Recently I have been struggling with an issue where links to my website do not generate previews in Google+. Instead, the user gets the error “Could not load website. - Retry”. When they try and retry, the error does not go away. Needless to say, although my readership is pretty low, that isn’t helping much.

When I started poking around, I found that Google+ uses Google’s “Rich Snippet” system. Google has released a Rich Snippet Testing Tool. The tool is great, and it helps you tweak your HTML so you get the correct snippet content.

…Except in my case, where the tool just reported “Could not fetch web page.”. Not helpful. Why a better error descriptor isn’t given, I don’t know.

This article will explain how I got to the bottom of the problem (despite Google’s useless error messages) and how you can look for similar issues.

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I have previously posted about using MacFuse with Snow Leopard, but if you have already upgraded to OS X Lion, you may be having trouble finding a version of FUSE to use. Many people have commented th
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This topic came up at work recently, and I thought it might be useful to the wider internet audience… When doing code reviews, I often come across components which utilize static mutable objects. Typi
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UPDATE: _OS X Lion users, according to this thread there is a new project called OSXFUSE that picks up where MacFuse left off. The project incorporates the source code below and already supports OS X Lion natively. The project is just getting started, but a beta binary release is promised in the next few days. You can find more information at the project homepage (not online yet) or find the source code on github._

So What Is The Story?

If you would like to be able to use MacFUSE on 64-bit Snow Leopard, you may have noticed a lot of mis-information on the net. In short, all of the latest official MacFUSE releases, including both 2.0.3 and the 2.1.7 beta are not compatible with 64-bit Snow Leopard. My understanding is that these releases will work with 64-bit Leopard, or with 32 bit Snow Leopard, but I cannot confirm this.

This article describes the current situation, and provides usable binary and source packages to download.

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First of all, the fact that you need to leave free space on your Clip is the most irritating issue I’ve ever seen on a modern electronics device. I’m sure there are thousands of people out there who have thrown their Clips in the garbage because of this.

Anyway, here is the situation:

You’ve got the “Not enough space for Music DB, please free 30 mb“ message on your Sansa Clip.
You have a Mac

Read on for the fix.

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If you have noticed CrashPlan is using too much memory on your 64 bit Mac, one solution might be to run its server process in 32 bit mode. I’ve tried this, and so far it hasn’t caused any problems, and definitely seems to keep memory usage lower.

This requires a bit of hacking, but its not too terrible.

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Today, I decided to flush out and clean up my A* implementation in Clojure. I cleaned up the namespaces, removed some cruft, got the Java integration working (which required by-passing RT.loadResource
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The Problem

Frequently, say, one out of 10 times, when I try and log back into my Mac from the screensaver, or when I wake it from sleeping, I will get a spinning beachball and be unable to type my password. Other times I will be able to log in, but I am prompted to enter my password multiple times for various applications, and invariably one of them (usually gconsync) will get stuck after I enter my password with a spinning beach ball. I can still use most applications, but application that needs keychain authorization locks up.

I happen to be using a very handy tool called SSHKeychain, which turned out to be the culprit.

If you are using SSHKeychain, this post will walk you through fixing the unstable-wake-from-screensaver, and also solves the problem of having to type your keychain password 3-5 times when I returned to my computer.

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If you are having trouble compiling Android on Snow Leopard, first make sure you’ve installed the Leopard 10.5 Java 1.5 SDK, according to these instructions. Second, make sure you have the latest XCod
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I wanted to refresh my knowledge of functional programming, A-Star search, and I figured learning Clojure at the same time couldn’t hurt. I figured I’d do all three at once, and throw in a health dose
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