Word!

Typical Microsoft fiasco: "The Metro design language… no wait! It's Windows 8 Store-style. Or is it? Nah, it's Windows Store App-style. What is it called properly again? Even we don't know."

Quite frequently these messages popped up in my system.log:

Jun 3 00:32:13 zoidberg.z.net mdworker[5556]: Unable to talk to lsboxd Jun 3 00:32:13 zoidberg.z.net sandboxd[5560] ([5558]): mdworker(5558) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

Browsing for an explanation for these sandbox issues I found out that they're not quite uncommon for systems which were upgraded directly from 10.6 to 10.8 (exactly what I did). A frequently recommended solution is to boot into safe mode, which I tried. However, my machine would always freeze at the same fsck stage during safe boot. It turns out that this is due to a bug in fsck_hfs in OSX (at least up to 10.8.3) which pops up when your machine has more than 2GB of main memory. Luckily It's easy to workaround this bug, by putting a fsck_hfs cover in place which always provides the necessary -c2g option to fsck_hfs.

$ sudo -s $ sudo mv /sbin/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck_hfs.orig $ cat << EOF > /sbin/fsck_hfs #!/bin/sh echo /sbin/fsck_hfs -c2g $* /sbin/fsck_hfs.orig -c2g $* EOF $ chown root:wheel /sbin/fsck_hfs $ chmod 555 /sbin/fsck_hfs

[Source]
After booting into safe mode and logging into my account, it seems the sandbox issues have indeed vanished.

When thinking about my favorite Metro app on Windows 8 I realized that there is none. I really like the design language of Metro, but there's just no desktop app that boosts my productivity compared to any old school Windows app. In contrast, I think that Metro apps slow me down. This is especially true when it comes to working with documents, which is really clumsy with current Metro apps.

Here documents are (also) available in PowerShell. If you directly write a here doc into a file, make sure the @" is at the immediate start of a line (no indentation)!

Example:

@' $FOOBAR=Foobar '@ > "${TMPFILE}.ps1"

Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out