Time Machine password not working?

I have been meaning to write this down for quite some time, but it always eluded me. When you are using Time Machine to back up your Mac, you get the chance of password-protecting your backups.

Whenever the machine is restarted you will have to unlock the disk by entering the password, unless you store the password for the backup disk in your keychain. For paranoia's sake (and to keep the password fresh in my memory, just in case) I do not store the password in the keychain.

Now, what happens quite regularly to me is this: I reboot the machine for some reason or other, and while it is doing that, I leave the room and do something else. Before I know it, maybe an hour has passed before I come back. In the meantime, the external Time Machine drive has gone to sleep, because it was not used for an extended period of time. On the screen, there is the password dialog dutifully waiting for me to unlock the protected volume.

As soon as I do so (being very sure the password I type is correct) I hear the external drive spin up again. Because I use a dual-drive RAID enclosure it takes a bit longer to get ready than most drives, because it powers up the drives with a slight delay to go easy on the power supply. All in all I estimate it takes about 10 seconds before the drive is ready. This, however, seems to be longer than the OS is willing to wait for the drive to report back, making it believe that the password was wrong. It will ask for the password again and again, and no matter how often you make sure you typed it correctly, there is no chance of convincing it to accept it.

When this first happened to me, I was getting a little panicky, because I thought that either I was losing my mind, not remembering the very same password I had been entering for months, or that something might be wrong with the drive. Turns out, everything is fine, the drive is mounted with the first attempt, it is just the dialog that remains open and drives you crazy - which, of course, you will not realize if you have a bunch of windows open, preventing you from noticing the icon on the desktop. Watch this short video for of demonstration of what I am talking about:

As you can see, the backup volume is mounted and the dialog is still up. So if you run into the same situation, don't worry. Just cancel the dialog and the backup will run normally.

I have been meaning to write this down for quite some time, but it always eluded me. When you are using Time Machine to back up your Mac, you get the chance of password-protecting your backups.

Whenever the machine is restarted you will have to unlock the disk by entering the password, unless you store the password for the backup disk in your keychain. For paranoia's sake (and to keep the password fresh in my memory, just in case) I do not store the password in the keychain.

Now, what happens quite regularly to me is this: I reboot the machine for some reason or other, and while it is doing that, I leave the room and do something else. Before I know it, maybe an hour has passed before I come back. In the meantime, the external Time Machine drive has gone to sleep, because it was not used for an extended period of time. On the screen, there is the password dialog dutifully waiting for me to unlock the protected volume.

As soon as I do so (being very sure the password I type is correct) I hear the external drive spin up again. Because I use a dual-drive RAID enclosure it takes a bit longer to get ready than most drives, because it powers up the drives with a slight delay to go easy on the power supply. All in all I estimate it takes about 10 seconds before the drive is ready. This, however, seems to be longer than the OS is willing to wait for the drive to report back, making it believe that the password was wrong. It will ask for the password again and again, and no matter how often you make sure you typed it correctly, there is no chance of convincing it to accept it.

When this first happened to me, I was getting a little panicky, because I thought that either I was losing my mind, not remembering the very same password I had been entering for months, or that something might be wrong with the drive. Turns out, everything is fine, the drive is mounted with the first attempt, it is just the dialog that remains open and drives you crazy - which, of course, you will not realize if you have a bunch of windows open, preventing you from noticing the icon on the desktop. Watch this short video for of demonstration of what I am talking about:

As you can see, the backup volume is mounted and the dialog is still up. So if you run into the same situation, don't worry. Just cancel the dialog and the backup will run normally.

Time Machine password not working?

Artikel in JavaSPEKTRUM 03/12

In Ausgabe 3/2012 der Fachzeitschrift JavaSPEKTRUM wurde kürzlich ein Artikel mit dem Titel "SOA-basierte NoSQL-Lösung im Mobile-Umfeld" veröffentlicht, dessen Co-Autor ich bin. Er beschreibt, wie eine mobile Java-Applikation mittels kreativer Ansätze und einem Mix aus moderner und altbewährter Technik zum Erfolg gebracht wurde.

Der Volltext kann entweder im Browser auf der codecentric Homepage unter der Rubrik Kompetenzen/Publikationen gelesen werden, steht aber auch als PDF zum Download bereit.

