Tom Morris

Snow Leopard annoyance: laptop sleep invokes very crashy login window

Before I moved up (or sideways) to Snow Leopard, here was my standard procedure when I wanted to put my laptop to sleep: invoke QuickSilver, type in a few characters from the word ‘Lock’, then hit enter. Wait about half a second or so until the login window replaced whatever was on screen, then shut the lid.

Now I am on Snow Leopard, I was glad to see that this sensible security measure has been built into the OS X. Only not very well. When you shut the lid, it doesn’t actually invoke the login window until you pull it out of sleep again. And login window is very, very crashy. I’ve had to hard reboot my machine a few times since I installed 10.6 due to the fact that Login Window becomes completely unresponsive.

I’ve had this a fair amount with OS X. One thing I really wish OS X had that XWindows has: a simple ‘kill all’ command. In XWindows, if there is a problem, you can just hit Ctrl + Alt + F2 and it’ll just kill everything and take you to a shell. Basically, you can hit it and it’d kill everything in the GUI and pull you back to a terminal. Then you can run startx to restart X. Why can’t we have something like this for OS X?

Here is hoping that Apple fix this irritation when the next point release comes out.

While my blog was down, I wrote up these instructions on how to set Firefox to always use about:sessionrestore. If you are a bit geeky and have limited bandwidth (or computing resources), this will be far more pleasant an experience than having 200 tabs open up after a crash.

The July 2007 Linked Open Data map is very inspiring. It’s growing, and it looks like a web!

Dr. Hulda Clark, a horrible quack, is dead. I’m sure there are ten acolytes to take her place, sadly.

So, iTunes 9 is out. Looks like Mashable were wrong: no last.fm, Twitter or Facebook integration to be seen. So, is this proof that the big tech blogs will print any old shit, even if it doesn’t pass the smell check of any sane person?