Rick Swift & Apple & Embedded I make things. Sometimes, I’ll talk about it here.

My Gorram Frakking Blog

Launch Services Cache Corruption

In the first what is sure to be an ongoing series of entries on how Mac OS X sucks, I’ll describe an issue I came across recently and how I solved it.
Yesterday I restarted my PowerBook (which is running Mac OS X 10.2.6) and found that I could not log in. The login dialog would appear, it would go through the motions, then disappear, then finally reappear.
I suspected that something early in the login process was crashing so hard it was taking down the login process itself. After a couple hours of snooping, and some luck (I was able to ssh in from another machine and watch the system log report the crashes), I discovered that Launch Services’ cache was corrupted, and was causing lsregister to seg fault. Removing that file (/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.LocalCache.csstore) allowed login to proceed normally.
Update (2009-03-10): Thanks to this post, I now know that the filenames have changed in more recent OS releases. Launch Services caches information per-user, in files of the form com.apple.LaunchServices-023<uid>.csstore, where <uid> should be replaced with the user ID of the user with which you're having trouble (my default user ID was 501).

New MSN for Mac OS X

Folks, I don’t work for Microsoft. I can’t help you get MSN for the Mac. You should dump any friends you have that insist on using it, anyway.

Tantek mentions a new Tasman rendering engine in his log, with promises of speed and bug fixes.
I ask, “When will we see this update in IE/Mac?“ I simply have no desire to use MSN, but I’d sure like to see fixes to IE. I also wonder if there are stability enhancements.
Maybe MSN is IE. It’s not in Software Update yet, though.

Surgery

Well, I go in for laparoscopic surgery tomorrow (actually, today!), to correct a bilateral hernia. Strange, seeing a distinct bubble bulge out of my lower abdomen for so long now. It will be nice to have it finally corrected. It never caused much pain or discomfort (until recently), but nevertheless I’ve put it off for far too long.
I expect to have video of the procedure. I’ll try to post QuickTime movies in the near future.
Now, to sleep. No more food, and only clear liquids. Hope I’m not too hungry in the morning.

Software Sucks

Well, I’ve barely got MT configured, this is the first entry. It was sufficiently difficult to get MT to work the way I thought it should. Partly because the installation instructions expect you to install things in a less-than-ideal way.