Quick Solution: Rooting your phone is actually much, much easier than I thought it would be. The two excellent guides that I used are Android and Me’s G1 rooting article and xda-developer’s G1 rooting article. Once you have rooted your phone, you can manually update to Cupcake (Android 1.5) without waiting for the OTA update.

The Whole Story
From what I have read and experienced, an out-of-the box T-Mobile Android G1 is completely reliant on T-Mobile for updates to the Android Operating System. The dilemma here for T-Mobile is probably that customers want timely updates, but they want those updates to be high-quality and bug-free. These two demands are opposing forces in the software development world: a high-quality and bug-free update takes time to build, and then takes lots more time testing for compatibility with millions of users running thousands of different applications in millions of different ways. A buggy update could be released quickly, but who really wants a buggy application?

An additional speculation of mine is that T-Moblie also has to maintain a reputation as well as remain competitive against the iPhone. If T-Mobile acts too quickly and releases a buggy update, then news headlines might read something like, “T-Mobile’s Cupcake turns out to be a dry Muffin” (or something more witty). Apple has a solid reputation of releasing stable updates, so T-Mobile has a high bar.

So, for the OTA updates, I can understand why T-Mobile seems to have shifted the release of Cupcake to the right 6 months.

Accept More Risk, Root your G1

I finally couldn’t wait any more for T-Mobile. Personally, I would prefer a 95% bug-less update now than a 99% bug-less update a month from now. But that’s me. Obviously, the potential risks in updating to a less-stable release of Android include data loss, wasted time, a dead G1, and missing important calls, SMSes, etc. I have waited long enough that I am betting that the process for rooting a G1 has been thoroughly tested and improved since it was first developed, so I gauge that risk at very low.

Using the above links, I found that rooting the G1 is very easy. I was prepared for some fancy commands and quick button pressing.

So I rooted my G1 and updated to the JesusFreke build of Android 1.5 (Cupcake). As you can see in the linked article, this includes the benefits of the Cupcake branch, plus multi-touch for the browser, an update app so you can always have the latest JF build, and (it seems) support for saving apps to your SD card and tethering.

So that’s that. It worked for me. Let me know if it has worked for you, and if so, what are your favorite builds?

Quick Answer: Try clearing some of the system memory.

The Whole Story

That is pretty much it.  I have a moderate amount of Apps installed, and each of the 3 home screen panes is about 1/3 to 1/2 full of icons.

My Solution

In the system settings, I sorted all applications by size. I noticed that my GMail storage was very large. Turns out, my GMail settings saved my entire inbox. Since I really didn’t need my whole inbox, I changed my settings to save only the last 30 days.

This put my system memory from about 7MB to over 24MB. That seemed to significantly improve performance.

However, I then noticed that the sync icon was in the status/notification bar at the top of the screen for a while.  Wile this icon was up, I also experienced slower performance.

Solution: Not exactly sure, but it seems to have stopped.

There are several WordPress posts that go over an issue of using the

[/sourcecode]

tag to write sourcecode.

Personally, I was very frustrated because while writing in Python, where whitespace matters, my indents would all be lost when switching between the visual and HTML editor in WordPress.

My solution was to wrap my

[sourcecode]

tags in <pre> tags.

Check the plugin?

I originally was using the

[/sourcecode]

tag from <a href="http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/">SyntaxHighlighter</a>, then found another one, called SyntaxHilighter Plus.

I don't have time to go over all of this, but I disabled the Plus version, re-enabled the regular SyntaxHighlighter, and made sure to wrap my

[sourcecode]

s in <pre> tags.

Symptoms

• You just installed GlowWorm.app
• Your computer will not boot (or not reach the login window, but the mouse appears) in normal mode
  • You can boot into safe mode
  • You can boot into single user mode

The quick answer: boot into “safe mode” and run the GlowWorm unistaller.app and disable firewall; reboot.

Problem Summary

After installing GlowWorm.app from the Apple Downloads page, my MacBook would not boot, or it would boot up to the blue screen that appears just before the login window (when the mouse appears), but no login window would appear.

The Whole Story

I was browsing Apple’s Downloads and downloaded a program called GlowWorm FW Lite. After I installed it (and during which it required my admin password) I think I started to run it. GlowWorm.app told me that there was an update and I think that I told it to upgrade. There was some popup that asked if I wanted to allow something to accept incoming connections… but I said “Deny”. For some reason (not sure if it was related to GlowWorm), I had to restart my computer. When my MacBook started to boot, it got as far the blue screen where the mouse appears. The next thing that I expected was the login window, but it never came.

