Work was work. I had to figure out some of the idiosyncracies of the Macintosh today. Actually, I suppose I was just re-learning some things.. Just before I left work on Thursday, I was playing around with display settings, and managed to put the display in an unusable state (it was a Dell/Sony Trinitron, not an Apple display). Who knew that 1280x960 at 60Hz could get messed up? Maybe it's something funky with the video drivers...
Anyway, I spent the first hour of my day tracking down how to fix that. You'd think that this would be a well-documented problem, but it took me a long time to find any information of value on the problem. I thought zapping the PRAM would help, but it didn't.. I found instructions on deleting some files by going through the single-user Unix command line, and they seemed to get me farther—but the display still went black about the time I'd expect a login window or the user desktop to pop up.
Finally, the problem was solved by doing a “safe boot” by holding down the Shift key. Bah. So simple! (In my recollection, the Mac was the first operating system to use the shift key for this, then it was copied in Windows and DOS). Well, I still had to change stuff in the display properties, and I think I had to either logout and log in to get things to save properly, or I had to shut down the machine. At any rate, it finally did get fixed.
After that, my day was filled with cursing at software incompatibilities, discovering that an ancient Apple scanner is not even worth trying to connect to a modern machine, seeing an OnStream ADR tape getting sucked out of my hand into the drive (quite cool), finding that tape drives don't show up in /dev like they do on other Unix operating systems, and downloading the Apple Developer's Toolkit in preparation for building some previously mentioned software..
My life isn't boring, it just revolves entirely around computers at the moment...
Posted by mike at July 7, 2003 06:58 PM | Hardware , Software , Work | TrackBack