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.

While ATG runs fine on OS X, and while many people inside and outside of ATG use OS X as their primary operating system, the ATG installer STILL doesn't work under OS X. It "mostly" works. It seems to work, it installs things, however if you try to do stuff, like patch, or like adding other ATG modules, things don't work. The culprit is the installconfig/config.xml. If you install on Solaris for instance, you get one that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config xmlns="*">
<install xmlns="">
<product name="ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine" version="2006.3">
<configure>false</configure>
</product>
<product name="ATG Consumer Commerce" version="2006.3">
<configure>false</configure>
</product>
<product name="ATG Content Administration" version="2006.3">
<configure>false</configure>
</product>
<product name="ATG Portal" version="2006.3">
<configure>false</configure>
</product>
<product name="ATG Business Commerce" version="2006.3">
<configure>false</configure>
</product>
</install>
<systemEnv xmlns="">
<locale>en</locale>
<rootDir>/opt/atg/versions/ATG2006.3</rootDir>
<jBossListenPort>8080</jBossListenPort>
<docRoot>/opt/atg/versions/ATG2006.3/home/doc</docRoot>
<platform>Darwin</platform>
<rmiPort>8860</rmiPort>
<appServer>JBoss</appServer>
<jBossHome>/opt/jboss/root/</jBossHome>
<jBossVersion>4.0.3</jBossVersion>
<baseLevel>ATG2006.3_8095</baseLevel>
<ATGJRE>/Library/Java/Home/bin/java</ATGJRE>
<patchLevel>2006.3p4</patchLevel>
</systemEnv>
</config>

when you install under OS X you end up with an atrophied little file like this:

(more...)

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.