ToonBoom StoryBoard 8.1 stopped working after I updated my Mac to 10.6.3

I don't know if it's directly related, but ToonBoom StoryBoard 8.1 stopped working after I updated my Mac to 10.6.3. Darn it!

No Jam Pack

Wasted a whole last night, and still couldn't get the Jam pack form the Logic Pro 9 Jam pack content disk set 1 to 3 installed. I serached the web and found that a lot of people have the similar problem, and surprisingly there is still NO solution to the problem. Someday if I really run out of things to do, I might try it again, but not now.

Install iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 5 saperately

I was told that in order to keep my original XCode and iPhone SDK environment clean, I should install the beta SDK, like iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 5, separately. I tried twice but they both failed, stuck at the screen saying "Prepare for Installation ...".

Eventually I found a great way to solve the problem: reboot. After rebooted, I could install the beta SDK in a new DeveloperBeta folder. Problem solved!

Crazy Adobe Illustrator CS3 on my Mac when dealing with Chinese fonts and number

My first experience with Adobe Illustrator CS3 wasn't a good one. The line breaks in text area seemed ot be messed up, until I found out that I have to click the paragraph break button in the "proper way" at the tool bar.

But the I encountered I problem that I couldn't resolve. No matter what I do, all the numbers I typed turned into some crazy shit symbol. After struggling for half an hour, I finally give up. I wonder if it's a bug or something.

On the positive note, I found that my Windows Chinese font can work with Mac OSX without problem at all. Pretty darn cool.

StreetFighter IV for iPhone requires reboot sometimes

I found out that sometimes if the StreetFighter IV started behaving (like not starting up), I needed to reboot the iPod Touch in order to make it working again.

Opening Mac Mini (Late 2009 model)

It turns out that it was pretty darn easy to open up my Mac Mini (Late 2009 model). All it took was a US$3.50 putty knief from Lowe's . I picked a standard flex putty knief with relatively sharp tip and one that's not too stiff, and it worked out pretty well. After examined the interior a bit, I closed it.

The only downside of opening the Mac Mini is that after I closed it up, I had to boot to the Windows 7 side, allowed it to force me to reboot, and then need to boot back to Windows 7 again, and waited for more than 15 minutes to let Windows 7 recognize all the external devices all over again. It's kind of stupid that while the Mac OSX side took no time to recognize everything, Windows 7 took SO LONG to do the same thing. But eventually it will be done, and all is well after then.

So that's why those "empty folders" in iTune couldn't be deleted

I spent quite some time trying to delete the seemingly empty folder within iTune music folder, but had no luck. I tried scripts, and even commercial application like Spring Cleaning, but still couldn't figure out why those folders didn't get deleted.

Finally I booted the system in Windows 7, and I instantly found out why. There were still some thumbnails in those folders, and that's why they couldn't be deleted by all sort of programs.

So I used XYplorer to find out those folder that were less than 200K in size and deleted them. After then I switched back to Mac, and need to manually manage some folders that contained music which for some mysterious reason didn't get migrated to new folder tree structure.

After about 1 to 2 hours, I finally have a clean iTune music folder structure. I even copied it to the share Z drive so that Windows Media Center can access those songs.

Cleaning up iTune Library

The moment I moved to Mac OSX, I decided to more the whole iTune library for Windows world to the Mac world. I completed the process, but found out that a lot of files have messed up ID3 Tags and filename. It seems like some of the ID3 Tag are not really in unicode format, and those they showed up incorrectly in iTune under Mac. So I decided to spend some time to fix them all up.

At first I was trying to use a program called MusicBrainz Picard, but it didn't work for me. Then someone told me that there's a tool called Unicode Rewrite that may work. I tried and it didn't.

Finally I found something that actually worked for me: I loaded those problem files in the Windows app Mp3Tag, selected them all, and saved them again. Interesting enough, 95% of the problem files was fixed, although I still need to manually fixed some of the files.

After I fixed all the tags, I use "Consolidate" feature of iTune on Mac, and it changed all the folder and file names based on the proper ID3 Tag, now instead of crazy file name, I got all the file name in human readable form.

But then I faced another problem. iTune Consolidate files, but didn't remove all those leftover empty folder. Right now I am using Mr.Clean to clean them up. Hope it works.