Critter’s Code

Just a quick thing.

I’ve had odd occasions where the trackpad button on my mac book pro seemed to stick. The other day it wouldn’t click. It seemed stuck in the down position. I ran a small blade along the edge of the button. I thought about attempting to pry it off, but not knowing exactly how it all went together, I opted to take it into Apple.

I made an appointment for 3:45 pm this past Saturday. I was detained on my way by one of Apex’s finest, and missed my appointment. They were able to get me in after a 1/2 hour wait.

The guy look at it. Pushed down on the trackpad button a couple of times. He then flipped the computer over and removed the battery.

Trackpad button now goes clicky clicky.

My battery had slowly expanded. Just a hair, but expanded none the less. The expansion of the battery was keeping the button pressed up from the bottom.

The pricing of a new battery was kind of interesting. If I bought it through the ‘Genius Bar’ it would cost $99.00 and come with a 30 day warranty, and I would have to turn in my old battery. If I bought it through the Apple store, it would cost $129, come with a 1 year warranty, and I could keep the old battery. *shrug*

so there… if your trackpad button seems to be stuck.. and it doesn’t look like it’s crammed with peanut butter or something… check the battery.

My good deed for the day is done. I have shared information that might at some point be valuable to… someone . ha. *shrug*

I had Carbonite installed as an online backup solution for a little bit, but ended up uninstalling the trial (via the preference panel) due to a lack of extra funding to throw their way.

I noticed this morning that the cpu kept jumping on my mac, so I popped open the Console and saw this:

I searched around online, but couldn’t really find anything that helped. I searched around to see where things were launched from, and found that /Library/LaunchAgents/ had these two plist files in it:

I do know that you need to unload a plist that has been launched, so I typed the following into Terminal

You will have to authenticate after each command. After doing that I was able to delete the files and all was well.

I do want to throw in that I much prefer Carbonite over Mozy. Mozy after a bit of time always seemed to just stop working for me. I’d have to re-install and then it would be good for a bit, etc, repeat. The only reason I uninstalled Carbonite was the inability to dish out the extra cash (side effect of the unemployment movement)  meh.

I can neither confirm nor deny the fact that from time to time I might allegedly download TV shows or movies from the internetz.

Theoretically when one would supposedly do this, one might be presented with a directory full of zip files:

HypotheticalTVSHOW1.zip
HypotheticalTVSHOW2.zip
HypotheticalTVSHOW3.zip
HypotheticalTVSHOW4.zip
HypotheticalTVSHOW5.zip

If one should stumble upon this situation. Rather than double-clicking each *.zip file (which most of the time creates folders for each file extracted)… you can run a command via Terminal which will extract all the files in the same directory. So.. fire up Terminal and navigate to the directory where all the zip files are stored.

Theoretically in this case, I might have them stored in a zip folder on my desktop.

cd “/Users/critter/Desktop/zips” [Return]

Once there you just need to type this:

unzip \*.zip [Return]

You will then be presented (if there are any duplicate files being uncompressed with the following:

replace duplicatefile.avi? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename:

Just type either ‘y‘, ‘n‘, ‘A‘, ‘N‘, or ‘r‘ and hit [Return]

done.. if that’s what might possibly, sorta, kinda be happening.
Allegedly.

This morning I decided to take the plunge and perform the 10.5.7 update for my Mac. Mind you… I say take the plunge. I get no where as nervous running an update on my Mac as I did my PC’s *shrug* just sayin..

After it rebooted I started to get a notification from little snitch that “ocspd” wanted to connect to “EVIntl-ocsp.verisign.com” on port 80. I wasn’t sure what this was, but I did know that it never occurred prior to the update. A little interweb searching brought me to this Apple discussion post, where someone stated what “ocspd” was.

ocspd is the “Online Certificate Status Protocol” daemon that processes all certificate validation. This handles both CRL – Certificate Revocation Lists & OCSP – Online Certificate Status Protocol validation of certificates. It’s part of both the part of the Keychain and certificate framework. Verisign is one of the common providers of Internet certificates so it’s one of the services the ocspd process will contact for certificate updates and verification.

You do want to allow this process to connect, yes. Only if it were attempting to contact some completely unknown site would it be cause for followup to verify the site.

Now, of course, they could be full of shit and have no idea what they are talking about, but since it’s on the internet, we all know it is true.

So… since it’s not illegal software that we are trying to block from contacting it’s website.. you should be alright.

Anyway… it’s been ages.. hugs and kisses to you all.