My iPhone 3G wouldn’t connect to my TimeCapsule wi-fi. I rebooted the TimeCapsule and the iPhone but it still gave an error. I then tried with my 2nd home wi-fi network (Netgear DG384GT) and the same “unable to join the network” error message popped up. In case it was an issue with channel interference or WEP password mistakes I switched channels and turned all security off temporarily. This still didn’t solve anything, my MBPro, Air, AppleTV, Xbox etc could still connect perfectly as did my old iPhone 2G. I backed up my iPhone and then carried out a full restore but even the virginal factory fresh restored software refused to connect. Once a friend with another 3G came round and connected without a problem I had little choice but to book an appointment at Apple’s Genius bar.

The Genius tried to connect to the stores wi-fi and it failed, he checked the phone had the latest version, did a force reboot (I’d already done several) and then simply said “I’ll go and get you a new one”.

After checking for liquid damage using an otoscope to view the liquid damage indicators in the headphone socket and bottom port he gave me a new iPhone 3G and I was on my way.

Since I use MobileMe & Exchange PUSH, when I set up the accounts quickly on store on the new iPhone my contacts were pulled down onto the iPhone in under a minute which is useful since my iPhone backup was on my home machine a few hours away.

I opened up Activity Monitor to see if it was a RAM shortage when I noticed my CPU history was almost maxed out, but NOT by the photoshop process. My cpu cycles were getting chewed up by a system process called ATSServer .

My hard disk activity was high considering I wasn’t actively doing anything at the time.

A little research on the web indicated that ATSServer was OS X Spotlight’s indexing process. Others having this problem had recently copied a large number of PDF’s to their machine and that’s exactly what I had done too.

Spotlight doesn’t just index the filenames, where possible it indexes the entire contents of PDFs, emails, etc and the process seemed to be stuck trying to index the PDF’s I had recently added.

Activity Monitor showed that the process had a full 24hrs+ of cpu time so I don’t think it was simply a case of waiting longer for it to complete. Instead I went into Preferences->Spotlight and added the folder that had all the newly added PDF’s to the privacy folder settings. This, however, did not stop the runaway process nor the thrashing of the hard drive, so i took the decision to Force Quit the ATSServer process and all is well again.

I’m obviously going to have to reboot to start the service running and hopefully things will be back to normal.

I left them all downloading and updating but one, the Safari update, refused to work. It said I had insufficient access rights but considering I’m the only user and I’ve always been setup as an administrator this was strange.

I tried repairing disk permissions but that didn’t work. Then I thought perhaps it just needs to be restarted having just installed all the other updates so I dutifully rebooted and the same thing happened when I rebooted.

The Update Safari can’t be saved. You do not have appropriate access privileges. The installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder.

I checked the Trash and there was nothing in there so I had a root around and found an easy solution…using Finder to browse my hard drive I navigated to /Library/Updates/

and then deleted the Safari folder that was in there:

and then tried to install the Safari update again from the Software Update window and it downloaded and installed the update without a problem.

I knew I was typing my password 100% correctly so I thought it might be a strange cookie or cached file problem so I cleared Safari’s history, quit and restarted Safari but the same thing kept happening.

I thought Facebook might be having an few glitches but I opened up Firefox and it logged me in straight away.

After lot’s of hair pulling I finally found the reason I couldn’t log in to Facebook using Safari and I’ve been kicking myself for not realising sooner….I noticed Private Browsing was activated in Safari. My computer gets used by a variety of people during the day so when I come to do any online banking I sometimes turn on Private Browsing and am normally very good at remembering to turn it back off. However, on this occasion I had forgotten to turn off Private Browsing and that was the cause of Facebook failing to login and constantly cycling me back to the login page.

I know this seems obvious once it’s pointed out, and other sites sometimes pop up warnings stating Cookies are not enabled, etc which would normally prompt you to check Private Browsing options but Facebook give’s no warnings or errors in a pop-up or on the re-loaded login page.

I have since turned on Private Browsing and tried to log in to Facebook and it worked fine, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t working before but turning off Private Browsing was definitely the cure.

Warning: Compilation failed: characters with values > 255 are not yet supported in classes at offset 16 in /vhost/vhost6/s/c/o/scoopz.com/blog/wp-includes/shortcodes.php on line 213

This only appeared on 1 or 2 posts the rest remained unaffected. I realised that most of the posts affected were those which had galleries inserted using WordPress Media Manager and the [ gallery ] tag.

After some research it appears to be a known issue with older versions of PHP. My site is hosted with Easyspace who unfortunately won’t upgrade me from PHP Version 4.3.2 unless I pay extra for a new hosting plan.

Somebody pointed out that if you try adding a test post with new images and insert a gallery, the error doesn’t appear unless you add ALT tags to the images (Image Caption).

For now I’ve simply removed the gallery from the affected posts until I either get my PHP upgraded or the next update from WordPress.

UPDATE (20th August) – I’ve updated my web hosting so I’ve now gone from PHP4.3.2 to PHP5.1.6 and inserting a [ gallery ] still causes the same error at the top of my posts. I’ve noticed there is another update out for wordpress (2.6.1) so I’ll try updating to that and see if that fixes anything.

UPDATE (20th August) - Just finished updating to 2.6.1 and the problem has now disappeared, so if you are experiencing this issue I’d highly recommend upgrading to WordPress 2.6.1