EYEHEARTZOMBIES

So some shit went seriously belly-up on my ibook yesterday, so i’m going to have to reformat and start over. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal operations in a day or so. Wish me luck. Details at eleven.

Aaaaaand wwweee’rre baaack!

OK, maybe some of you remember that sketch from SNL. If not, you’re not missing much.

Well, we did finally get completely moved into the new place (some still-un-packed boxes, but we can get by in our day-to-day lives) and everything is alright here, aside from the neighbors constantly clomping up and down their stairs like a heard of elephants. And there’s no baby yet, so I was lucky in that regard to be able to pay attention to the iBook when it gave itself a lobotomy.

I’ve been using an awesome Finder replacement named Path Finder for the past few weeks and I really like it. I plan on getting a license as soon as I can (probably for my birthday in a few weeks). It’s fast and it holds onto my NFS shares better than Finder does (as in, PF actually does hold onto them, instead of dropping them and making me restart every 20 minutes). But the version I was using, which was a couple of revisions back (4.0.1, I think, as opposed to 4.1) had a fun little glitch that I wasn’t the first to find.

When you did Get Info on an item, any item, you had the option to specify what application you wanted to open it with. Normally this is a good thing; maybe you have a JPEG that constantly opens in Preview but you always want it to open in Photoshop. No problem; change that file to open with Photoshop and you’re good to go. The problem came from the fact that you could do that same ‘open with’ magic on applications. So you could make Fireworks open in Photoshop.

Yeah, I’ll let that sink in for a second.

So, trying to get an application I had downloaded whose name happened to end in ‘.5′ (which is apparently associated with Script Editor) ended up with me looking at it’s Info. It was definitely marked with an APPL type (denoting to OS X that it’s an Applictation), and the file type was listed as ‘application’, but it still opened in Script Editor.

One of the kind of annoying things about the ‘open with’ part is that it’s kind of insistent. If it doesn’t agree with what you’ve changed it to (i.e. it’s not a logical choice like opening an image in a text editor), it’ll switch back. I didn’t know this at the time. That’s important later.

Applications in OS X open with themselves. They all contain a little bit of system-scripting that runs the appropriate code. So I set this little .5 app to open with itself and in the blink of an eye clicked ‘Apply to all’. Yeah, I just heard you gasp.

So it say that the file type was an Application and in that split second switched from opening with itself to opening with Script Editor. And set all applications to do the same.

Again, I’ll pause for full effect.

Still breathing? Good. So now all apps were opening in Script Editor, everything from Photoshop to Mail to Path Finder itself. I went digging in the system, on Google, in the MacOSXHints IRC channel, and on the Cocoatech forum. Where I found out I wasn’t the first to encounter this. And, looky-looky, a solution!

So I restored the LaunchServices daemon. Something like 20 times, restarting randomly in that span. I updated Path Finder, thinking that could have been the problem. I cleared my cache two or three times at the advice of one of the Cocoatech employees/troubleshooters. Nothing.

So, I thought, I’ll back up and format and reinstall and then just bring over what I need. Yeah, that would have worked great except that my USB drive isn’t formatted as Mac Extended. It’s Fat32 so I can take it anywhere. And I can’t just copy it’s data to the iBook, reformat it, and then continue with my plan, ’cause the music library on it alone is almost three times the size of my entire iBook’s hard drive.

So I did it manually, moving everything I though might be important over to Puma (the USB drive) and then I crossed my fingers and reformatted.

It went a lot faster and smoother than I thought it would. I had most stuff up and running pretty well the same day. I’m still adding things back in as I find I need them, but everything seems to be working fairly well. The hard drive is still nice and open so the machine runs pretty fast. I didn’t even lose the iTunes library (thank god!) so I can sit here and listen to pretty music while I type this (currently listening to the newest episode of radiotelepathy).

Anyway, be careful of that. The newest version of Path Finder has fixed that problem, but it might still pop up later.