar.

In other menu bar news, I came across this menu extra for Time Machine today via one of Hicksdesign’s tweets.