No Business Naming Things

As yet another example of how Leopard is a massive pile of Fail, my Documents folder is no longer writable. Well, that’s not exactly true. I can drop files in it but I must first authenticate before it’ll allow the operation despite the fact that the file permissions are seemingly okay (at least Finder and the command line tell me they are.) I can’t write to it at all from applications directly and I can’t do it from the command line either.

I have this horrible fear that my system is on the verge of eating itself.

Edit: it appears to have been an issue with my access control list after all (nice thinking McQ). Knowing absolutely nothing about ACLs, however, I was a bit confuzzled as to what course of action I should take. I bit the bullet and downloaded ACL Fix from version tracker and after chewing on my Documents folder for five minutes or so I now seem to have a “normal” Documents folder.  I still dont know how I managed to get into this predicament - as near as I can tell it was the last system upate - but at last I’ll know what to do next time it happens.

Boy am I glad I don’t rely on Time Machine for my one and only backup.  For the second (third?) time my backup volume has been eaten.  I don’t have any idea why - backups are simply failing.  They don’t get beyond the “preparing” stage and when I enter the Time Machine browse mode I don’t see any previous iterations whatsoever.  When it can die under normal operating circumstances I’d hate to see what happens when your machine goes tits up and you actually have to rely on it to restore your data.

I had hoped Leopard would grow on me as time has progressed but it really is a dud.

If anyone sent me any interesting mail to my pookzilla.com account over the past day you might want to resend it. OS X Mail just ate my pookzilla.com inbox. I was able to archive it before it happened but I’ve effectively lost the ability to easily search through 3 years of mail. Color me pissed the hell off.

It all started this morning when I realized I hadn’t gotten any new mail since about noon yesterday. Thinking this was weird, I logged into my webmail and found about 100 mail waiting for me. Going back to Mail, I checked my connection and everything appeared to work fine. I went into my settings and just for the hell of it changed my password to gibberish. I synched again and lo - the connection still seemed to be working! Nothing I did would reset the account to a state where it would pop new mail from the server. Reluctantly, I archived my mail and added a new account. I did a pop and got down about 150 new mail.

Thinking I was out of the woods I briefly scanned my subject lines and then did a rebuild of my Mailbox - god knows why. When it was done I now had NO mail in my inbox! I still had mail in my secondary sorted folders (the ones that I used to sift through my mailing list mail) but my main inbox was empty. What’s more, all of the mail was gone from webmail as well! Whatever it did, it deleted the mail in both places despite my settings for the account saying “never delete.”

So not only have I lost the ability to browse Mail for the past three years but I’ve totally lost all personal Mail from the past 24 hours. From my brief scan of the subject lines I know I lost some stuff from people and I apologize for that.

When I get home tonight I will give Time Machine a try and see if I can’t restore to yesterdays state. I can swallow a days loss of mail but if I cant restore my inbox to its former state I’m going to seriously consider reverting to Tiger.

There’s a lot of things I’ve grown to like about Leopard.  Quick Look and Cover Flow have made pretty dramatic improvements to my work flow and I’ve even warmed to Spaces despite it’s pretty severe handicaps.  The jury is still out on Time Machine and will likely stay that way until I am forced to use it.  There is one thing in particular I’ve discovered about Mail that’s really got my panties in a knot, however.

I swear in Tiger I could surpress the preview pane for the Junk folder alone or if not I could at least disable automatic preview of image attachments.  I can turn off remote images via HTML but actually disabling attachments seems to be impossible.  What’s more, I can’t seem to write a rule that will match any message with an attachment so I can’t even safely dispose of them should they arrive.  Oddly enough, I CAN write a Smart Mailbox that will match any message with an attachment.  I figured they’d be backed by the same code but apparently not.

Hrumprh.