Elegant Chaos

Occasionally I've had errors where Software Update refused to download something, telling me that I didn't have permissions to save the updated file.

In previous systems I think these files went into the /tmp folder, but in Snow Leopard they don't, and I've finally managed to work out where they do go - /Library/Updates.

On my machine, somehow, I'd ended up with a couple of folders inside this one which were owned by another user, and which didn't have group write permission.

To fix the problem, I did the following in a terminal window:

• > sudo chown -R :admin /Library/Updates
• > sudo chmod -R a+rwx /Library/Updates

You need to replace with your actual user name. In fact, I suspect that it doesn't matter who owns the files as long as they belong to the admin group, so if you want to be a little bit more security conscious, you could probably do this:

• > sudo chown -R :admin /Library/Updates
• > sudo chmod -R g+rwx /Library/Updates

I've just installed 10.5.5 on my Mac here at work, and for some inexplicable reason Synergy seems to no longer be working.

I'd be interested to hear of anyone else who's having this problem - especially if they can figure out a solution...
Tags: synergy, macos

One little GDC note in passing - I noticed a surprisingly high number of folks with Apple laptops. I did an ad-hoc survey by walking from one end of the convention centre to the other, counting non-apple laptops and resetting to zero when I saw an Apple one. One average I got to about 6. A ratio of 6:1 isn't bad - definitely larger than Apple's alleged market share.