In Ausgabe 3/2012 der Fachzeitschrift JavaSPEKTRUM wurde kürzlich ein Artikel mit dem Titel "SOA-basierte NoSQL-Lösung im Mobile-Umfeld" veröffentlicht, dessen Co-Autor ich bin. Er beschreibt, wie eine mobile Java-Applikation mittels kreativer Ansätze und einem Mix aus moderner und altbewährter Technik zum Erfolg gebracht wurde.

Der Volltext kann entweder im Browser auf der codecentric Homepage unter der Rubrik Kompetenzen/Publikationen gelesen werden, steht aber auch als PDF zum Download bereit.

Artikel in JavaSPEKTRUM 03/12

Removing Xcode 3 shared build settings from Xcode 4

This is about me getting a substantial amount of grey hair over the past couple of days, trying to hunt down a setting that would cause the current version of Xcode 4 to build my iOS projects to an unexpected, but not unfamiliar, taken over from Xcode 3, location, but not presenting any obvious way to revert that.

This is about me getting a substantial amount of grey hair over the past couple of days, trying to hunt down a setting that would cause the current version of Xcode 4 to build my iOS projects to an unexpected, but not unfamiliar, taken over from Xcode 3, location, but not presenting any obvious way to revert that.

Removing Xcode 3 shared build settings from Xcode 4

SOAP web services with iOS

Fresh on the codecentric blog is my new post about using SOAP web services from an iOS client application.

It features a short comparison of the current state of frameworks and tools with the Java world, and then focusses on the sudzc open source library that takes a very interesting approach in generating web service client artifacts by transforming the service's WSDL into Objective-C classes using XSL transformations.

The post is available in German as well.

Fresh on the codecentric blog is my new post about using SOAP web services from an iOS client application.

It features a short comparison of the current state of frameworks and tools with the Java world, and then focusses on the sudzc open source library that takes a very interesting approach in generating web service client artifacts by transforming the service's WSDL into Objective-C classes using XSL transformations.

The post is available in German as well.

SOAP web services with iOS

Why good metrics do not equal good quality

A short while ago I posted an article on the codecentric blog about why good metrics can be, but need not be equal to good software quality. As I wrote earlier, I will add links to this blog whenever I post something of interest to the company site.

The post is available in both English and German at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2011/10/why-good-metrics-values-do-not-equal-good-quality.

A short while ago I posted an article on the codecentric blog about why good metrics can be, but need not be equal to good software quality. As I wrote earlier, I will add links to this blog whenever I post something of interest to the company site.

The post is available in both English and German at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2011/10/why-good-metrics-values-do-not-equal-good-quality.

Why good metrics do not equal good quality

List all open Safari tabs across windows

Over the course of a workday I tend to accumulate lots of browser windows, and even more tabs inside them.  Up to now, I would often lose track of what which tabs were open in which window and in which space. In the end, I would often just open a page again in a new tab of the window I happened to be in at the moment, increasing the overall clutter.
With the advent of persistent application state across reboots or application restarts as well as fullscreen apps in Mac OS X Lion that situation has gotten even worse.

The "Window" menu in Safari does not help too much, because it only shows the tabs of the currently focussed window. Today, while wondering why a website was not displaying correctly, I accidentally found a remarkably simple (and built-in!) way of showing all open tabs across all open Safari windows.

Just hit Cmd-Alt-A or pick "Activity" from the Window menu in any Safari window to open or focus the Activity overlay window.

It is usually used to determine what servers different parts of any given website are loaded from. However, even if you are not interested in that, this little popup contains a list of all currently open tabs, regardless of the window they are in.

Double clicking any entry in there will take you to the correct window and focus the desired tab. Nice and easy, not even an extension needs to be installed :) The only drawback I see is that you cannot sort that list, clicking the "Address" column header has no effect.

A final tip: When you open the window, it might have one or more of the entries expanded, making the list overly long. Even though there is no collapse-all feature I could find, you can rather quickly do so manually by selecting the top entry in the list and then repeatedly hit the left and down arrow keys. Left arrow will close the currently selected item, down arrow move to the next entry. Even with lots of tabs listed, within a few seconds you should make your way all the way down, leaving a nice clean list of tabs.

