i.justrealized

Opps. If you’re on Snow Leopard, never log into your guest account. Logging into the guest account then back to your account can cause your account’s home directory to be deleted as though it is brand new. It is speculated that Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard deletes the user’s home directory instead of the guest’s directory.

Snow Leopard bug can delete account data

A bug has been reported in Apple’s new Snow Leopard version of OS X that can result in the loss of an entire user account’s data. The glitch seems to be triggered by using a Guest account and then trying to log back into a regular account.

According to multiple topics on the Apple Support discussion boards, the problem can occur when a user logs into their Mac’s Guest account — whether by accident or on purpose — and then tries to log back into their regular account.

In some cases, users have reported finding their regular account empty of data, as though it were a brand new account.

Speculation is that something makes Snow Leopard treat the regular account like a Guest account, from which by default all data is deleted upon logout. Further speculation is that the problem occurs when the Guest account was already enabled in Leopard before being upgraded to Snow Leopard. (Source: IT Wire)

This is really bad if it’s true. Apple has yet to confirm this.

Mac OS, great at making Windows look like sh!t again:

Mac OS, great at making Windows look like sh!t again

Saw this in Snow Leopard. All the executables look like a bad TV.

I’m pleased with the new exposé. The one is Leopard just looks terrible with all the windows not aligned. Leopard’s exposé is just a horrible Apple engineer’s prank.

Snow Leopard exposé is so worth mentioning:

Nicer expose

Look it actually aligns nicely now.

I was all excited to receive a brown uninspiring envelop knowing what it should contain. My excitement lasted till I completed the installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard only to discover MacPorts isn’t working. I had no idea how to fix that.

Above is some gibberish error. Hoping to fix it soon. Good thing is that my LAMP installed from MacPorts in Leopard is working still although the paths are a little messed up.

I’ve been busy this couple of weeks hence the lack of updates. I have been working mainly on my tool of choice — CakePHP. I mainly do my work on OS X for PHP. Recently I got involved in working for some software that requires Microsoft SQL Server, PHP and IIS. The whole shift towards the other side slowed me down a lot. I found myself being confused over the tiniest thing like where’s my host file. Where’s the php.ini? How to configure this and that. The terms are seemingly different and watching IIS crash again and again due to me incorrect configurations frustrates me.

On the brighter note, when I working in Windows I actually realized how much I missed Windows Explorer. It’s probably the single most useful utility I miss when I switch to a MacBook.

This is the first time since a decade ago where I buy a computer with an OS fully installed. I almost have no recollection how easy this supposed to be. When I received my MacBook Pro earlier in the day I had thoughts on how I have to set things up.

It was delivered (finally) at half past 4. My brother and I opened the package which presents itself well and earned an excellent first impression. I switched on the MacBook Pro and was delighted it just works. (That’s not to say that others computers don’t.)

I begin by trying out all the eye-candy stuff, the dashboard, the expose and made sure I opened each and every application to see how it looks like. Then I played with the System Preferences, probably that excites the geek part of me.

Instead of getting Mac OS X to suit me, I decided not to do any custom settings and use all those System Preferences as default. I explored around like a kid with a new toy and felt Apple delivered the experience.

Then my frustration sets in. All the function keys require the ‘fn’ to be held down. I don’t mind if the controls that took over are useful, but it’s being replaced with crap like backward, forward, play buttons that is just unnecessary. There’s no Home button. And I still have no idea how to get the Num Pad out, or is there even one?

The first thing I installed was, well, Windows 7. Please don’t scream at me. It’s the nearest I could get to something familiar. Windows 7 works for a while and start giving my blue screens then black screens then no screens. I tried resurrected it by starting the recovery console where my brother and I stared at the damn forever-progressing progress bar left to right till we got dizzy. It didn’t fix itself. I switched off and went back to Mac OS X.

It’s destiny I tell you.

This is more of a personal note. You may find it useful too.

Here’s how to ignore files and folders using Git. You can create a file “.gitignore” and place in the files and folders that you wish to ignore (separated with a line break).

In the file: “./.gitignore”

Here’s a list of standard things to do a .gitignore. It ignores the thumbnail files generated by Mac OSX and Windows. (I’m on Windows Vista.) You can place this on the top folder of your Git project:

“nbproject” is for NetBeans.

In the file: “./app/.gitignore”

Well, if you use CakePHP, you may want to add an additional .gitignore file in your CakePHP app directory:

I am open to suggestions what other files or folders are good to ignore but these are all I can recall. You can read more about gitignore at kernal.org.