More Leopard

Ever since upgrading to Leopard, I've been having Google problems. I had put the computer to sleep, and came back later. Everything was fine, except Firefox couldn't load my Gmail or Google Adsense pages. I did "Try again" a few times and figured Google must be down. A few minutes later I happened to be in Safari, and Gmail came right up. Oh, good.. switched back to Firefox, that was fine, thought nothing more of it.

This morning, both were down again. Hmmm.. Is this some Firefox foolishness? I switched to Safari, and Adsense came up, but Gmail wouldn't. Switched back to Firefox, and yes, it could now access Adsense.. what the heck? This has to be some stupid routing thing.. I power cycled the Verizon router, and yes, everything now worked fine.. stupid Verizon.. nothing wrong with Leopard.

Well, except that I didn't have much disk space left. Is Leopard that much bigger? Of course not: I did an Archive and Install, which means that all my old stuff was sitting under "/Previous Systems.localized". Come to think of it, that's "System(s)" with an "s" - no doubt my Tiger upgrade was under there also.. I blew it all away and picked up 15GB.

I can hear you now: "Wouldn't it make more sense to confirm that your new system is functioning as you expect and that you don't need to pull over any files?"

Well, yes, but.. I already have all of my stuff backed up on another drive anyway.. actually, backed up to another drive, and also backed up to another machine, AND backed up to removable media.. I don't think I need to keep "Previous Systems.localized".

I did get a chance to play with "Instruments" a bit. Apple pushes that as the ultimate debugger for your code, and I'm sure it is, but I also see that as a fantastic trouble shooting tool - a heck of a lot easier than running something through "trace" and mucking through the output. Come to think of it, I could have used that to dig into that Firefox problem - of course I would have found out that I didn't have a problem in that case, but that type of problem could be a lot easier with powerful tools like this.

But speaking of development, I once again fired up Xcode, and said "yes, I really need to find some time for this", poked around for a minute or two, and then shut it down. Sigh.. it's not that I have any real needs in mind, it's just the intellectual challenge: I like learning new things. Oh well, maybe someday..

No more playing today.. I have to go do some real work.

Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard

Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac

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