MacOS – Mavericks system tool gets wrong notifications

1. It seems you have another system - in that you are able to post the question. If it is a mac, you can start the problem system in Target Disk Mode (if it has FireWire), connect it to the working system with a firewire cable and you should be able to change the name remotely.

2. If you can start in single-user mode (s) that may allow you to bypass the problem.

3. If you start in verbose-mode, (same link as above), you may be able to see the problem.

4. If you can start from the Lion recovery disk, or a DVD, that will also allow you to change the drive name.

5. Finally, if you do get the system restarted, I urge you to check it through Disk Utility (applications > utilities).

I hope this helps.

I'm a Mac OS X developer and I just finished adding Notification Center support to my app. For what it's worth, here's what I found out:

• By default, notifications (the alerts) are NOT shown if the application is already frontmost (this explains why alerts refuse to show up sometimes, and you only see the notification in Notification Center). This is up to given applications to overwrite and it is not very straightforward, so do expect most applications to not show notifications when they're active. In my opinion, this is very annoying.
• The application, after sending a notification still has a lot of control over that given notification. It can remove it from your screen at any time it wants, regardless of the settings you have. Basically, if Safari, for some reason was set to remove notifications after X seconds, it will do that, your settings do not matter.

I have no idea if this is a bug in Safari or Notification Center, or both. However, I am fairly confident that there is nothing you can do about the second issue (there might be a hidden defaults setting for the first one, but I haven't heard of it). I did check the WebKit API Specification, to make sure it's not something that the individual websites are doing, and you can rule out websites from your suspect's list, because they do not have any control over the notifications.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if Apple will address this in its next bug fix release (10.9). However, by the looks of it, not showing notifications when the app is frontmost is a "feature", so don't get your hopes up.