Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Usual oatmeal yogurt with nonfat yogurt. This morning I found a seemingly very healthy baby silverfish just a few millimeters long swimming in my orange juice. I have no idea how it got there—whether it came in with the OJ or crawled or fell in the glass beforehand while it was in the cabinet or sitting on the table. We don't have an insect problem of any kind, so I was surprised as well as disgusted. I fished it out with my finger and washed it down the drain (which is not necessarily the same as killing it, I think). I thought for a moment of throwing all the juice down the drain as well, but I figured some people in the world probably are much worse off, and they're still alive, right? If I get sick or die later today, then you'll know why. Yesterday when closing up at the end of the day I asked Windows XP to shut down and it hung on the "Please wait... Saving your settings..." dialog box. I figured it might be taking a long time for some reason and just left it overnight with the OS X screen locked. When I got in to work this morning, nothing had changed—it was still hung on the "Please wait... Saving your settings..." dialog box. There are no buttons on this dialog, but the orange/blue gradient progress indicator continues to animate, indicating that possibly something is happening. I can also select and drag the title bar to move the dialog box around on the screen—that works as expected. In Fusion, I selected Virtual Machine > Shut Down Guest but nothing happened. I selected Virtual Machine > Restart Guest, answered OK to the question that appeared ("Are you sure that you want to restart the guest operating system?") and the screen immediately blinked once and then nothing else happened. I selected Virtual Machine > Send Ctrl+Alt+Del and nothing happened. I disconnected the cdrom, network, and sound from the Virtual Machine menu and then selected Shut Down Guest again—nothing happened. The last time something like this happened I had to reinstall Win XP from scratch, so I'm wanting to not have to do that again. I don't know what else to do, so I click the red circle close button at the top left corner of my Boot Camp partition window in Fusion and the following dialog appears: "Are you sure that you want to power off the virtual machine and exit? Please make sure that the virtual machine is in a safe state for shutdown; abruptly powering off can damage data. When possible, shut down your virtual machine from its operating system. (Cancel) (Power Off)" Nothing else worked and I couldn't find any other suggestions on the web, so I select Power Off and still nothing happens. I force quit Fusion. Restart Fusion. Check my license code since I had entered it on my last Fusion session—it's fine. Restart the Boot Camp partition—it takes me back to the "Please wait... Saving your settings..." screen! I found a VMWare Communities discussion thread called "How? Gracefully shutdown VMWare Fusion After a crash?" in which rcardona2k posts this solution: "In the Finder using the Go menu you can open Go > Go To Folder > enter ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp. This will open a window with a folder named "%2Fdev%2Fdisk...". Highlight that folder and ctrl-click (or right-click on the mouse) and choose to make an Archive of that folder. Delete the folder itself and restart VMware Fusion. Fusion will scan for your Boot Camp partition and create a new Boot Camp partition machine that should be in working order." I didn't have the Archive option—I had compress—it creates a ZIP archive. I think it's the same thing as Archive. After some processing, Fusion displayed the following dialog: "The Boot Camp partition is not prepared to run as a virtual machine. It appears that Windows did not shut down cleanly the last time it was used. To shut down Windows cleanly, go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and set Windows as the startup operating system. Restart your system. Once in Windows, use the Startup Disk pane in the Control Panel to select Mac OS X as the startup system, then click the Restart button to return to OS X." I did as instructed—this solution worked for me! However, in the Startup Disk system preferences I did not see an option for Windows—I saw only "Mac OS X, 10.5.2 on Macintosh HD" and "Network Startup." To get the Boot Camp Windows icon back, I had to restart OS X. After I set the startup disk to Windows, the computer successfully restarted into Windows. I logged in as admin and immediately installed Microsoft UPHClean to possibly mitigate shutdown problems in the future. I restarted the computer—it shut down successfully and restarted successfully into Boot Camp. I logged in again as admin, then tested a full shutdown to power off—works. I restarted into Boot Camp, set the startup disk back to OS X in the Boot Camp control panel, then restarted and logged in to OS X. Started Fusion and opened the Boot Camp partition. There was a bit of a delay, but it did successfully start the Boot Camp partition. Without logging in, I shut down Windows—successful. Quit Fusion. Restarted Fusion. Thanks, rcardona2k! I also received a solution to my problem of renaming files in OS X on my iMac at home. The error message "You do not have sufficient access privileges" appears when attempting to rename certain files or folders in OS 10.5.2. Attempting to rename, for example, Image-57E66CC6A02011D9.jpg at the root of my home folder consistently produces the error message "You do not have sufficient access privileges". I tried repairing permissions with Disk Utility—it completed successfully, but the problem remains. I tried restarting with the Leopard Install DVD and doing the Utilities > Reset Password > reset ACLs thing for all user accounts on the computer but the problem remains. When I execute
sudo chmod -R +a "everyone deny delete" ~/
chmod responds with "Operation not permitted" on hundreds of files. For example:
chmod: Failed to set ACL on file 'Application Data': Operation not permitted
When I next execute
sudo chmod -R -a "everyone deny delete" ~/
chmod responds with
chmod: No ACL present
When I execute
sudo chown -R `id -u`:`id -g` /Users/`id -un`
chown responds with "Operation not permitted" on hundreds of files. For example:
chown: /Users/myusername/Music/b/Beck/1993 Loser (CD Single)/05 - Fume - Beck - 1993 Loser (CD Single).mp3: Operation not permitted
This is on my iMac, which was new in December 2007. I had used Migration Assistant to migrate files from a Mac Mini running 10.4. The iMac with the permissions problem also received files from an NTFS filesystem (Windows XP SP2). The answer to this problem is to execute the 3 statements provided by V.K. of Toronto in his post of April 2, 2008 at 5:35 PM ("Re: Must Enter Password to Move from Movie Folder"). I realized today that the journal hadn't been publically updated since the 19th. I've been writing entries every day since then, but the changed data is authored on my iMac and then later rsynced to the web server on the Mac Mini and sometimes the connection doesn't exist. This happens if I forget to remount the Mac Mini shared volume on my iMac after restarting the iMac—I haven't yet figured out how to automatically make it mount. Today was Alyssa's last day at our office. She found a new position with Bright Horizons, and we held a little going away celebration and asked her about her new job and work environment. I brought a loaf of blueberry cream cheese tea cake from Arizmendi Bakery and a bottle of ruby grapefruit juice. Cindy brought bagels and cream cheese. Lucia brought small chocolate-frosted cookies. I didn't see who brought what else. Edited the student awards dinner PowerPoint for Cindy. Went to the dentist for an exam and cleaning—all is well. Natasha Lee's office, Better Living Through Dentistry, is now using superslick high-tech equipment. X-rays are now digital—90% less exposure to x-rays (I think is what Emily said), instantly see results, no film developing chemicals. I was very impressed. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli with grilled vegetables in red sauce, corn on the cob, dinner rolls, Smart Balance Light. Watched The Bourne Supremacy on Netflix DVD with Patrick. We turned this Netflix movie around in less than a day, and it feels so good that we're getting the most of our $9.95 per month (or something like that). Tomorrow evening Patrick and Aaron are hanging out. Friday Patrick and I see Booka Shade. And Saturday is Ryan's birthday party. Paid a bill.