Hugo’s blog

For the past three weeks, our Mac mini, whose sole purpose in life is to run iTunes – to share music in the house – and Vine Server – because it’s headless –, had been crashing after less than 24 hours of being up. It would just stop responding to anything except to pings, and I would not be able to SSH nor VNC into it.

Nothing was showing up in the logs, and plugging in a monitor and a keyboard did not help getting more information. I didn’t remember doing any change to the system except applying the software upgrades from Apple.

As it’s a first generation one (as a matter of fact, bought on 22 January 2005, the day they were released), I wondered if it was time to invest into a new computer.

After running a full hardware test that turned up nothing abnormal, I decided to give it a last chance by reinstalling it. So I took my Panther CD (yes, remember, before Leopard, there was Tiger, and before Tiger, there was Leopard), and spent a couple of hours reinstalling the system from scratch.

The result is a much faster system, and it’s been up for almost 3 days now!

mini:~ hugo$ uptime
21:28 up 2 days, 22:42, 2 users, load averages: 0.07 0.02 0.01

So, just like Windows, OS X needs to be reinstalled, sometimes. But it’s not every few months, it’s about every 3 years.

I had been complaining for the past few months that my wireless card did not work right on my MacBook Pro. The simptoms were the following:

• At home, my Mac would not detect automatically my network, even though it was in the preferred networks list. I always had to pick it by hand.
• Regularly, it would not connect to certain networks, giving me an error. Clicking on Try again would sometimes work, and sometimes my only solution was a reboot.
• I would get poor performance. Pinging a maching would get me sub-second delays with a very regular pattern:
  

  PING xxx (x.x.x.x): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=3.927 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=1805.443 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=805.355 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=4.002 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=4 ttl=58 time=4.861 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=3.775 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=6 ttl=58 time=2000.225 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=1000.141 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=4.067 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=1805.541 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=10 ttl=58 time=808.282 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=11 ttl=58 time=45.774 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=12 ttl=58 time=3.702 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=13 ttl=58 time=3.924 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=14 ttl=58 time=1998.669 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=15 ttl=58 time=998.551 ms
  64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=16 ttl=58 time=3.601 ms
  ^C
  --- xxx ping statistics ---
  17 packets transmitted, 17 packets received, 0% packet loss
  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.601/664.696/2000.225/778.601 ms
  

• I would occasionally get disconnected from networks.

IT looked at my Mac, ran hardware tests, and did not find the issue. I looked online, and did not find anything obvious, until I finally stumbled upon this lengthy article giving tips for any wireless issue that you might encounter on a Mac.

Near the end of the list (after many other things I tried), there is: Check for/quit third-party wireless applications (monitors/sniffers). And this was my problem: a simple widget showing wireless information, and nothing more. Not only that, but I installed this so long ago, and considered it so innocuous, that it took my a while to even realize that I had something in this category.

I’m amazed that polling the network interface would have such consequences, but it obviously does. Needless to say, I’m much happier about my Mac now, though I have noticed that Intel-based laptops are far less stable than PowerPC-ones: my PowerBook would never crash, while the MacBook Pro does occasionally. Unless it’s another harmless piece of software messing up the system…

Via Alexis Kartmann, l’excellente campagne de pub Get a Mac est maintenant disponible en France.

Je suis néanmoins un peu déçu qu’ils aient choisi de doubler les clips américains au lieu d’utiliser des acteurs français pour tourner une nouvelle série de clip. Par exemple, le Wall Street Journal est une référence qui n’évoquera pas grand chose au grand public en France, alors qu’ils auraient pu adapter ce clip pour un contexte français.

Voilà le lien vers les pubs.

While I was trying to have my Mac talk to the Internet over Bluetooth using my Treo 650, I experienced what I’ll call a Grayed Screen Of Death:

The reboot showed a nice kernel trace, that I sent to Apple.

It looks like Apple has copied Windows’s BSOD.

Ca y est, je suis finalement arrivé à configurer mon Mac pour utiliser mon Treo 650 via Bluetooth comme accès Internet avec Orange France. Ça a été beaucoup moins automatique qu’avec mon SonyEricsson T610, mais en suivant les excellentes instructions de captnswing.net et en utilisant orange comme APN, nom d’utilisateur et mot de passe, ça marche !

