Trackpad gestures broken in Snow Leopard

At some point last week I realized, that I could not use the “Rotate” gesture on my MBP (e.g. in Preview). It was just gone. After some googling I figured that the Three- and Fourfinger gestures were broken, too. So what happend? Apparently no one really knows so far. There is only an Apple-Technician, who posted that weird hint at the Apple-Discussions-Board. But the good news is: It works!

All you need to do is to shutdown your machine and boot into single user mode by holding [cmd] + “s”
Once you made it to the root command line, you force a filesystem-check of your system disk by typing

fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2
reboot

And afterwards everything should be in place again.
Astonishing.

Uninstall Lotus Notes 8.5 from Mac OSX

At some point I wanted to completely erase and reinstall my Lotus Notes 8.5 installation.
Turns out, that dragging the app into the Trash is not enough – the user preferences are still kept.
But finally I found help in the IBM-Documentation-Jungle:

You can uninstall IBM^® Lotus^® Notes^® by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes using the uninstaller application supplied with the Notes install media. This preserves user data. As well, you can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Apple^® Mac OS X^® trash bin:

• Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
  • /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg
  • /Library/Receipts/xpdcoreinstaller.pkg

Note To reinstall after uninstalling, you may also need to delete the following items prior to reinstalling Notes:

Note If you installed the Notes basic configuration, rather than the standard configuration, you can uninstall the Notes basic configuration by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Mac OS X trash bin:

• /Applications/Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
• /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg

That did the trick for me.
Next time I started the installer, it had forgotten everything and started from scratch:

Fun with Trash can in Mac OSX

I figured, that at some point – if you have BootCamp installed it might come to the case, that your trash can in the doc looks always  filled, although the trash seems to be emtpy.

If you open up a finder window, all you can see is this strange link:

I managed to work around this, by “ejecting” my BootCamp partition/drive.

Other folks have reported to get this fixed by booting from your Windows partition, right-click on the drive ->Properties ->Tools->Check Now->Automatically fix filesystem errors.

Did not test this on my own.

How to flush DNS Cache in MAC OSX?

Ever wondered, why your fresh entries on the DNS server never seem to appear on your mac right away?

Leopard is caching DNS information quite long. So if you want to flush your cache just take a terminal and hack in the words of magic:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

I can never memorize that, so I wrote it here.

Once and for all.