Jason Fox

Ever have Expose freeze up on you? Command-TAB stops working, Spaces stops working, the Dock stops working, show desktop stops working, show windows stops working; you’re trapped!  Well, if you happen to have a terminal window open or can launch one, fear not!  Simply issue the following command (make sure to use a capital ‘D’) and you’re golden.  No restart required!

$ killall Dock

Share and enjoy!

Recently I had a problem with Bj where it would not start up.  Nothing was written to the backgroundjob log or Rails log and no exception was being thrown.  To make the problem even stranger, Bj would start-up just fine in development but not in production but worked just fine in production from script/console.  After digging into the Bj code and adding some debug statements I found the problem.

# database.yml
development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: my_development
  username: me
  password: password
  host: localhost
  port: 3306

test:
  adapter: mysql
  database: my_test
  username: me
  password: password
  host: localhost
  port: 3306

production:
  development

Bj was getting an ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished exception but was swallowing it.  The solution was to explicitly define the production database connection in database.yml.

If you receive the “File system formatter failed” error message while trying to partition a large hard drive using Disk Utility in OSX you need to change the partition type to GUID.  Click the Options… button at the bottom of the partition list and select the GUID Partition Table:

Just got my two Iomega Prestiege 1TB hard drives from Amazon ($104/each) to support my new backup strategy (more on that later).  First impressions: PROS: Very quiet, very solid feeling construction, CONS: Activity light placement forces you to put it to the left of you, the color is not at all like the picture; the drive is more of a gun metal, putty grey than a shiny silver aluminum like the MacBook Pro.  Oh well, all I ask is that it will last longer than my Western Digital MyBook.