There's something grimly ironic about your machine freezing whilst writing a lengthy item on backups. Even more so when the forced reboot entails losing said lengthy document, including several hours' worth of work, collected links, fact-checking, valued insights, etc.
All hail saft, whose crash protection for the browser brought back at least 50% of the pages and links I wanted, leaving me with just the simple (haha) job of reconstructing the words to go around them.
The Path Finder connection? After the recent MacBreak episode on Path Finder, I decided to give it another go. I remember now why I didn't reinstall it back in April 2006 on the new Macbook Pro. If you have a WebDAV connection that goes away for whatever reason, and you then try and unmount the WebDAV connection in Path Finder - boom! - your machine is now hung. That's what happened today, causing the reboot and loss of work.
I figured I could ssh into the machine and kill Path Finder, but since switching over to the new Airport Express I got in Boston, the only machines with the new WEP key on were my Macbook (hung), Powerbook (dead hard disk that inspired the original backup post I was writing) and my much-hated mobile phone.
Never fear! I had Opera Mini installed on the phone (conjures up images of fat ladies singing in small cars), so I googled and found Putty for Symbian OS. Unfortunately the download is a zip file and not a jar or sis, and the phone doesn't support zip files. Never fear! I googled and found Handy Zip for S60. Except the download is a zip. Oh, and Nokia - why do you provide a zip manager for the E61 but not for the N80? You suck!
Of course, retracing my steps on the rebooted laptop, I did the same search ("nokia zip") and the first result is the epocware site, and the download page has the SIS file I needed. Some days I think the computers are out to get me. Other days I just accept they are inherently evil.
In fairness - Apple's Finder is not much better with disconnected network shares, but at least you can usually command-tab to a terminal and kill it. And I must admit that apart from the occasional completely killed laptop, I am getting used to the power that Path Finder brings. Do check it out, but make sure you have backups.
Oh, and is anyone else depressed at the thought that heaps of people won't get the whole alt.pathfinder.die.die.die thing?
Posted by savs at January 9, 2007 5:48 PM