No kidding. In an attempt to replicate first hand the Flash upload bug that is in Leopard 10.5 we attempted to upgrade one of our less used machines. During the installation it stopped and said that the installation couldn’t be performed on the hard drive and to restart the system and try again.

About 10 seconds into the restart the computer would shut off. It did this every time. I tried starting the computer in Firewire device mode and connected the system to another Mac to see what I could see. The internal hard drive didn’t show up at all. Running Disk Utility found it, but couldn’t repair it.

Then next step was to reformat the hard drive and try the install again. This proved to be futile as well. Leopard still couldn’t install to the hard drive. The only course of action now was a new hard drive. This got Leopard installed and the computer back to working.

I was able to reproduce the Flash Upload problem with the Certificate Creator and a clean install of Leopard. Luckily Apple has an update 10.5.1 that fixes this issue along with some others. After updating to to 10.5.1 the upload feature of the Certificate Creator works again.

BACKUP!

I’m pretty happy with my use of Parallels on my 17″ MacBook Pro. I don’t get into Windows that often, however when I do it fills my needs. I do see a lot of people out there that are moving to Fusion, this article on MacWorld discusses the process of moving your Parallels VM to Fusion.

When doing desktop applications we typically need to create installers if we don’t have the luxury of playing back from a CD-ROM. For Windows we use InstallShield. For the Mac we haven’t had a need, for our last desktop applications like The Keller Williams Red Pages on the Macintosh version we just had directions for the end user to copy the application folder to their hard drive. I have used Installer Vise, which is a cross platform installer. Vise isn’t a bad solution and worth looking into. It’s been a few years since I used it (at least 5 years ago), but there is a pricing model.

I came across an open source project EasyEclipse that is free and looks like it will fill the needs for Macintosh installers.

Of course any desktop development we seem to be moving to Adobe Apollo so building a custom and full installer is not necessary as the Apollo Framework handles the install.