I have Java 5 installed on my Mac, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

Trying to figure out what /usr/bin/java is, I got:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /usr/bin/java
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  57B Nov 23 13:03 /usr/bin/java@ -> /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Commands/java

hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Commands% ./java -version
java version "1.4.2_09"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_09-232)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-54, mixed mode)

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework
total 56
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  27B Nov 23 13:03 Classes@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Classes
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  28B Nov 23 13:03 Commands@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Commands
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  24B Nov 24 00:08 Headers@ -> Versions/Current/Headers
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  24B Nov 23 13:03 Home@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  23B Nov 23 15:49 JavaVM@ -> Versions/Current/JavaVM
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  29B Nov 23 13:03 Libraries@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Libraries
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  26B Nov 23 15:49 Resources@ -> Versions/Current/Resources
drwxr-xr-x   13 root  wheel  442B Feb 16 18:24 Versions/

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 15:49 1.3@ -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Jun  9  2005 1.3.1/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 13:03 1.4@ -> 1.4.2
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Jun  9  2005 1.4.2/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 15:49 1.5@ -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Nov 23 15:49 1.5.0/
drwxr-xr-x   6 root  wheel  204B Feb 15 08:05 A/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   1B Nov 23 15:49 Current@ -> A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 13:03 CurrentJDK@ -> 1.4.2

A here is therefore version 1.4.2_09, and I wanted to use 1.5.
So I ended up doing something ugly:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo mv Current Current.DIST
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo mv CurrentJDK CurrentJDK.DIST
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo ln -s 1.5 Current
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo ln -s 1.5 CurrentJDK

And behold:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% java -version
java version "1.5.0_05"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_05-83)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_05-48, mixed mode, sharing)

I can already hear Mac people scream.

This is what happens when you let a Unix geek play with a Mac. I bet there was a better way to do that, but who knows how. I’ll have to watch out for things breaking in the Java world now.

I have been using Firefox since the time it was called Phoenix. I think that the first build I used was 0.3, released in October 2002. So when I got a Mac a few months back, I naturally installed Firefox right away, with all my extensions, ad-blocking filters, etc.

But I have to face it: Firefox on the Mac is painfully slow. And it’s not just me: comparison charts and other users reach the same conclusion as me. Maybe MacBook Pro users won’t suffer from this, but Firefox on a PowerBook is far from ideal.

So I decided to give other browsers a try, which is tough as I can’t live without extensions like Adblock or Tab Mix Plus. However, responsivity of an application like a Web browser comes before features.

And it turns out that the Mac has quite a number of browsers available for it, ranging from free open-source ones (e.g. Shiira) to commercial closed-source (e.g. OmniWeb).

After giving them all a short try, I found two candidates that suit my needs and which I found very responsive:

• Safari, with SafariStand and SafariBlock installed. There actually are a number of extensions for Safari.
• Opera, used with no-ads.pac. Other solutions are available too.

Because SafariBlock is much easier to use than no-ads.pac (e.g. you can block Flash ads with one click), I settled on Safari as my main browser, but hacking a little GUI for no-ads.pac could be cool, especially this solution is cross-browser.

This is not replacing a good backup, but I just found a neat utility for Mac, SMARTReporter, which reports your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status so that you can hopefully know before it’s too late that your HD is on its way out.

I don’t know if it would have helped my on my previous crash, but I’m willing to give it a try, and hopefully it will save me next time, or even better, the indicator is going to stay green and nothing is going to happen.

An Airport Express driver for Linux is now available.

I am not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I have now gotten used to OS X, and it works like a charm for most things (it’s just the fact that I can’t type in a window which is not in the foreground which annoys me) and I just finished reinstalling it all after I got my PowerBook back from the repair shop.

However, my 10 year long love story with Linux is hard to stop, so I now have the desire to try it out.

I am wondering if I can resize my HFS partition and play around with Linux a little to see what it’s like on a Mac…

I just figured out something which might have been obvious to everybody with a Mac but me, but as it took me a while, I thought I’d record it.

In order to use F1, F2, etc. as function keys on a PowerBook, which by default do special functions such as adjusting the brightness of the screen, one has to hit Fn+F1, Fn+F2, etc.

Now that I know it, the Fn key kinda hints it, but that wasn’t obvious to me.