Chris.Weekly.org - A Web Space

I share a monitor between a Mac Pro tower and a Dell PC laptop, using a KVM switch. A couple days ago, toggling to the Mac resulted in a totally blank screen. Thinking it was a problem w/ the KVM switch itself (as I’d run into this trouble w/ a previous switch) I plugged the monitor directly into the Mac… with no change. I was able to launch itunes using keyboard shortcuts, so I could confirm OS X was running fine. After restarting the Mac, doing tests on the monitor and googling around, I still was faced with no display. This is a particularly frustrating problem to have, since most solutions involve being able to see what you’re doing. Finally a friend and mac guru suggested I try resetting the PRAM. It worked! I’m posting this in case anyone else has Mac display issues.

To reset your Mac’s PRAM:
1. Power the machine down
2. Hold down Command+Option+P+R all at the same time
3. Power the machine back up, while holding those keys down
4. Listen for the boot chimes to sound several times (I cycled it 5 times before releasing the keys)
5. Release the keys and cross your fingers.

With luck the reset PRAM will eliminate whatever temporary issue was getting in your way.
Here’s Apple’s page on this topic: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Many thanks to EJ for the help!

This will only interest web developers.

Using Firefox 3.0.10 on XP, with the firebug console open, I kept noticing seemingly arbitrary errors like this:
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED) [nsIRequest.name]” nsresult: “0×80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js :: anonymous :: line 282″ data: no]
file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js
Line 282

I finally realized this was triggered by using the right-click context menu option “View Selection Source” (which is very useful for examining generated markup, e.g. after scripted DOM manipulation). It’s a minor bug in Mozilla’s code that seems harmless enough.

Anyway thought I’d share in case anyone else is scratching their head wondering why this error is polluting their console logs.