Over the course of a workday I tend to accumulate lots of browser windows, and even more tabs inside them.  Up to now, I would often lose track of what which tabs were open in which window and in which space. In the end, I would often just open a page again in a new tab of the window I happened to be in at the moment, increasing the overall clutter.
With the advent of persistent application state across reboots or application restarts as well as fullscreen apps in Mac OS X Lion that situation has gotten even worse.

The "Window" menu in Safari does not help too much, because it only shows the tabs of the currently focussed window. Today, while wondering why a website was not displaying correctly, I accidentally found a remarkably simple (and built-in!) way of showing all open tabs across all open Safari windows.

Just hit Cmd-Alt-A or pick "Activity" from the Window menu in any Safari window to open or focus the Activity overlay window.

It is usually used to determine what servers different parts of any given website are loaded from. However, even if you are not interested in that, this little popup contains a list of all currently open tabs, regardless of the window they are in.

Double clicking any entry in there will take you to the correct window and focus the desired tab. Nice and easy, not even an extension needs to be installed :) The only drawback I see is that you cannot sort that list, clicking the "Address" column header has no effect.

A final tip: When you open the window, it might have one or more of the entries expanded, making the list overly long. Even though there is no collapse-all feature I could find, you can rather quickly do so manually by selecting the top entry in the list and then repeatedly hit the left and down arrow keys. Left arrow will close the currently selected item, down arrow move to the next entry. Even with lots of tabs listed, within a few seconds you should make your way all the way down, leaving a nice clean list of tabs.

List all open Safari tabs across windows

com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control

After my recent Mac OS X 10.7 Lion upgrade I was greeted with a dialog box after reboot telling me that

com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue. Type the name and password of a user in the "Developer Tools" group to allow this.

No problem, I thought, and entered my credentials. Alas, to no avail. My name and password were rejected, which had me a little panicked at first, because I thought the OS upgrade might somehow have botched my account, potentially locking me out of my Mac later.

Hitting cancel would only get rid of the message for a few seconds, then it would reappear, again and again.
Turns out the solution was quite easy: Go the Mac App Store and download Xcode 4.1. Once the installer has finished downloading, run it to replace the Snow Leopard version of Xcode 4.0 with a Lion compatible one. Once that is done, the message will not appear again.

Please note: Maybe I could somehow have fiddled with my accounts privileges and group memberships, but as I needed Xcode anyhow, installing the correct version seemed the logical thing to do.
And by the way: Should the Xcode 4.1 installer seem to take forever, make sure there not this little popup hidden behind some of the other Windows on screen:

The installer will stall, until you close iTunes and the iTunesHelper (which may be running, even if iTunes is not. Use Activity Monitor to quit iTunesHelper if needed.)

Update: Apple has released an update to the Xcode 4.1 installer (4.1.1), which will fix this (iTunes) problem. As the release notes say, if you have already installed it, there is no need to update, as the included software is the same as before:

After my recent Mac OS X 10.7 Lion upgrade I was greeted with a dialog box after reboot telling me that

com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue. Type the name and password of a user in the "Developer Tools" group to allow this.

No problem, I thought, and entered my credentials. Alas, to no avail. My name and password were rejected, which had me a little panicked at first, because I thought the OS upgrade might somehow have botched my account, potentially locking me out of my Mac later.

Hitting cancel would only get rid of the message for a few seconds, then it would reappear, again and again.
Turns out the solution was quite easy: Go the Mac App Store and download Xcode 4.1. Once the installer has finished downloading, run it to replace the Snow Leopard version of Xcode 4.0 with a Lion compatible one. Once that is done, the message will not appear again.

Please note: Maybe I could somehow have fiddled with my accounts privileges and group memberships, but as I needed Xcode anyhow, installing the correct version seemed the logical thing to do.
And by the way: Should the Xcode 4.1 installer seem to take forever, make sure there not this little popup hidden behind some of the other Windows on screen:

The installer will stall, until you close iTunes and the iTunesHelper (which may be running, even if iTunes is not. Use Activity Monitor to quit iTunesHelper if needed.)

Update: Apple has released an update to the Xcode 4.1 installer (4.1.1), which will fix this (iTunes) problem. As the release notes say, if you have already installed it, there is no need to update, as the included software is the same as before:

com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control