JavaGeek.org

Fixing Terminal.app problems on my Mac

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:05:14 GMT

This morning, when I sat down at my computer, I saw that SuperDuper! had a problem doing its daily backup. I tried to quit the application to no avail, and then I used 'Force Quit' on it, which made an error message pop up, with no way of making it go away. After another issue with Firefox hanging after trying to save a pdf, I decided the best course of action was to reboot the machine. However, after several attempts I realized Finder was not responding, so my ultimate solution was to hold the power key down until the machine shutted down.

After a lengthy startup (which had me worried), everything seemed fine, except that when I tried to open a shell via Terminal.app, I would see it go through the login process only to have [Process Terminated] in the window, instead of the usual shell prompt. I tried deleting the preferences for Terminal, yet the same result appeared.

I had recently modified my .bashrc file, so I thought that this might have something to do with my problem, but after editing the file with MacVim I still had the same problem. I tried to open Console.app to see if there was an error being sent to the logs, but Console just crashed right after starting it up. Uh oh... Time to hit Google!

After several search terms, I came out with this forum post, which seemed to describe precisely what was going on with my computer. So, I decided to follow the instructions in the post:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
cd /var/log 
sudo mkdir asl.broken 
sudo mv asl/* asl.broken/ 
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

And voila! Everything started working again. It seems that the last hard reset corrupted the Apple System Log (ASL) databases, and that created a whole set of problems for Terminal, Console, etc.

5 Days of Wicket - Designing the backend

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:13:40 GMT

5 Days of Wicket - Designing the backend is an article written by yours truly as part of a series of articles geared towards the better understanding of how to create a web application using Apache Wicket. Enjoy.

(You can read a short introduction to the series of the articles and links to the rest of them here)

Why not having Flash on the iPhone is a good thing

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:07:00 GMT

The other day I was trying to look at some site from my iphone but alas, the site was crawling with Flash embedded objects (from menu navigation to actual site content). At first I became frustrated that the iPhone didn't support Adobe Flash embedded objects, but then I started thinking further, and I realized that I've never really liked flash-based sites.

I don't want to start a flamewar between those who are in favor of having flash objects on their sites and does who despise the use of flash on them (including SEO people), but to me building a site in flash that disables the back button, puts a big and unneeded intro and puts all the information inside the embedded object is simply a poor way of creating a website; and this is not flash's problem, but the developer's who go for pretty instead of functional. I do have a question, though... Are flash-based sites accessibility friendly?

But as more and more iPhones are sold and used to browse the web, more people will start complaining, and hopefully site owners will start listening and start converting all those sites into something that can be read by everyone. And as more and more devices start appearing, more site designers will realize that html, although basic and plain, can be made functional to work on all or most of these devices with the help of CSS and/or other html-related abilities.

So, I am really glad that iPhones don't support Flash. Heck, I can even say I'm glad it doesn't support applets either (although I wish I could program iPhone apps in Java), as long as it will make people create "normal" sites.