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Weird Mac OS X bugs
Jul. 21st, 2003 08:45 pmJeffrey Zeldman writes about a bug in the Mac OS X Finder that is annoying him terribly. I encountered a strange system-wide one the other day-- all dragging of items simply stopped working. Everywhere. It didn't go away until I restarted the machine.
It seems as if there are lots of strange limbo states associated with FireWire auto-syncing of the iPod. I suspect this has to do less with iTunes (which is really very solid on the whole) and more with the flaky current version of iSync, which I use to synchronize calendar and contact information with the Pod. It works fine most of the time, but occasionally the system gets in a state in which the iPod won't sync at all; or iSync freezes up and the Pod never gets out of "do not disconnect" mode, leading to more bizarre malfunctions if you do anything to try to relieve the deadlock. Sometimes things get so hung that you can't make processes go away by forcibly killing them, which is particularly weird, since in my experience that almost never happens otherwise (and as far as I'm concerned this is one of the major selling points of Mac OS X:
It seems as if there are lots of strange limbo states associated with FireWire auto-syncing of the iPod. I suspect this has to do less with iTunes (which is really very solid on the whole) and more with the flaky current version of iSync, which I use to synchronize calendar and contact information with the Pod. It works fine most of the time, but occasionally the system gets in a state in which the iPod won't sync at all; or iSync freezes up and the Pod never gets out of "do not disconnect" mode, leading to more bizarre malfunctions if you do anything to try to relieve the deadlock. Sometimes things get so hung that you can't make processes go away by forcibly killing them, which is particularly weird, since in my experience that almost never happens otherwise (and as far as I'm concerned this is one of the major selling points of Mac OS X:
kill -9 as killer app-- and as an old Unix hand it disturbs me when it doesn't work). Auto-syncing seems to involve some really deep hooks into the bowels of the system, which wreak havoc when they go wrong.