Tag: Mac

Fixing FilePlanet’s stupidity on the Mac

Posted on by yiming


Lately I haven’t been able to download files from fileplanet.com via my Mac. It’s inane, because downloads apparently requires an ActiveX control. I’m appalled at the utter stupidity of excluding all non-Windows platform users from your download service, just to set up a download queue. Can’t you put up a Flash control instead? Just as shiny and unusable, but actually compatible with other operating systems.

It gets better. The good news – the designer had some foresight to set up a fallback mechanism, to use plain old HTML queue. The bad news – it simply presents you with a 403 Forbidden when clicked.

As it turns out, I found a post that contained a possible solution. Actually, that post is a bit unnecessarily complicated. Apparently, they’re blocking all browsers without a Windows user agent. On the fallback solution that was supposed to work for all platforms. Argh.

Until Fileplanet addresses this issue (which could be tomorrow. or never), the simplest solution (that worked for me) was to switch my user agent in Firefox (via the aforementioned and highly recommended User Agent Switcher) to a Windows browser (try the default Opera XP user agent). Then, click on the fallback queuing link, and it should kick you into the download page.

Note that the User Agent option in Safari (at least, v2.0.x) Debug menu will not work straight up. Believe me, as a primarily Safari user, I’ve tried hard to make this work. Because Fileplanet pops up a new window when download is selected, and the Debug menu setting only sets it for the active window. As the download window is a pop-up, you do not get a chance to intervene and change the User Agent code before FilePlanet denies you access to it. So for now, Firefox + User Agent Switcher is the solution. If you have a browser (or Safari, in the future) which allows the fake user agent setting to persist across windows spawned from the initial window, that browser would work too.

UPDATE 3/27/2009:
Feedback in the comments section reports that this is still a problem for many users. Appalling. It’s been 2 years.

/Library/Java/Extensions, MATLAB errors, and you

Posted on by yiming

If you installed MATLAB 2006b on OS X and encountered this error when Matlab starts up:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxp/properties/schemaSource
at org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl.setAttribute(DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl.java:118)
at com.mathworks.xml.XMLValidator.validateFile(XMLValidator.java:54)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.Product.getItems(Product.java:310)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.pathChanged(ProductInfoUtils.java:160)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.<init>(ProductInfoUtils.java:67)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.getAllProductsInfo(ProductInfoUtils.java:910)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.<clinit>(ProductInfoUtils.java:53)
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:164)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.callClassForName(StartupClassLoader.java:304)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.access$000(StartupClassLoader.java:27)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader$LoadInfo.<init>(StartupClassLoader.java:80)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.addLoadInfo(StartupClassLoader.java:219)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.createLoadInfos(StartupClassLoader.java:195)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.access$500(StartupClassLoader.java:27)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader$2.run(StartupClassLoader.java:147)
at java.util.TimerThread.mainLoop(Timer.java:512)
at java.util.TimerThread.run(Timer.java:462)
Exception in thread "Timer-2" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:164)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.callClassForName(StartupClassLoader.java:304)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.access$000(StartupClassLoader.java:27)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader$LoadInfo.<init>(StartupClassLoader.java:80)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.addLoadInfo(StartupClassLoader.java:219)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.createLoadInfos(StartupClassLoader.java:195)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader.access$500(StartupClassLoader.java:27)
at com.mathworks.mde.desk.StartupClassLoader$2.run(StartupClassLoader.java:147)
at java.util.TimerThread.mainLoop(Timer.java:512)
at java.util.TimerThread.run(Timer.java:462)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.Product.getItems(Product.java:317)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.pathChanged(ProductInfoUtils.java:160)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.<init>(ProductInfoUtils.java:67)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.getAllProductsInfo(ProductInfoUtils.java:910)
at com.mathworks.mlwidgets.util.productinfo.ProductInfoUtils.<clinit>(ProductInfoUtils.java:53)
... 11 more

or something similar, you may have hit one of the mysterious gotchas of Mac OS X 10.4. In /Library/Java/Extensions (or another one of these system Java directories), you have a conflicting copy of xerces.jar, probably from another software package that rudely installed these extensions without informing you of it. Due to the way Java classpaths are being resolved, apparently the copy in Extensions overrides the copy in Matlab’s directory.

The symptoms of this: among other things, Matlab will throw these exceptions at startup; you can’t open certain panels or windows via the menu bar; you also cannot select certain panels in the Preferences window. Whenever you perform one of these operations, you’ll receive a NoClassDefFoundError on one of the Matlab widget classes, even though it already exists in the Matlab directory.

This is a rather classic gotcha, but a lot of people wouldn’t even realize /Library/Java/Extensions actually exists. If you went off chasing the red herring of the NoClassDefFound exception, or went tracing StartupClassLoader.java, you’d never realize the core cause of the issue.

/Library is sometimes an incomprehensible morass of things that cause mysterious failures in other applications (InputManagers, anyone?) and end up exceedingly difficult to trace.