development corrupts

Okay, here's one thing that bothers me: occasionally, I stop being able to connect to my brother's computer on our home network. Let's call this computer "brother".

So I'll still see "brother" under the Shared section of the Finder sidebar, but double-clicking on it gives me a "Connection failed", and clicking "Connect as" on the upper right either has no visible effect, or gives a pop-up with the text "The server “brother” may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again."

In Console (Applications > Utilities > Terminal), there's this error message in the system log:
SharePointBrowser::handleOpenCallBack returned 64

Judicious googling tells me that indicates the remote server is down, which is not true! My laptop just thinks it is. No amount of flushing dnscache (whether by doing dscacheutil -flushcache, or killall -HUP mDNSResolver) could fix it. It's also not a network setup issue, because I've been able to connect to this computer before and if I restart, etc, I'll be able to connect to it again.


I just spent the evening digging into this, because it frustrates me so, and I think I've finally got some solutions that work well enough that I want to share (also note them down so I can find them when I next need them!):

( three things that worked for me under the cut )

And there! I haven't managed to google up *any* solution to this kind of issue (except for advice to restart, but again that's not always feasible), so I've tried to put down everything that I could, and maybe it can help someone else in the future.

Future self, if this happens to you again, please remember to look at this entry.

UNPACKED ON MY BED SO NICE.

Leopard is pretty. Lots of tiny touches that are shiny.

I've only been playing with it for a few minutes. Here's what I've noticed, compared to my old PowerBook G4 (running Tiger, with only about half the memory :p)

Blow-by-blow:
I came into my room, saw the box on my bed. It's much tinier than the PowerBook box, which is still at the foot of my bed. I didn't want to touch it yet! So I went to the bathroom and washed my hands to make sure that I wouldn't dirty anything.

Opened the box. Errr, even the styrofoam packaging is pretty (with a neat regular pattern of circles, and "MacBook" branding). The first thing I saw was my new laptop, wrapped in this cloth which made me pause and feel nervous for a moment. So much care given to her to make sure she arrives in mint condition! I don't want to ever dirty or scratch her! Even if it is unavoidable.

Lifted her out of the box; below her was a compact much smaller box containing the manual and the two Leopard installation disks. Poked through those a bit, and only then did I notice the plugs (adaptor + duckhead, extension cord with uglyhead; bighead).

Unwrapped her! Carefully! I didn't want to tear the sticker but I was impatient to get at her, so I tore it in the end. I don't care. SHE'S PRETTY. SO WHITE. HOW?

(As a side note: I'm going to miss the cool metallic smoothness of my PowerBook. I used to stroke my hands over it while thinking. The MacBook is glossy on the outside and somewhat textured matte on the inside. Altogether a different tactile experience).

I opened up the shell, and there was a protective layer between the screen and the keyboard. ASDFGHKJLK; I felt like such a dork, I know I know, but I didn't want to remove it. Looked at the manual for battery calibration instructions. Didn't find any; assuming that it's not necessary for some reason?

Played with the plugs a bit, swapped out duckhead for uglyhead, plugged her in. I have wanted the magnetic plug for so long, ever since the time I accidentally tripped over my PowerBook's power cord, sending her crashing to the floor, and damaging one corner so badly that it couldn't be repaired (I still used her, but there was a gigantic *hole* for her front-left corner). Battery indicator says that she had about three bars battery. And and and battery button is so white, it blends right into the bottom of the battery case, unlike the button on the bottom of the PowerBook which is a separate shade of (still-stylish *cough*) gray.

I went down briefly for dinner, but I was so excited that I couldn't stay downstairs long. Only stayed long enough to keep my dad company, but even then, I rushed upstairs before he was done with his fruits. Still so excited!

Went browsing through the manual a bit more. Found no surprises. Turned her on...

Leopard video *grin* With the words in different languages in space and all that. Pretty, but I wasn't opening the laptop to see that, so I didn't pay much attention. Then it was on to setting up. First language, then location, then keyboard input I was a bit awkward because I'm not used to typing in QWERTY. I wish that keyboard input and location had been switched around. But I was pretty glad that it came so relatively early in the setup process, because only one or two screens were awkward for me to get through.

I think that at some point it automatically registered the laptop for me, which is great! Then a bunch of stuff and features, such as MobileMe registration, which I skipped, and finally it was time to set up the root administrator account.

There was a screen where you can take a picture of yourself to associate with your account. I thought that quite cute. I'm still not used to having a webcam on my laptop, but I'm sure I'll figure out something to do with it *grin*.

Remembering old lessons, I made a new user account to use as my primary day-to-day account (but first I opened up Terminal and SSHed to my server so that I could poke people over IRC for a moment). And that's where I am now!

Lots of stuff that I'm still getting used to, including the feeling of the keys. Someone warned me that the MacBook's keys don't feel that responsive, but they respond about the same as my old PowerBook's. However, the trackpad button doesn't feel as responsive or as "click"-y as my PowerBook's. I have to press down and double-check on the screen to see whether a click happened.

Luckily, this is easily solved by opening up System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse, and enabling "Clicking" for the trackpad. I enabled dragging as well, for good measure. Saw what looks like a neat new feature, of tapping with two fingers to right click and enabled that as well!

I didn't think there was anything you could change with system dropdown menus, but apparently there is. It looks like they have rounded corners. I think this is kind of neat, actually ;-) (And I just noticed that menubar menus also have rounded bottom corners. Top ones can't be rounded for obvious reasons)

So far, the only applications I've opened have been Safari, to type in this entry; Terminal, to SSH so I can chat; and System Preferences, so I can reset some settings, including the beep sound.

Having to set up my preferences again is somewhat frustrating, as things that I am accustomed to working a certain way no longer do, and I have to remember that it's because I'd edited a setting somewhere. Same as when I was transitioning to Firefox3, it's the little things that I took for granted that I feel the most now.

Terminal is much much better. It has tabs! Translucent background with decent default opacity! Found settings to set the option key as meta (same as before) and to send ctrl+H for the delete key (one up on before?). Also restarted it so it would recognize the unobtrusive "Pop" beep instead of the jarring default beep alert, and I'm almost all set. I just need to remember what I did to enable pageup and pagedown in screen, and then I'm all set.

Hmm, kay, taking back my excitement about Terminal tabs. It looks like cmd+1, cmd+2 switches between windows not tabs within windows. Thank goodness for cmd+}, but....

I cannot wait to get my old laptop back home so I can start transferring settings. It's currently in the car which I'd meant to take on the way home, so that I could work on stuff. However, there was a change of plans, and I ended up being in another car and coming home earlier, so the laptop is still wandering the streets, wandering the streets, wandering the streets my poor laptop...

Oh, I just realized that you can click in the binary section of the Mac OSX calculator to flip the bits and enter binary numbers. All this time, I've been wondering why there was no binary input mode (there's Hex, Oct, Dec, but no binary). So, whenever I needed to convert from binary to decimal, I'd convert it in my head, and then enter the decimal number, and then double-check against the displayed/converted binary.

It turns out all I needed to do was click in the right place(s)...

I just found out that you can select multiple mailboxes in Apple Mail. I found out entirely by accident, and initially thought that some of my messages had been misfiltered.

It's a rather interesting feature; I'm trying to figure out if/how I can use it.