OS X Mountain Lion musings

I have a trusty MacBook Pro early-2008 model which I upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion recently.

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly - surprising compared to Windows experiences of years gone by. The laptop had the original 2MB of RAM which it came with. Things slowed down in a scary way (to the point where I was wondering if the upgrade was a good idea).

I upgraded memory to 4MB off eBay and things are back to normal. I could have upgraded to 8MB but that was a bit over budget for me.

MySQL O_o

I'm a novice hobbyist software tinkerer. As I started down the path of migrating a Java app to Amazon Web Services, I discovered that MySQL that I have running for years pre-Mountain Lion had stopped working. MySQL would fail to start with the error message "The MySQL Database Server installation was not found. Please make sure the /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin file is present."

Oops

After some searching around, this page from dougr provided the hint, though the original article was for Leopard. It was simple case of a symbolic link to that went missing during the upgrade.

At first, I placed the link under /Users/roupen which turns out was wrong (I did say I am a novice). I placed the link under /usr/local like so sudo ln -s mysql-5.0.51a-osx10.5-x86 mysql

Ahhh yes, finally running

Things are happy again now!

Growl No More

The other thing that I did is remove Growl after some looking around. I'm all in with the Mountain Lion Notifications. When I looked at apps that Growl preferences pannel, there were only a handful of apps listed there are using Growl. Several were old-old apps that I no longer use (and had since uninstalled). I used the Growl Uninstaller listed on this page and bam! done.

Google Music Manager No More

Having taken a break from Android (was always an iPhone user), I also removed Google Music Manager. I didn't realize removing the app from the Applications folder wasn't sufficient. Some additional clean-up was required as listed here. Thank you Google for complete uninstall instructions. Remains to be seen if I will get back to Android and Google Music some day... Android JellyBean was the last flavor of Android for me for now...

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Firefox and gmail not happy

Firefox and gmail not happy
Originally uploaded by roupen

I been using my MacBook Pro happily for the last few months including Firefox 2.0 and Gmail. A couple of days ago, gmail stopped working with Firefox on my machine.

I tried clearing cookies and even reinstalled firefox but the problem wont go away. So for now, I am using Safari to read my gmail, which is not bad but its no firefox :(

Update: I upgraded to FF3 Beta and the problem went away (thanks to Noam for the suggestion). I lost a few plugins along the way that weren't compatible with FF3 but oh well.

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