Having trouble removing some pesky icons that have gotten stuck in the Finder’s sidebar? If you’re on Lion or Snow Leopard, the solution is easy:

1. Click on the folder and drag it away from the sidebar
2. Before you let go of the mouse button, hold down the Command (⌘) key
3. Now that you’re holding down the Command (⌘) key, release the mouse button
4. The icon should now finally disappear from your sidebar in a puff of smoke
5. Hooray!

(Credit: Hybridair at MacRumors Forums)

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Here’s an interesting thing to consider next time you’re looking through your web stats: the popularity of Safari 4 and later (the desktop version, not the iOS one) probably looks way higher than it actually is.

Safari’s “Top Sites” feature checks sites to see if any content has changed since you were last there (and also to draw the preview images), and it does this reasonably often. The way it checks is to load your website behind the scenes, which means your server gets hit, and your stats show Safari’s more popular with each refresh.

Perhaps Apple should make the background thread use a different user agent string so that we can differentiate real requests from the Top Sites updates?

Just over a year ago, I created a bunch of SSL certs following the instructions here: http://www.devklog.net/2008/05/25/generating-ssl-certificates-that-will-make-firefox-3-happy/

I’m having some interesting problems creating a new certificate to replace an expired one.

When I created a new certificate (as a leaf of a self-signed CA cert), to replace the expired leaf, I got a message saying that the certificate already existed.

I backed up and then deleted the expired cert and tried again, to no avail.

I saw this old thread which seems related to the problems I’m having, but the solutions there didn’t help me (I’m already manually picking serial numbers in the format yyyymmddnn, where nn is the number of certificates I’ve created that day, and deleting the Certificate Authority folder from Application Support in my home library didn’t make a difference either).

Anyone else had similar trouble? How did you resolve it?

I ran into some problems with Perl’s CPAN installer on Snow Leopard, notably, it didn’t work once Bundle::CPAN was installed. Every time I tried to install a package I’d end up with an error like this:

Catching error: 'Can\'t call method "value" on an undefined value at /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm line 64.
' at /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/CPAN.pm line 281
CPAN::shell() called at /usr/bin/cpan5.10.0 line 199

Not good. So, how to fix it? Move the broken IO::Uncompress module out of the way. In a terminal window, copy and paste the following

sudo mv /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm-broken

Once that’s been shifted out the way, it should work provided CPAN was configured with the proper paths to your tar, bzip2 and gzip executables (if not, nuke your /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/CPAN/Config.pm and start over).

Note: This isn’t a long-term solution, some things like CPAN::SQLite won’t install if IO::Uncompress::RawInflate is missing, but at least it gets some functionality back into CPAN. I’m very interested in hearing of any better fixes for this.

That was a bit odd. My iPhone 3G started acting a bit weird so I turned it off. I turned it back on, and it took what seemed like forever to start back up.

When it eventually did come back, it was deactivated! It had the connect-to-itunes image (not text like the image above) at the top of the screen, no service name in the top-left corner, a “slide for emergency” thing at the bottom and an info button which showed the ICC ID and IMEI.

In a bit of a panic I turned it off and on again.

It took another eternity to start back up.

And then it booted normally, with the “iPhone is activated” message. Is my iPhone dying, or is it just time for a factory restore in iTunes?