A few months ago, I noticed that Quicksilver’s Clipboard History window would pop up unexpectedly when I used Cmd+Q to quit applications. Mildly annoying.

I finally decided to search for a solution and I found a workaround at least:

Basically, the workaround is to dock the Clipboard History window to one of the sides of the screen.

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As you all probably know, I’ve written a word game for the iPhone called Word Up!

<shameless-plug>

</shameless-plug>

Tonight, I started getting an error while trying to run my app from Xcode on my device (provisioned for development). The error was:

Your mobile device has encountered an unexpected error (0xE8000001)
during the install phase: Copying file.
Try disconnecting and powering off the device; then power the device
on and reconnect it.

I tried resetting the device a number of times and rebooting my MBP as well to no avail. It was beginning to look like I was going to have to do the dreaded restore and then lose all the cool jailbreak stuff that I’ve become so accustomed to. And then that made me remember that because my device is jailbroken, I can ssh to it and poke around. I wondered if a previous failed copy left some garbage on the device that was causing subsequent copies to fail.

iPhone:/ root# find . -name 'Word Up*'
./private/var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging/Word Up!.app
iPhone:/ root# cd /var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging/
iPhone:/var/mobile/Media/PublicStaging root# rm -rf Word\ Up\!.app/

Bingo. That fixed it. So if you hit this problem and you happen to have access to the filesystem of the device, give it a shot.

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You can now grab OS X 10.5.5 from Software Update.

What does it have? From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2405:

General

• Includes recent Apple security updates.
• Addresses stability issues with video playback, processor core idling, and remote disc sharing for MacBook Air.
• Addresses an issue in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day.
• Resolves a stability issue in TextEdit that could be found when accessing the color palette.
• Improves Spotlight indexing performance.
• Fixes an issue in which contacts might not sync properly with PalmOS-based devices.
• Improves iPhone sync reliability with iCal and Address Book.
• Includes improvements to Active Directory (see this article for more information).
• Improves Speech Dictionary.
• Fixes Kerberos authentication issues for Mac OS X 10.5 clients that connect to certain Samba servers, such as Mac OS X Server version 10.4.
• Includes extensive graphics enhancements.

Address Book

• Addresses stability issues that may occur when creating a Smart Group.
• Resolves a printing issue with address cards containing information that spans more than one page.

Disk Utility and Directory Utility

• Improves reliability when rebuilding a software mirror RAID volume in Disk Utility.
• Improves reliability of server status displayed in Directory Utility.

iCal

• Updates iCal to more accurately handle repeating events.
• Improves performance when choosing meeting attendees.
• Resolves an issue in which the “Refresh All” option may be dimmed (”grayed out”) in the contextual menu for certain calendars.
• Fixes issues with read-only calendars.
• Addresses an issue that prevents an invitee from moving an event to a different calendar.
• Resolves an issue with syncing published calendars.

Mail

• Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.
• Resolves an issue with SMTP settings for AIM, Compuserve, Hanmail, Yahoo!, and Time Warner Road Runner email accounts.
• Addresses stability issues that may occur when dragging a file to the Mail icon in the Dock.
• Addresses an issue with the “Organized by Thread” view in which the date does not appear when the thread is collapsed.
• Resolves an issue in which RSS feeds could temporarily disappear from the sidebar.
• Improves Mail robustness when sending messages.
• Improves reliability when saving drafts that have attachments.

MobileMe

• Improves overall sync reliability.
• Improves Back to My Mac reliability.

Time Machine

• Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.
• Addresses performance issues that may affect initial and in-progress backups.
• Fixes an issue in which an incorrect alert message could appear stating that a backup volume does not have enough free space.
• Time Machine can now back up iPhone backups that are on your Mac, as well as other items in (~/Library/Application Support).

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MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 just popped up in Software Update:

After installing and rebooting:

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Lately, Quicksilver has been quietly dying very often and I’m constantly restarting it. I suppose I should try reinstalling and/or deleting my preferences, but before I do that, I was wondering if anyone else was seeing this.

Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that the “check for updates” functionality always fails to connect to the server. I’ve wondered if this and the crash are related (e.g.: Quicksilver dying when it attempts to do an automatic check), but that’s just pure speculation.

Here’s a snippet from the last crash log that got dumpd in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter

Process:         Quicksilver [1566]
Path:            /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver
Identifier:      com.blacktree.Quicksilver
Version:         β53 (3814)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [87]

Date/Time:       2008-04-01 11:27:29.302 -0700
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C7010)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  4

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My Apogee Duet Firewire audio interface arrived.

Thoughts:

• It looks great. It’s bigger than I thought it would be, but still a nice size. With it’s simple controls and silver, rounded body, it looks right at home with my MacBook Pro.
• Ease of set up. No problems. Downloaded the latest software package from Apogee’s site, installed it, rebooted, and then plugged in the Duet. A dialog came right up asking whether to use it as the default audio device and Logic Express found it with no problems either.
• Ease of use. I worried about it only having one knob, but it seems like that’s all I need. Pressing the knob toggle between the two inputs and the outputs which is quick and easy. Having meters and clip indicators on the unit is really nice when adjusting levels. Another nice feature is that adjustments on the unit are mirrored in a transparent popup on the Mac display, which is a nice touch.
• Sound. Very pleased. Being the pessimist that I am and not being a person with “golden ears”, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything really noticeable, but I was pleasantly surprised. The most noticeable thing was the lack of apparent noise when there’s no signal and listening with headphones. It’s so dead quiet that I wondered several times if it was still in the signal path. And music played through it sounds great too.
• Crashes. Unfortunately, OS X did crash once when I plugged it in, but in fairness, this is almost certainly Apple’s fault, since it also happened with a PreSonus Firebox (see this post) (and I’ve seen reports of it happening with the Inspire 1394 as well). C’mon Apple – fix this. This is OS X; not Windows. This reminds me of Windows 98 crashing on Bill Gates when he plugged in a scanner at Comdex 1998.

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While following the exercise “Creating Blue Apple Loops” on page 262 of “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ by David Nahmani, I was running into some trouble.

1. Open Logic project file: “07 New Day”.
2. Drag the Marquee tool (Command-click tool) over the High Arpeggio region from bar 5 to bar 7. Verify that before releasing the mouse button, the help tag reads “5 1 1 1 7 1 1 1″, indicating that Marquee selection goes from bar 5 to bar 7 and is thus 2 bars in length.
3. Click the Marquee selection with the Pointer tool to create a new region that should be exactly 2 bars in length.
4. In the Arrange area’s local menu bar, choose Region > Add to Apple Loops Library.

Expected Results:
The dialog should offer the choice of “Loop” or “One-shot”.

Actual Results:
The choice of “Loop” or “One-shot” is grayed out.

According to the book and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301036, this graying out is a symptom of having a region that is not a whole number of bars in length, but this region seems to be exactly 2 bars in length as far as I can tell.

I posted about this on the Logic Pro Help forums (run by Mr. Nahmani; not Apple) and Mr. Nahmani kindly pointed me to an earlier thread that explains the problem and how to work around it. Basically, the bug is that the help tag is indicating that the region is 2 bars in length, when in fact, it’s actually a bit shorter. The remedy is to tweak the region a bit to make it shorter and then to make it exactly 2 bars in length.

I hope this helps other folks who run into this problem. And I hope Apple fixes this bug.

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