I tried all of the things you can do according to the Apple Support Page (tried again, reset PRAM, selected a startup disk, etc) to no avail. I was able to boot into Safe Mode (hold shift as the computer is turned on and hold until the apple logo appears and the progress wheel starts spinning) and backup my documents. While in safe mode, I deleted GlowWorm.app to the trash and then emptied the trash. I used spotlight to look for any files called glowworm, but there were no results so I restarted.Same problem.So I went back into safe mode and looked where another Apple support article suggested that there might be a problem,

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

but there was nothing in that folder.

I remembered that earlier I was asked to either Allow or Deny something to accept incoming connections, so I opened up my System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall. At the bottom of my “Set access for specific services and applications” list, I found that service (I don’t remember what it was, but it did start with a “Q”) and took it off of the list. Because Safe Mode takes forever to boot, to be safe I also disabled the firewall by selecting the “Allow all incoming connections” radio button.

Then I thought it was odd that the GlowWorm.app didn’t have any support files when I looked earlier. It turns out, there is an app called uninstall.app located in

/Library/Application Support/glowworm/utilities/

I ran that and the traces of GlowWorm appeared to be gone. I rebooted and this time the login window appeared.

As I mentioned, I changed a few things before rebooting (firewall settings and installing), so I am not sure what the actual problem was, only that what I did seemed to fix the problem. Normally I might try to reproduce this error, but I don’t feel like flirting with the kind of danger that prevents my mac from booting.

The quick answer: export your data and reinstall WordPress.

The whole story:

So I used the cPanel interface of the web hoster and created a subdomain, blog, and set the document root to /www/blog/. When I would try to pull up www.blog.thewebsite.com , the browser would just redirect to www.thewebsite.com/, and no blog would appear.

I was going to go through all of the things that I did to try to hack-up WordPress so that I would not have to reinstall, but then I realized that none of that actually worked. I could get far enough that the page would show up and about half of the links would work, but there ended up being an issue with the permalinks.

What I had to do was use the Manage->Export feature of the WordPress admin area to save my categories, posts, etc. Then, to uninstall WordPress, I deleted all of the tables in my WordPress database, then ran the install.php script again. I probably could have kept the users table, and perhaps a few other tables with the plugin settings, but I didn’t. So I had to reactivate my plugins and all of the other options that I had changed from the default values.

If you have a better fix for this, please leave a comment!

1. “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver” error message OR
2. nothing happens when you launch help from one of the apps (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, etc)

I installed Adobe Web Premium CS3 on my computer, and in the applications folder were placed 7 or so icons all starting with “Adobe…” Most of these items weren’t even applications or aliases to such, they were just folders, so I had an extra mouse click (plus more searching) to launch one of these apps. So I created a folder called “Adobe” in my applications folder, stuck all of these adobe folders and files in there, and then made aliases for each of the applications and stuck those in the applications folder.

Each time I would launch one of these apps for the first time, I would get a message that said “Application has moved This application has been moved from the location in which it was originally installed. Some settings need to be repaired.” Each time I clicked Repair Now.

The apps seemed to work fine, until I tried to open Dreamweaver help, either from the help menu:

I would get this error: “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver”. In Fireworks, I wouldn’t even get an error message, nothing would happen.

I tried launching from the .app instead of the alias (just to dummy check), and got the same error. I also searched for “help” within the Adobe file I made, and found a folder called help. This was buried way deep, so I didn’t want to mess with that if I could find another way.

To check, I remembered that there are .apps just for help in the adobe suite. The first thing that I noticed was that there are 2 of them: Adobe Help Viewer 1.0.app and Adobe Help Viewer 1.1.app. Openeing Help Viewer 1.0.app seemed to only have help for Adobe Viewer and Pro.

But Help Viewer1.1.app had the rest of the suite.

I also think I remembered that when you ask for help from one of the apps (Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc) that it just opens the Help Viewer 1.1.app.

So if the application doesn’t know where it is, I thought about where a newly installed Adobe Application would think to find Help Viewer 1.1.app. If you notice in the screen shots of my applications folder, you can see that I happen to have a copy of Help Viewer 1.0.app in both my Applications folder and my Applications/Adobe folder.

So, the fix was to copy the Help Viewer 1.1.app in to the Applications folder. You don’t even have to restart your Dreamweaver.