2007 April — HighTechDad HighTechDad

I guess I got lazy and did not follow my normal routine of backing up and repairing permissions PRIOR to installing software updates from Apple’s auto updates. So, last night, I simply installed the update from the Software Update program. Well, after rebooting (which took abnormally long – but has been duplicated by others so is expected behavior), I was welcomed with this beautiful alert:

My wireless card was dead. I could not launch it. The system extension was not loading. I then thought that I should reinstall the Security Update, but being to lazy to get up from the sofa to connect to my wired connection, I used Cocktail to enable hidden files, then navigated to /harddrivename/Library/Packages and sorted by date and found the installer for the Security update. I tried running that twice but after each reboot, still had the alert box listed above.

So, I decided to use AppleJack (which I wrote about earlier) to run a full repair on my disk. There were lots of permissions and other things to be repaired (they flew by my screen so that I didn’t really see all of them…I may review the logs later). But on reboot, my wireless extension was back and my wireless was working. So, I guess that AppleJack saved the day again!

I strongly recommend that you visit MacFixIt prior to installing any updates. You can always see what they think is the best way to install (e.g., use a Combo installer if possible, repair permissons, back up, etc.). You can also get user feedback. Here is the link to this security update there. (Not sure how long it will stay active…you may have to be a subscribe to see older articles.)
Good luck!

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Okay Mac/Wikipedia users, this one is for you. Have you ever found yourself lost navigating through the incredible amount of links and cross links within Wikipedia? It’s truly hard to use the back button to go back and forth throughout Wikipedia when your exploration is truly multi-layered. You need a breadcrumb trail and a way to link all of the different pages you discover together.

This is where Pathway comes in to play. Instead of using your boring ol’ browser to go through the related and non-related links, fire up Pathway and visually track where you go, save your path, explore some more, save it again, come back a few days later and pick up where you left off.

You start off by adding a page to your list [note, click on the thumbnails to see larger images]:

Once you add the page (and you don’t even have to have an actual name of the page in Wikipedia because if the page cannot be found, a search results page is displayed). If you do get a hit on the page name, the page name shows in the “page network” and below in the page browser, you see the actual Wikipedia page. For fun, I chose “blog” as my starting page:

[click to continue…]

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