Archive for May, 2008

Disk Warrior & damaged Journaling data

May 15, 2008

If an application on OS X has damaged the Journaling data, then when you try to run Disk Warrior, you may get this error:the new directory cannot replace the original directory due to a mac os services failure. You may be able to work around this problem by temporarily turning off Journaling via Disk Utility:

  1. Open Disk Utility
  2. Select the Volume of the drive
  3. Hold down the Option key on the keyboard
  4. Go to the File menu - select Disable Journaling

Now run Disk Warrior again. Afterwards, you can turn back journaling. I spend many hours trying to get Disk Warrior to rebuild my file-system and after many futile searches, I contacted the Disk Warrior Support, and they suggested this solution. The good news is that in my case it worked.

OS X 10.5, SyncServer takes 100% of CPU

May 6, 2008

For the past couple of days a process called SyncServer started every 15 minutes or so and it would take over a 100% of the CPU on my MacBook Pro. Not quite sure what initiated this problem, but I found the remedy discussed in this Apple support case to be useful and apparently effective (well at least so far). I did have .Mac and BlackJack synchronization, so not sure if either of these applications caused this problem or not.

Here is the command that you’ll need to run (broken into a set of cd commands to fit the width of this column).
$ cd /System/Library/Frameworks/
$ cd SyncServices.framework/Versions/
$ cd A/Resources/
$ ./resetsync.pl full

How to use JMeter to load test Flex applications

May 6, 2008

JMeter, AMF setting for HTTP SamplerFlex applications use a binary protocol called AMF. The easiest way to use JMeter with a Flex application is to use Charles (the indispensable 100% pure Java cross platform http debugging proxy). Here are the steps:

  1. Start Charles and visit the site whose Flex application you wish to load test. In Charles, you will see the entire HTTP traffic.
  2. Click on the Charles’s Sequence panel to see the ordered list of HTTP requests.
  3. Right click (on Mac control click) and save the HTTP request corresponding to a Flex AMF call to a file.
  4. On JMeter create a new HTTP sampler for this request. Set the Send a File with Request to the file that you saved on the step before. Set the MIME Type to application/x-amp (click here to see the JMeter screen)

That is really it. Just save the request using Charles, and then reference it in the JMeter HTTP Sampler. Couldn’t get much easier than this. The solution gets a bit more complicated if you need to read the requests and extract data for use in subsequent requests. To do this, you’ll have to write some code. I’ll add an entry on how to do this soon.

How to change the default version of JDK on the Mac

May 4, 2008


Mac Java Preferences
On the Mac, there is an application called Java Preferences. You can use the Spotlight to find it. Launch the Java Preferences and in the Java Application Runtime Settings panel, drag the version of the JDK that you wish to use to the top. Save and restart any terminal applications that you may have had opened and you should be set.