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Apple has ever so helpfully removed ODBC Administrator from MacOS 10.6’s Utilities folder.  The software is now a standalone download from Apple’s website-

http://support.apple.com/downloads/ODBC_Administrator_Tool_for_Mac_OS_X

From Apple:  The ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X enables database administration of ODBC-compliant data sources.  Features include connection pooling, trace log creation, and ODBC driver management, among other administration features.

As expected, The Chromium Experience on VMWare is really just a web browser at this point. 

It did boot in about 10 secs. and I could see how this would be very nice on a NetBook, but for now- it’s just a overhyped browser running in a VM.

The Chrome task manager reveals a few details about what’s going on.

And of course the “Stats for Nerds” shows quite a bit more including Zygote & Sandbox helper.

Just when I had 10 minutes to review my projects, the project management system is down for emergency maintenance.  With the link going to a description of timezones, I found this error to be pretty weak. 

The system is down for emergency maintenance

It’ll be back by 3:00PM Central time.

Got this fairly vague error today at ProProfs.com. It is nice that it says there is an error and provides a link to try again, but pro peeps need better pro errors.

IPS Driver Error

There appears to be an error with the database.
You can try to refresh the page by clicking here

It’s been a while since I’ve found a good shot for the collection.  So fun to be back on track with Bit.ly’s hand-drawn “bit.ly couldn’t find a link for the bit.ly URL you clicked” screen.

Uh oh, bit.ly couldn’t find a link for the bit.ly URL you clicked.

Maybe one of the pufferfish ate it, or maybe there are some extra characters on the end of the URL.

Most bit.ly URLs are 4-6 characters, and only include letters and numbers.

Several years ago, I settled on Chat Transcript Manager from Unsanity to archive and search through my extensive iChat log files.  I conduct extensive meetings and have fully integrated IM into my workflow and Chat Transcript Manager was really well designed and easy to use.

Unfortunately, the tool was broken when Apple changed the format directory structure for the iChat log files in Leopard.  It doesn’t see the new logs in which are in subdirectories.  Unsanity hasn’t updated the software since the end of 2006, but luckily the fix is simply to flatten the logging directory structure.

The chats are stored here: 

~/Documents/iChats/

I suggest coping the logs rather than just simply moving just in case something blows up.  Don’t for get to set an actual path to your_destination.

find . -name ‘*.ichat’ | xargs -i cp {} /your_destination

After flattening, Chat Transcript Manager has no trouble indexing the files and I was able to pinpoint the conversations I wanted.

Somehow I lost the ability to sync my Transmit bookmarks via MobileMe.  Not a big deal but as passwords began to change, I was getting frustrated that my bookmarks were breaking. 

The fix is quite simple:

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—registerClient

This will register the Transmit Sync Client in MobileMe and you should see it immediately appear in the Sync tab of the MobileMe preference pane.

If you’re having trouble printing under 10.6 to Fiery-powered printers:

Go to http://www.efi.com and download the “Fiery Print Driver update for OS X v10.6”

It’s located on the website in Support/Downloads/EFI Software.

This corrects issues with drivers already installed on your previous 10.5 system.

I’ve been dealing with an intermittent issue for about a year now where some of my mail messages never appear in the Gmail inbox.  I usually access my Gmail using IMAP and rarely use the web interface. 

Up until now, the only way I’ve had to find them is to search for unread messages and page through listservs and all sorts of junk looking for messages with no labels applied.

Today after waiting for an email that apparently never arrived, I decided to do something about it.  First step, determine how many messages were really affected and find a search string to display them.

That string turned out to be:


is:unread -label:[gmail]-Meetup -label:[gmail]-ListServ-w3 -label:[gmail]-pr -label:[gmail]-listserv-su-alumni -label:inbox


After seeing the results of that query, all I could say was “Wow, this issue with my gmail not going into the inbox is much larger than I’d previously thought.” 

So, I did some digging around in Google Labs and found the “Quick Links” add-on which let me save this search so that it’s never more than one click away.

Then, I spent some time going through hundreds of messages that went back nearly a year and found what I had been missing.  Along the way, I could only think of two reasons this could be happening:

1. I’ve filed certain messages away in the web interface and Gmail has continued the “thread” in a mailbox other than Inbox.

2. I might have an IMAP email client configured incorrectly and it may be filing messages into non-existent mailboxes.

3. There’s some sort of glitch in Gmail.

More testing is required to get to the bottom of this, but at least now I can find the messages that are “missing.”

Here’s how to re-enable the Locate database in Snow Leopard (MacOS 10.6).  Once this LaunchDaemon is loaded, locate services will continue to work- no need to reload.


sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

update: Here’s the error I was getting prior to re-enabling: (so that search engines can find the tip)

WARNING: The locate database (/var/db/locate.database) does not exist.