How to enable Java 7 in the browser on Mavericks

Content warning: just tech.

If you’re running the Oracle JDK 7 on your OS X Mavericks machine you may have noticed that the control panel doesn’t do anything. In particular, you can’t switch back and forth between enabled and disabled Java. Silent failure occurs.

It is officially a bad idea to run Java in your browser, which is why it’s disabled by default. However, sometimes it’s necessary to use the damned thing for some job-related or government nonsense. Here’s how. Disclaimer: I am just another user. This may destroy your life. It works for me.

Open a command line. and execute the following:

cd '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/'

sudo mv Info.plist Infoplist.bak

sudo ln -s Enabled.plist Info.plist

Close your terminal. You should now be able to use the browser plugin with Firefox and Safari. It can’t work in Chrome for other reasons.

THEN of course remember to turn it back off:

cd '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/'

sudo rm Info.plist

sudo mv Infoplist.bak Info.plist

I hope this works for you. It did for me.

¡Huevos!

There’s a sweet little desktop app for OSX called Huevos.

It’s tiny and free, and it’s a search helper. You pick a search site, type in your search, and your browser of choice fires up and searches. I recommend it!

You can drop in your own searches, so I took out the ones I didn’t need and put in somei new ones. In case anyone is interested, my new ones were:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&field-keywords=%@

Blinkx: http://www.blinkx.com/videos/%@

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%@&sitesearch=

IMDB: http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%@&x=0&y=0

Powells: http://www.powells.com/s?kw=%@&x=0&y=0

Attention prospective installers of new Mac OS X Leopard:

“Apple, having allowed this shipment to slip six months already, has had to get Leopard out the door before the end of October by hook or by crook. You may reasonably conclude that this cake is probably not entirely baked. As with Tiger, an early software update (10.5.1) will likely be needed to correct a multitude of issues. Until then, consider yourself a beta tester.” — Maxfixit

More here: http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071026082852658

mysterious file/disk suck on my powerbook

I get disk I/O errors, which are the computer equivalent of coughing up blood; ominous.

They only happen with certain files. I notice it when syncing to my iPod or listening to music, for example. One music file will be a DEVIL FILE and cause the system to throw the I/O errors into the log after hanging up really badly (slow UI, processes crash, etc).

If I delete that one file then no problems for a while until another DEVIL FILE shows up.

I’m trying to figure out if maybe the iTunes-LAME script I use so I can use the LAME MP3 encoder might be contributing to this, or maybe LAME itself, but I can’t see how. Maybe something is messed up with 10.4.3?

Technical victories

First, I finally got my Powerbook to stop miscellaneously slowing to a crawl several times an hour, and also got it to stop hanging on “Open” dialogs. The solutions were 1) completely and utterly disable Spotlight and 2) turn off syncing the iDisk. So I had to disable two useful features of my operating system because they were buggy and painful, but at least I’m not swearing at top volume every 15 minutes.

Second, Jeff Eaton was kind enough to post on his blog the solution to a horrible Photoshop problem I’d been having. All my pictures would look lovely in Photoshop and then get washed out and crappy as soon as I saved them as web-optimized jpegs to put on Flickr, etc. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening, and it was making me something something. Turns out there was a bad preference in the “view” menu in Photoshop under “proofing”. End of problem.

Man, it’s like taking a rock out of each shoe.

Tiny automator app for syncing your iDisk

I got really sick of the fact that a 0.3 second failure of my wireless caused my iDisk to go offline completely, requiring restarting the Finder and waving a chicken to get it to wake up again. You can fix this, it turns out, by sending an alarm signal to the mirroring agent program.

Since many of you do not want to open the terminal or find out about the killall command or any of that crap, I made a very small Automator app that prompts you to make sure this is what you wanted and then forces the mirror agent to fire up and sync the disk. After that it will show as online just fine.

http://www.fringehead.org/misc/syncIdisk.tgz

Nice bug, Apple. Real nice.