Today the expert in coupling a radio-frequency single-electron transistor to a quantum dot formed in a silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructure is turning a year older and wiser. So raise your glasses, give a cheer, to dear Tim, the birthday boy of the basement of Wilder. have a great birthday, Tim, and don’t party too hard–it’d be nice to see you tomorrow… 
Here is your birthday present from me:
Alright, this one’s for all y’all computer-literate types out there (especially the Mac-savvy among you).
My iBook (G4, running 10.3.9) is having all kinds of shit-fits today about some kind of “shared library error”. This seems to be causing major problems with things like Preview, Internet Explorer (not that I care much on that one), the Shockwave plug-ins on Safari, and third-party applications like the carbonized version of Diablo II I was running just fine yesterday.
Here’s an example of the sorts of error messages it gives:
shared library error:
“B[diablo II (Carbon)][apple;Carbon;Multimedia][cfmpriv_quicktime][]”
Note: I’ve had to replace the greater than/less than symbols with corresponding closed/open brackets on account of the blog not cooperating.
I don’t even really know what the heck that means, but I have figured out where this all-important shared library resides. Of course, I can’t look inside it because, according to the computer, it can’t be opened on accoutn of OS X using the file. Something very similar crops up for Internet Explorer. Preview quits before it ever starts, with no error message to explain why. And, the Shockwave plugin gives an error message of “Unable to load plug-in”, which is fairly mundane I suppose, except that I usually don’t have problems with that Shockwave stuff in particular.
I’m okay with having this thing be crappy for today, although I don’t much like it, since about 90% of the Internet I’d like to access relies on some kind of Flash (for ads or content) that is causing some kind of fatal error in the browser, but if anybody has some time to help me sort this out tomorrow, I’m happy to owe you lunch sometime.
UPDATE: I’ve managed to use one of the other machines here in the office to download Firefox, which I’ve now installed on my machine. I’ve updated/re-downloaded Shockwave, and that seems to be in order. Still having major problems with Flash (try re-installing that as well), due to the same sort of “shared library error”. Tried updating Quicktime, as the error seems tied to something relating to it, but I can’t get the installer to work, since my machine seems to already have the latest version.
The man many of us will always remember as Barney Fife passed away this weekend. He lived a long and full life that touched the hearts of many through his humor; we should all be so fortunate.
You’ll be missed, funny man; thanks for all the laughs.
