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Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset Apps
A few nights ago, the battery fell out of the bottom of my TiBook 400 while it was asleep, resulting in a complete system reset. This left the system date set to 12/31/1969 on restart, and I've got iCal set to launch automatically on login.

After realizing the problem, I fixed the date settings and restarted. When iCal came back up, it immediately put up an empty alert window and hung, pegging the CPU. I believe it may have been trying to alert me to every event in my calendar since I started keeping it. Force-quitting iCal and restarting it just produced the same scenario over and over again.

After some poking around, I finally found the cure: in your user's Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist file, there is an entry named lastHearBeatDate (yes, it's Hear not Heart). Its value was a date string that looked like this:
19691231T224444-0800
I corrected it to somewhere near the right time (20050213T224444-0800), saved the edited plist file, and started iCal. Everything has been fine since.
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Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset | 3 comments | Create New Account
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Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset
Authored by: morgion on Feb 17, '05 11:59:37AM

I've encountered this problem before as well. Another solution (worked for me, YMMV):
1) quit iCal
2) move your ~/Library/Calendars folder to the Desktop
3) start iCal, then quit it
4) move the Calendars folder on your Desktop back into your Library, replacing the auto-generated folder that iCal put there

A few more steps, but I don't usually like to manually change preference files unless absolutely necessary; less chance of accidentally wrecking something. ;-)



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Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset
Authored by: stonetownmike on Feb 17, '05 02:06:30PM

This has happened to me too, not just with iCal but with any app. that picks up the current date and time -- my email app. for instance. My question is, why doesn't the system synchronize with my network time server after a reset? It's set in system prefs to set the date and time automatically, but in this case it doesn't. Shouldn't there be a workaround not just for iCal but for the whole system?



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Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset
Authored by: stealthgeek on Feb 17, '05 03:13:46PM

Sorry if this is a silly question, but wouldn't it be sufficient to simply delete de preference file?

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Stealthgeek



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