Fixing ‘No Audio’ Issue on Mac OS

I have been facing an audio service issue with my Macbook Pro (Catalina 10.15.1). After I open it from sleep, sometimes audio does not work at all. Closing the applications (browser, Spotify) or replugging headphones don’t solve the issue either.

I used to face similar issues on my CentOS linux machine and the solution was either to kill and restart audio service, or, if that does not solve the issue, to reboot the machine.

I was googling for the command and found that I was not the only one facing this issue and it was an old issue at least since 2011.

The command to restart CoreAudio process:

sudo kill -9 `ps ax|grep 'coreaudio[a-z]' | awk '{print $1}'`

It fixes my ‘no audio’ issue, at least for now.

Google Maps Tracks and Stores Location Data – Even When your Location Detection is Turned-off

This is scary.

Apparently, Google Maps has been tracking and storing all my locations over last several months even when my location detection is turn-off and there is a neat little visualization of all your locations provided by Google itself.

All you need to do is log in with the same account you use on your phone, and the record of everywhere you’ve been for the last day to month will erupt across your screen like chicken pox.

Has Oracle Just Discontinued MySQL MXJ Connector?

MySQL MXJ connector download page is empty, and MXJ connector is no longer listed on the MySQL connectors list.

It’s not just me because I found this post on MySQL forums –

In your release notes you mentioned that the binaries can be found here:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/mxj/5.0.html

Unfortunately I am seeing an empty page there. Has this artifact ever
been uploaded somewhere?

MySQL MXJ Connector allows Java developers to easily and transparently embed MySQL database in a cross-platform manner in the installation package. Last release version 5.0.12 is available on maven mirror.

Has it just been discontinued permanently by Oracle? Although MySQL as an embedded database has limited functionality and SQLite is preferred, it makes sense to embed MySQL in some scenarios e.g. embedding database in a package which already targets MySQL.

has oracle just removed mysql mxj connector? http://t.co/ryGaIf7t is empty and mxj connector is no longer listed under left navigation.

— Brajesh Sachan (@brajeshs) August 17, 2012

Persistent “Bad Request – Error 400” when using Google Apps Mail

Gmail for Google Apps sometimes throws “Bad Request – Error 400” after you have persistent session (chose to “Stay signed in” while logging in). I have 4-5 Gmail accounts which I’m usually logged in at the same time, and I get this “Bad Request – Error 400” error on one of the accounts. I use Firefox as my main browser (because apparently Google Chrome cannot support even the latest CentOS 5.x with official repo and Chromium build is stuck at version 13 for CentOS 5)

Google suggests – “Clear your browser’s cache and cookies” which means I need to kill all my active sessions and sign in all 5 gmail accounts again, which is pretty unproductive.

By trial and error, I found the following solution for Firefox-

1. Install an extension which allows you to view cookie information of a browser tab and selectively delete cookies (I use Web Developer)
2. List all the cookies on “Bad Request – Error 400” page (“View Cookie Information” on Web-developer extension)
3. Delete the cookies which have long string values GMAIL_IMP. If you delete all the cookies, you may have to sign in to that account again, but usually deleting only some cookies works for me without needing to sign in again
4. Refresh the browser tab which was showing  “Bad Request – Error 400” and done.

[update: Rob identified the cookie to be deleted]

“Software is a Process”

Two very insightful posts from Dave Winer –

1. We Make Shitty Software (from year 1995)
2. A message from developers to users

Dave writes –

“Software is a process, it’s never finished, it’s always evolving. That’s its nature. We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it’s a process. We’ll make it less shitty.”

Google Chrome Promotion inside Gmail on Firefox

Just noticed that Google web mail interface is showing recommendation to upgrade to Google Chrome on reasonably modern version of Firefox (10.0.5 Extended Support Release)

Not for the first time though.

Google Gears and Linux

“Google Gears” could not be installed because it is not compatible with
your Firefox build type (Linux_x86-gcc3). Please contact the author of this
item about the problem.

Found the fix in this Google group post which says re-installing Gears should fix this issue.

On more digging, it appears that there are several bugs reported with this issue e.g. Bug # 975, 977. Apparently someone uploaded a custom gears xpi to fix versioning issue. Google indeed has moved on to phase out Gears in favour of HTML5.

Tags: google

Google Chrome Promoted on the Most Valuable Online Property

Google’s new browser Google Chrome is being promoted on arguably the most valuable property on the web – Google Homepage.

The browser itself is “google cool” with Javascript applications performing much better. Flash performance seems a bit sluggish. Need a password manager and status bar perhaps, and a Linux version of course.

The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium. The rendering engine is Webkit, and Javascript “monkey” is a new JS virtual machine V8.

Skypecast Shutting Down

Skypecast has been shut down by Skype, apparently due to the quality concerns. Skypecast was sort of a poor man’s podcast tool.

Simple Update Protocol (SUP)

Paul Buchheit (the creator and ex-lead developer of Gmail) of FriendFeed has suggested a new format – Simple Update Protocol (SUP) to minimize multiple feed polling.

The idea is simple –

• The feed provider will generate a live or cached feed for ALL recent updates with an ID field to identify the updated entities.
• The feed consumer will poll this SUP feed instead of polling individual RSS feed.
• The feed consumer will request only relevant updated feeds.

HTTP header If-Modified-Since does something similar. But, that would still means requesting for each individual feed.

The proposal looks good for both feed generators and consumers, and not very difficult to implement either. However, the format is too vulnerable to feature creep and standardization can be a painful process.