I decided to finally upgrade my PPC MacMini from Tiger to Leopard.

Problem: Mac Mini refuses to read the DVD despite the DVD working fine on my MacBook Pro.

Solutions:

• Install Leopard from iPod: Failed. My MacMini refused to boot from the iPod even though I'd used an Apple Partition Map and put it into forced disk mode. Likely culprit: I was using an USB rather than a Firewire iPod
• Network Install: Didn't try.
• Install from external dvd drive: Don't have one. But....
• Target Disk Mode: Nifty Firewire trick. Restart your MacBook Pro in target disk mode, connect to Mac Mini via Firewire, put the DVD into your MacBook Pro, it appears immediately on the Mac Mini and install proceeds just as if the DVD was in the Mac Mini. Very sweet. Sucked that I couldn't use my MacBook Pro during the install though.

So, I now have a very nice Leopard install on my Mac Mini. Now to re-compile all my MacPorts installs...

Update to OS X Tiger 10.4.5 and suddenly lose the ability to access your shares from your Windows PCs. Don't worry, you are not alone!

The fix is quite simple when you know it (and a pain in the ass if you don't).

1) On your Windows PC, set the Domain (or Local) Security Policy setting "Network security: LAN manager authentication level" to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"
On Windows XP Professional on a stand-alone machine, this setting is in Start -> Run -> secpol.msc -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options.

2) Run gpupdate.exe or restart your PC. This refreshes the group policy settings to take into account the change we just made in step one to the Security Policy.

3) On your Mac, open Terminal and type:

sudo nano /etc/smb.conf

4) Under [global], make sure you have the following settings set:

auth methods = guest opendirectory 
passdb backend = opendirectorysam guest 
client ntlvm2 auth = yes

5) Save the file by pressing the "Ctrl" and "O" keys at the same time. Close Terminal.

6) In System Preferences, Stop "Windows Sharing" in "Sharing". Then Start it. This restarts Samba.

That's it! Hopefully (!), you should now be able to access your shares!

Okay, annoying as hell thing happened a couple of days ago: sounds stopped playing in Firefox on my Mac.

Apparently (according to macosxhints), if you can’t hear anything in Firefox for the Mac, the most likely culprit is a program having changed the sample rate setting.

To fix, go to Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Audio MIDI Settings and change Audio Output Format 44100.0Hz and then you will have sound again!

WTF!

Did you know that Apple is shipping OS X with Java 1.4.2 set as the default JVM!!??

You have to manually set it use v1.5.0 in Java Preferences. How stupid is that!?

I just wasted the guts of two hours trying to figure out why my code wasn’t working before I realised that that was the problem.

UPDATE 25/4/06: Apple released a Software Update last week that set Java 1.5.0 as the default JVM.