maniacal rage

One of the nice features of the iPhone is that it can be pulled from its cradle at any point. You don't have to disconnect it via software or cancel the sync or anything. Just pull it out and use it.

Well, today I needed to use my iPhone and it was halfway through a sync but I figured, hey, what the hell. But, not being totally trusting, however, I cancelled the sync before pulling it out of the cradle.

The phone snapped into action right away but my computer started acting really sluggish. I checked Activity Viewer and lo and behold, iTunes, iChat, Mail and SystemUIServer had crashed. I decided to restart.

After logging in I started iChat up and it presented me with the "Welcome to iChat" panel. I got a little nervous. I gave it info again and when it logged in, all my contacts were missing their nice names. Shit. I checked Address Book—blank. All totally blank.

I tried the trick Kevin mentioned on the Blue Flavor blog and found that my AddressBook.data.previous file was also blank. All gone. The crash erased my contacts entirely, and the backup file. Now I have to go restore them from my offline backups.

Just be careful when removing your iPhone mid-sync, even after canceling. Bad things can apparently happen.

Update: Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, my contacts reappear! I have Address Book open and it's blank and I'm writing this and then, poof, it just fills itself in. What in the name of holy fuck is happening here?

I've just released a quick bugfix build of SimpleLog, version 1.1.1. Grab it from the site and you'll have it installed in no time. It's not a major bug, but it could affect a few people (like, say, Shawn, who noticed it).

I promise, eventually, I'll go back to writing about things other than just SimpleLog...

I'm absolutely in love with my MacBook Pro. The power of a desktop in a portable that I can take with me anywhere is truly fantastic. I will say honestly that this is the best machine I've had to date.

The only problem I've had with the machine is related to Rosetta. For some unknown reason, Adobe Photoshop frequently causes Rosetta to malfunction, and afterward it's impossible to launch any app in Rosetta (the app will simply bounce in the dock once or twice and then die). I'm not sure why Photoshop does this, but it happens pretty regularly.

When this first started, I was restarting the machine whenever I needed to use Photoshop. Luckily, this wasn't a terribly frequent occurrence, but it was a pain none the less.

Finally, today, I took the time to look in to this more and realized that it is in fact Rosetta hanging, and a simple terminal command would fix the situation any time it happened:

sudo killall translated

Rosetta will die and then restart the next time it's needed. Hopefully in the future, Apple or Adobe will fix this issue, but in the mean time this is a lot better than having to restart.

You can also create an AppleScript to make this faster:

try
  do shell script ¬
    "killall translated" password ¬
    "YourPass" with administrator privileges
    --replace "YourPass" with your password
on error
  beep
end try

I've saved this as a run-only script and assigned a Quicksilver trigger to it, so I can run it quickly whenever I need to.