20 June 2008 Archives

My last few posts at my various sites have been created using the ecto Mac-based web publishing tool. I’m still working out the kinks, not the least of which I do my own HTML, when most of the world seems to be WYSIWYG by default.

What I like about ecto is that I can create accounts for all of my Drupal installation, and control all aspects of the publication. The only type of post that seems to be a problem is creating a new image, using the images module. The ecto application persists in telling me that I have to add an image before publication, and this after adding an image.

The other popular Mac-based editing tool, MarsEdit, seemed to have problems just connecting with Drupal and doesn’t, as far as I’ve seen, seem to be able to handle multiple Drupal accounts. Besides, ecto was cheaper.

update

Well, I’m officially dead in the water. I did create a firewire bootable image on one of my external hard drives, and had it running once. Now, however, when I go to start the machine, pushing the Option key does nothing. Trying to safe boot or single boot does nothing. Trying to boot off an install disc does nothing, and I can’t get the disc out. All roads lead to kernel panic.

Though the RAM tested as good, I have to assume it isn’t good if I can’t even get to state of being able to pick which disc to boot from. Regardless, there’s nothing I can do now until I take it into a genius bar, but since I can’t afford to replace RAM or hard drive or whatever other expensive item the Apple people will recommend, it will just have to sit for the nonce. Perhaps it will use this quiet time to meditate on the evilness of its ways.

Thanks, though, for all who tried to help. Found out some new and useful ideas for the future.

I have a question for those of you who understand the Mac quirks.

I have the last of the G4 Powerbooks with Leopard installed. I haven’t had problems with the computer until just recently, when it seemed to start running a little more sluggishly. Today, when I rebooted, I got a kernel panic. I tried resetting the PRAM and even the PMU, but couldn’t get past the kernal panic. Finally, I booted in Single User mode, and ran fsck to repair the disk.

The first time through, it said files had been changed, so I ran it again. The second time it came back with an OK message, and I typed in reboot.

I was able to get into the machine and run the disc utility to repair the permissions and everything seemed fine. However, when I rebooted again, I got the same kernel panic, and had to run fsck again. This time, I only had to run it once.

I’ve since rebooted the machine twice and it seems fine. One difference between this set of reboots and the previous, in addition to running Disc Utility, is that I also cleaned out some old files and went from 17GB of free space to 23GB.

I am worried that something might be about to go on the machine. Have any of you run into this situation, and do you have guesses as to what the problem might be? I really can’t afford another new computer, and need to keep this one going.