Month: November 2006

How to report bugs

Apple has a Developer article on Bug Reporting Best Practices

which includes tips for writing meaningful descriptions, and individual tips for more detailed reporting of bugs in Xcode, Java, Safari, Mail, iChat, Audio, USB/Firewire Ports/Drives, AirPort, iPod, iDVD. The information was also presented at a WWDC session this year (I was at another session at the time).
Interesting tips include using

sample (Application Name) 15

to ‘sample’ hung applications.

There are also instructions for turning on more bug reporting in iChat and Mail.App.

MacTalk edition #1 available as PDF

I saw my first copy of Australian Mac magazine MacTalk today, and it looks pretty promising. Articles include from photography (“Clearing up Depth of Field”), podcasting (“Podcasting in the Real World”), programming (“Build Core Data Applications”), software and Mac culture.

If you want to have a look the PDF is available for download.

Command of the week

So, you’ve got 20+ clients who’ve flown in from interstate for training and you’ve discovered that all the machines they’re using have the annoying access control lists turned on (ie you do an “ls -l” in the terminal and you see the “+” sign in a left hand column. You can do “ls -e” for more file acl info.), which is probably stopping things working as expected.

The magic command to turn acl’s off on Mac OS X is

sudo fsaclctl -a -d /

If you’re trying to remember the command, presumably fsaclctl stands for “File System Access Control List ConTroL”

Aeroplane iPod integration

Not content with plugging your iPod into a mere BMW? Now you can plug it into a much more expensive aeroplane.Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United passengers will from mid 2007 provide power and video input for iPods to the in-flight seat-back display.
Apple say they are also working with Panasonic Avionics (who according to the Wikipedia are the world’s largest supplier of in-flight entertainment systems) to add the system to more carriers. Panasonic Avionics provides equipment to both Boeing and Airbus.

Commandline for erasing DVD-RW discs

I was trying to erase my DVD-RW disk in Disk Utility, and every time it had finished erasing it (either in Quick or normal mode), the disk would mount again with the same data visible.

A bit of poking around on the commandline revealed the optical disk cousin of hdiutil, namely drutil. So from the commandline you can do

drutil erase full

to erase a DVD-RW disk (I’d guess it works for CD-RW discs too). You then have to wait of course for it to blank all of the disk of course, but at least it’s actually erased so you can then re-burn it.

You could of course try 

drutil erase quick

first.

Also supported are 

drutil bulkerase full

or quick for erasing lots of disks.