I recently started having an issue with YouTube playing a video without sound for 2 seconds, then stopping. This is a new laptop, so everything is fresh and new, leaving me with a ton of potential culprits: OS X, Safari 3.1.1, Flash, network, Perian, etc....

Googling showed that other people were having this issue across many OSes and browsers. Unfortunately, most of the advice was "reboot" or "change your network buffer" or "YouTube sucks!". None of which helped me.

What did help, is downgrading from Flash Player 9.0.124.0 to 9.0.47.0 using the Adobe archive of Flash Players. I uninstalled the 9.0.124.0, and installed 9.0.47.0, and poof, no more problems with YouTube videos.

I hope this helps someone.

This appears to be an issue with the JVM under Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), but I started getting the following error within Eclipse when using the ResourceBundleEditor plugin:

It also apparently happens with other plugins/apps and is an issue with the AWT kit in the new JVM. After pouring through all of my Eclipse config files and determining that I definitely was NOT specifying StartOnFirstThread anywhere, I found this fix:

Within the Eclipse application bundle, in the file Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini, add this line:

-Djava.awt.headless=true

Save the file, and restart Eclipse. Problem solved.

I just setup some bash scripts leveraging rsync and triggered via cron to not only keep my external hard-drives backed up to their relative backups, but also to keep my wife's laptop (MacBook) backed up to an external drive attached to my desktop (PowerMac).

/usr/bin/backup:
#!/bin/bash
rsync /Users/emma/ -avz -e ssh 'modoc@andromeda.local:/Volumes/MBP\ Backup/tongari/Users/emma/'
rsync /Applications/ -avz -e ssh 'modoc@andromeda.local:/Volumes/MBP\ Backup/tongari/Applications/'

/etc/crontab
# minute hour mday month wday who command
30 5 * * * emma /bin/bash /usr/bin/backup

And with ssh keys setup correctly, it should just work.