Mac +/- for Macs & Mac users, plus or minus, more or less.

I've got a Blackberry 8830 through work, so I can become the expert on Blackberry for the university.

Never used one before. Never had any smart phone before, though I used a Palm for years, and a Newton before that.

I really, really hate this phone. If I hadn't purchased an iPod Touch a few weeks before getting the work phone, I'd probably only dislike it. But I have seen the Promised Land of interfaces, and Rim could not find it with a map.

Documentation is very scarce in the box. I am a tech guy, I can spend time learning it, because it is my job to do so. But it has left me completely convinced that the typical mode of set up for this device is for the user to hand it to his or her IT person and say "Make this work."

Mark Space's Missing Sync syncing is unreliable and very very slow. And it is insulting that we have to buy software to make it work at all--the free from Rim pocketmac sw was a complete failure.

Reading anything on the tiny, overly busy screen is a pain.

It comes pre-configured with an (in)convenience button that goes off randomly, leaving my pants repeating "Say a command!" at random times.

Oh, and it's broken now, with a scroll button that only goes up, left and right. No, I didn't drop it or spill anything on it. Hopefully I can get that fixed at Alltel tonight.

Blech.

Technorati Tags: Alltel, Tech, UVa

Today I used the lovely Disk Inventory X to find excess large files on my Mac. As expected, most of the fat files were various video projects...But what's this? In logs?

A three gigabyte log file?! That's gigantic! Log files are just text, and text doesn't take up much space. So that must be a lot of text.

So I tried to find out what made the log so big. To say the least, I was unsurprised when Console locked up trying to open a 3 gigabyte log file. Thank goodness for the command line. A bit of more action in the right directory and some paging through what started out as a normal log file got me to

[567] file:///Library/Widgets/Weather.wdgt/Weather.html:Error - Out of memory 2006-08-11 21:57:09.838 DashboardClient[567] (com.apple.widget.weather) undefined: Error - Out of memory (line: 0)
[567] file:///Library/Widgets/Weather.wdgt/Weather.html:Error - Out of memory 2006-08-11 21:57:09.898 DashboardClient[567] (com.apple.widget.weather) undefined: Error - Out of memory (line: 0)

Thank goodness that console needed to record this error every half a second for days. Of course, the end of this file wrote out while I was on vacation. Which begs the question--why was the Weather Widget even doing anything while my screen saver was on?

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Tech

Since UVa uses the cisco VPN "solution" this might be of use to some readers, though it's not for the faint of heart:

MacOSXhints Article

Since half of my job is to deal with the "tough" Mac problems that nobody else can fix, I thought it wise to provide some troubleshooting help and links for my cohorts who spend most of their time fixing the latest Critical Windows® Vulnerability or virus outbreak.

First off, the really basic troubleshooting for a Mac is just like a Windows® computer: Make sure it's plugged in, make sure the ethernet or modem cable is plugged in, that any network devices (like modems, switches or hubs) are turned on and plugged into their correct places, make sure that they've got a ethernet cable and not a phone cable, that sort of thing.