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Re-Installing Leopard Has Surprises
Did a stupid thing a few days ago and agreed to beta test some software that required the use of Insantiy's APE file (Application Enhancer) - a strict "no no" for the Leopard users of this world. Before Leopard if you wanted to change or alter the dock, Insanity offered a neat little program that would do it for you and installed the APE file.

What Apple nor Insanity told anyone was that Leopard and APE together resulted in the blue screen of nothingness. That is, upon restart your system would not display your desktop or all your icons, it just displayed an empty blue screen. The mouse and keyboard worked but you couldn't do anything or go anywhere.

In the middle of installing the beta software I noticed it was installing APE and as quickly as I could, aborted the installation. I forgot all about it and after a situation with my friend's new iMac (see below) I decided to check out my own system and make sure all my hardware was up to snuff. It was but required a restart at the end of the diagnostics. Upon restart I got nada - just a blue screen. I tried all the tricks, even making it to the terminal and deleted the offending APE files (I thought) but still nothing. My machine was now useless unless I reinstalled Leopard and I dreaded the thought of losing all my work on the boot drive (I have 5 drives). Yes, I did have a backup of the system and I tried reinstalling from there but because I back up nightly that backup also included the newly added APE file.

So I reinstalled Leopard and selected to option to retain my previous setup. I did this was Tiger once and what you got was a folder half full of some user settings but apps and such all had to be re-serialized and it was a pain in the ass. Still, I hit the button and went on to bed because it said Leopard would install in just 20 minutes but the previous setup files would take 2 hours (it is a 1 terabyte drive). I tossed and turned all night dreading having to rebuild my entire system knowing it would take weeks to hone it back to my perfect view of excellence.

I get up this morning and to my complete surprise there was my old desktop. All the icons were lined up to the right and there were some duplicate icons pulled from the trash but nothing of serious value was missing. I was connected to the 'Net, Wifi worked as it should, the old dock was back with that ugly shelf and I was at v10.5,not 10.5.1 but that was quickly remedied. I don't know how Apple figured out how to do this but they have my undying respect and support for making my Mac computing life so easy.

Neighbor's New iMac Goes Belly-up!
I've owned three iMacs, four MaBooks, iPods, iPhones and a Mac Pro and in all that time have never experienced a hardware failure. I talked my neighbor into buying an iMac for converting his VHS and cassette tapes over to digital and he's been working on it diligently for two months. I run into him to ask how its going and he says something is wrong, his computer won't start up and all he gets is a question mark on his screen. I drop by, we check it out and I find the system can't find a hard drive. I call Apple Tech, they walk us through the test, agree it is a hard disk failure and give us an appointment with the Genius Bar in Downtown SF the following day (today).

We arrive, meet with "Steve" a personable guy who knows his stuff, he checks it out and says the hard drive went kaput. He apologized, put a rush on it and says the iMac will be back in 2-3 days barring tomorrow's holiday. No cost, of course. Neighbor did not buy AppleCare but still the machine is covered for a full year. You just don't get better service then that. God Bless Apple.

Removing Leopard's Dock Shelf
It's really incredibly easy. I hate that shelf and love those little white glow lights under active icon apps. I want the shelf removed, a transparent background so the icons just sort of sit at the bottom of the screen and beneath them the little glow lights when an app is active. Here's how you do it:

Got to:

- Macintosh HD
- System
- Library
- Core Services
-Right click on Dock.app and hit Show Package
- Contents
- Resources
Remove these graphics from Resources (you'll have to give you admin pwd):
- frontline.png
- scurve-xl.png
- scurve-sm.png
- scurve-m.png
- scurve-l.png

(You can copy them to another folder or just delete them, just get them out of Resources)

Next go to Applications/Utilities/Termarinal App and start Terminal.app

Type: killall Dock

The old shelf dock will fade down below the screen then rise again without the shelf and display only the icons and the glow lights. Click here a mini-screen shot of my dock without the shelf.