Today I tried to open a VMware fusion virtual machine on my mac. Last time I had used it is more than 8 month ago. As far as I can remember, everything worked flawlessly at the time and I can’t remember upgrading VMware since. But today it complained: “VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files.” Bugger.

Some forum thread on the offcial website suggests to reinstall the software. That obviously sucks. The working... Read more.

This stupid bug has annoyed me for quite some time, and as quite a few other sufferers I have lodged a bug report with apple. However, fixing problems with FileVault obviously is not the highest priority for the apple developer team. To my frustration. Using an encrypted home folder prevents Mac OS to read the user’s customizations regarding file and MIME type associations. The suggested workaround is to reset the LaunchServices database. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help much in most cases.

Lucky for me, one brave programmer came up with a much cleverer solution: Martin Kopischke wrote a little shell... Read more.