I’m currently running:

• Mac OS 10.5.6
• Adium (IM chat client)
• Mail.app (e-mail client)
• iCal (calendar application)
• iTunes (music)
• OmniFocus (GTD todo list)
• TextMate (text editor)
• Preview (image viewer – for looking at screenshots, scanned requirements docs)
• PostgreSQL (CouponEngine database)
• pgAdmin (postgreSQL client and admin app)
• Terminal
• Safari 4 (primary browser)
• Firefox 3 (for testing look and feel)
• Eclipse (development environment)
• Windows XP (running in Parallels-for testing and Oracle)
• Oracle 10G (ATG database)
• JBoss 4.0 + ATG 2006.3 with full Commerce stack
• JBoss 4.2 + Seam application
• ANT JVMs for running builds

This is what I need to run to do my job, and it takes more than 4 GB of RAM.

Now that I have 8 GB, I’m not longer running into swapping and paging delays, and I’m much more productive.

Having close to twice the screen real estate (~70% more I think), a faster CPU, and 8 hours of battery life don’t hurt either. This is the perfect machine for me.

After unzipping it to the full 1.3 GB size I was able to open it using the built in Apple log viewer Console.

I ended up mostly using the terminal and tools like cat, less, grep, etc… to quickly find what I wanted and view the log lines surrounding the events I was interested in.

No problem.

Whoops.

I opened the containing directly in the Finder, where my ATG 7.1 USED to be, and hit TimeMachine. My laptop connected to my Time Machine over wireless, and let me browse through the last month or so of folder states for that directory. I went to the previous backup (about half an hour ago), and clicked Restore. Like magic, my entire missing ATG installation reappeared.

Pretty sweet stuff. Thanks Apple.

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.

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.

<?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:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<config>
<systemEnv>
<baseLevel>ATG7.2_7673</baseLevel>
</systemEnv>
</config>

When installers and patches go looking to see what is installed, they can’t find anything and die. If you dig around you can find the following errors from the install logged away somewhere obscure:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.MakeExecutable.a(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.MakeExecutable.a(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.MakeExecutable.r(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.MakeExecutable.installSelf(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.InstallUninstaller.c(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.InstallUninstaller.installSelf(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.Action.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.InstallDirectory.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.actions.InstallDirectory.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.Action.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.GhostDirectory.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.Installer.install(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.LifeCycleManager.a(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.LifeCycleManager.a(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.ia.installer.Main.main(DashoA8113)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.launch(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.main(DashoA8113)
XMLScriptWriter: No Installation Objects were skipped
Retrying Installables deferred in pass 0
Deferral retries done because:
There were no deferrals in the last pass.
RepositoryManager: repository successfully written to stable storage
RepositoryManager: repository successfully written to stable storage
Execute Custom Code
class atg.road.install.iacustom.action.WriteConfigXML FatalInstallException.

Now the first error turns out to be the ZeroG installer failing to create an uninstaller. Exactly why it failed, I couldn’t figure out, as they’ve obscured the heck out of their code. The MakeExecutable class has about 8 methods named “a”, many of them call other “a” methods, none of the variables are clearly named, etc…. But it’s just an installer, so I’ll let it slide.

The second error looks like the real culprit here. The problem is that the error itself isn’t very helpful. The code isn’t very helpful either, and it looks like it should be logging more helpful info, but I can’t find it anywhere. I poked around for a few hours, but didn’t make any headway.

Short answer is you have to install on a support platform, Solaris (you can even grab a Solaris image for Parallels off the net), Linux, Windows, etc… and copy over the install,or at least the config.xml file from that install.

It’s a real shame since really the whole thing just unpacks and could be well served by being distributed like JBoss in a simple zip file. Maybe make a post-install setup tool to help configure somethings (like perhaps the database connections? Run the install scripts automatically after being giving the jdbc info…. just an idea guys)?

/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.