I suddenly started getting http 403 errors on my self hosted [with native apache installation] site that worked perfectly until Feb 5th 2010. The errors showing up in the access log looked like:

[Fri Feb 19 02:05:25 2010] [crit] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: /Users/username/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable, referer: http://127.0.0.1/

I’m not sure what changed, perhaps an OS X update from Apple, but after restoring all /private/etc/apache2/* files and the my /Users/username/Sites/ folder via TimeMachine to a date when things were working it still wouldn’t play ball.

Eventually I came across the soultion, it seems the chmod levels of the default folders had changed so doing the following in Terminal:

chmod 701 ~
chmod 705 ~/Sites

Solved everything…phew

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.

He’d never used a Mac before so I showed him the basics, email, surf, download, music, video, DVD player, iPhoto, etc and left him to it.

My Macbook Air has now got a fault and needs sending to Apple for 2 weeks for repair so I’ve relieved my father of the Macbook Pro for the 2 weeks I’m Air-less.

Considering my father’s been using the Macbook Pro regularly I was a little shocked to see the show-off widget showing 134 days uptime!

That’s more than I get out of my windows servers at work.

I know many of you will leave comments saying you’ve seen up-times on windows servers/linux boxes, etc going into the years BUT for a laptop, that’s in use by my computer inept father to remain up for over 4 months is worth a screenshot at least:

There were, however, 500MB of updates waiting from Apple so it’s time to wave good-bye to the show-off uptime and follow in the footsteps of Windows and reboot!

I have 2x4GB SDHC cards which each hold around 40mins on the highest quality setting, when they get full I normally just open iMovie 08 and import all the footage before wiping the card. The problem is, I sometimes do this on my MacBook Air and was shocked to find a warning saying I was low on disk space on the Air. I had 10GB free before I started importing 4GB of video but I didn’t realise that iMovie 08 un-packs all the video from the video camera’s compressed format so the 4GB ends up being ~16GB+. Importing the video on my MacBook Air is also quite a slow process, on my Mac Pro it’s not too slow but I needed a solution to copying the card contents whilst on the road in order to free up the space on the card.

After a little experimentation I’ve opted to use Apple’s built in application, Disk Utility, to make a straight clone of the SDHC card as a disk image file (dmg). The benefit of doing it this way into a disk image rather than just dragging and dropping the SDHC card contents into a folder on your desktop is when you remount the disk image file iMovie 08 recognises it as a connected camera and starts the video import wizard, creating the disk image is also stupidly faster than importing the footage into iMovie which requires heavy processor time.

I’m also using it as a useful backup procedure taking a snapshot of each SDHC card before I format them. Even though I have all videos ultimately imported into iMovie 08, should iMovie decide to corrupt its database or wipe all the imported files I can also start from scratch if I have clones of all the raw footage.

There primary reason, however, I want to backup the raw footage is to preserve the 5.1 surround sound data that the Panasonic SD-100 records. At present iMovie 08 doesn’t support anything other than stereo soundtracks, so regardless of how fancy your camera is and how many surround mics it has, if you are using iMovie 08 the 5.1 sound is going to get down-sampled to stereo. I know Final Cut Pro handles 5.1 surround channels but that’s a little too advanced and out of my price range at present. I’m hoping that iMovie 09 will support 5.1 channels and also BlueRay burning options but we’ll have to wait and see. Rather than kick myself next year when I suddenly have the ability to edit movies with 5.1 surround and realise the additional channels have all been down-mixed to stereo and lost forever, if I take a backup of the SDHC cards now into DMG format then I can re-import them as and when needed.

Create Disk Image (.dmg) from a SDHC card

Open you Applications folder and find the Utilities folder:

then select Disk Utility:

Ensure you have connected your SDHC card to your computer using a card reader and that it is appearing on your desktop or in your finder window. You should see the SDHC card mounted in the left pane of Disk Utility, more than likely it will have a sub-disk branching off it. Click on the SDHC card in the left pane, if there is a sub-disk make sure you click on the highest level (i.e. the top branche or the upper one of the two).

Once the disk is selected click on New Image at the top of the Disk Utility program window:

This will popup a new window asking you where you wish to save the image, I’d suggest you create a new folder called “SDHC Backups” and save them all in the one folder, be sure to give each image file a unique name so you can find it later:

Note that the default option is for a compressed image, whilst this might work and save you some space it’s not the quickest method to create a backup image and I haven’t tested how well it works, so change it to Read-Only with no encryption. I will do a few experiments with compressed images and see how processor intensive they are, any increase in time taken to create an image and how much space is actually saved compared to a non compressed read-only image, I’ll update this article once I’ve done that. UPDATE – On a Mac Pro the compressed image takes no longer to create however there is very little space saving, uncompressed = 3.68GB whilst compressed = 3.66GB so I’m going to stick with uncompressed read-only for now.

That’s it, hit Save and it will show you the progress:

You should now have an image file the same size as the SDHC card in the folder you specified on your hard drive. You can now eject the SDHC card from your computer, and just to double check, double click the image file you just created to mount it on your computer. You can click skip on the validating stage if you are feeling confident, once you see it mounted in Finder open up iMovie and it should detect that a camera has been connected even though the SDHC card is no longer plugged in.