E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Try, try again

This is really one of the most maddening things that OS X does: 

The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.

Try quitting applications and try again.

Hey, you're the damn computer -- try telling me what those applications are! Try telling me what files are in use! Try letting me override!

Monday, September 12th, 2005
+
4 comments

Some related posts: Johnny can too code • QuickTime 0, Open Source 1 • Mac troubleshooting tips + bonus rant
• Comment from Quentin Stafford-Fraser, later that day

Agreed - this has always bugged me, and Windows does just the same.

Linux has an 'fuser' command which allows you to find out which processes are using a disk - you can do something like fuser -vm /home. I haven't found an equivalent in OS X, though there may be some combination of options to lsof which would give you something similar.

Either way, it should really be a button in the dialog box that would give you the info.

• Comment from Russell Edwards, 2 days later

Good call Quentin, man lsof reveals lsof +D [path] . Worked great for me.

• Comment from Paul, 3 days later

Very nice!

• Comment from Michael Abbott, 22 months later

I know I'm two years late, but I had the same problem today, and found this page on google.

I found that you can force an eject in the terminal: cd /Volumes and then type

hdiutil eject -force drive-name/

and it's gone! No idea really how safe this is. I quit everything first, but didn't want to reboot.

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