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Who knew Rush Limbaugh was such a...geek? In mid-February, the conservative talk-show host publicly asked Steve Jobs for help fixing some bugs that had been plaguing him. Limbaugh then described the problems he was having and told us that Apple had gotten in touch and was working on the problem. Now, a month later, Rush says Apple has fixed the bugs. Read on for some impressive detail.

Last time I was in New York or maybe two times ago, I asked on air, an open-air plea to Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, Inc., to help out with a couple problems I was having with the new operating system: OS 10.5 Leopard...Both have been resolved through the diligent work of an engineer that Apple assigned my IT guy, and the primary problem was with their Time Machine program.

They've got this great backup program called Time Machine, and it automatically backs up every hour. You can have a third-party application to set the interval to different times if you don't want to have it done every hour and fill up the backup drive. Regardless, I live.. in my e-mail application; because I don't use the phone much, because I don't like the phone. There's always somebody on the other end... E-mail has become my number-one way of communicating with people, and that's where I do all of my work... I've got four — I got them installed, by the way, last weekend — brand-new Mac Pros, 32 gigs of RAM, eight core processors, all the way the fastest speed, whatever they are. I can't remember off the top of the bat. Oh! This is funny, too. I wanted to get two super-drive bays. I've put a Blu-ray drive in the top bay. When I mentioned this last time, one of the snarky comments in one of these blogs was, "I don't think Limbaugh even knows what Blu-ray is, because Apple has not made Blu-ray available."

Well, Apple didn't, but there are third-parties. I've got a Blu-ray drive, and I've got some Blu-ray blank disks, dual-sided, 50 gigabyte. Now, you can't play Blu-ray movies on them because the hardware is not on the computer yet to play Blu-ray movies, but... I got it for data transfer. Anyway, so the Blu-ray is in there and the thing is working just fine and dandy. But the mail program, this Time Machine, is amazing. It just backs up everything on the computer as often as you want, every hour or less.., and then you can go back in time... If you've deleted an e-mail accidentally or any other file from anywhere on the computer, you can go back and get it and have it restored to the present day on your hard drive — except, mail wouldn't do that. I couldn't go back and access mail. I could see it. The e-mail or a series of e-mails that I wanted from say three months were there.

I'd click restore, and they did restore, but in some esoteric file in the user library in an unidentified way, so I couldn't identify which ones they were. They did not restore them in the mail index in the actual application. An Apple engineer was assigned to us, and the fix took place last night. I did two weeks of trying it, creating logs for the Apple engineers to look at, and they found the problem. Basically, what we had to do was delete the null mail folder (that's the folder that processes all e-mail) and then we told the mail app to rebuild its internal director via terminal command, and now it is working flawlessly. So I just wanted to take a moment to thank people at Apple. I'm not going to mention the name of the engineer. I would love to, but if I did, this guy would be taking heat for the rest of his career from people for helping me. But they were very cooperative, and I think it's going to end up having to be a system-wide fix, which is good, because it's been discovered. The other issue was if you have a dot-Mac account — if you have one of those you can use it to share the screens of your other computers. Now, I have two here in Florida and two in New York, and they are not synchronized because I'm not in New York very much...

What if I need an e-mail from there? I can get it now with the screen sharing, but it wasn't working via dot-Mac. I had set it up to work with a direct correct on a VNC direct connect, but it wasn't working via back to my Mac. They fixed that as well. That has been done. So I just wanted to thank Apple again for taking the time to look into this, because the backup and the Time Machine application used with mail app was crucial... Somebody said, "Make 'em name the patch after you." There will be a patch. I don't think they'll say anything about it other than in the release notes of the next security update or system update. But, anyway, I wanted to fill you in on the details of this, because it was very nice them and they were extremely diligent. It took a lot of time to find out what the glitch was. We had to log every time we try it, and we tried a bunch of times on purpose knowing it would fail creating logs of what was going on. So it was discovered that the null mail folder had to be deleted and then rebuilt in the internal directory with the terminal command. It was a small little terminal command, too, for those of you geeks on the blogs — and, no, I'm not going to share the terminal command here.

Nice work, Rush. Think Jobs will come over next time we have a problem?