2005-03-22»
mac got the blues»Well, the server is still down, but the data seems to be okay for now. It’s in a sort of carbonite-like stasis. The machine isn’t stable enough to check to see whether its mobo, drive or IDE controller that’s bust, but I have been able to mount the drive read-only using the Ubuntu LiveCD, and peer at five or so years of mail. I’m living out of Gmail for now.
Which means I’m also slightly more dependent on my PowerBook than I like. And as if by magic, MacOS X has started acting in a “I hope you don’t think that three years of OS reliability is an indication of future stability, do you?”
Does anyone have any clue about what’s going on here, for instance?
Selected icons (including the Trash) have turned bright blue. It started after I rebooted the machine after the last security update. It only happens on my login, which makes me suspect that it’s some debugging feature I turned on in the past, and has now come back to haunt me. As far as I can work out, it’s icons that are stateful – ie probably drawn in Quartz rather than painted as Icons.
I’m damned if I know what to do about it. Any suggestions?
Update: I moved ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist out of the way, and that seems to have fixed it. Cheers, Jason! (This is like a BoingBoing post in so many ways, isn’t it?)