Rebooting Mac

Mac has the uncanny habit of screwing itself up (atleast mine does) and then not telling the user what happened. Let me explain. All of a sudden, the initial grey screen comes up with the loading "rotator" thingy. And thats about it. Nothing more happens. And when I force shutdown and restart, it does not actually start from the beginning, meaning it does not do a "CHUNNNGGG" chime sound when restarting.

And again, the cloud was the Good Samaritan (who else is there). Pressing the keyboard combination of "Command(Apple)-Option-P-R" and holding it like that (NB: it needs some skill to hold this key combination) until the chime sounds twice should resolve the issue. But, my machine seems to be a bit more adamant than that. Even though I have "CHUNNNG"ed it, it still stops are the rotator screen. :-( Will update the post as and when I find a solution.

Source: TUAW

Wrong Architecture issue in Mac

I maintain a common source code base for both PPC and x86 architecture in Mac and just recompile (with different Makefiles) in both architectures. Once, I had forgotten to clean up a library archive which I had compiled in x86. So, when I tried compiling the library in PPC, I ended up with the following error.

ld: common symbols not allowed with MH_DYLIB output format with 
the -multi_module option
mymainfile.o definition of common _gsDeviceFreeMutex (size 44)
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed

Just cleaning up the x86-compiled library archive removed the above error. And this drank few hours off my work-day. But, I ended up wiser ;-)