Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Doc Oc Is on Life Support

After spending most of the day trying to diagnose what state my MacPro was in, and continuing to wonder how I got there, I think I may have an answer.

Long, long ago, I had a Quad G5… (ok, so it wasn’t that long ago) and I believe my 1TB drive was created/installed there first. An apparently, it wasn’t partitioned as a GUID drive, but as an Apple Partition drive. All well and good, except that you allegedly cannot boot an Intel-based Mac from it. Empirically, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as I’ve been doing it, but I think that’s why so many things have been scrambled — extended attributes on system files, zero-byte system files, and loads of other really bad things. As I said before, bad juju.

Now, I had I not skrogged the original boot drive, I’d be sitting pretty — just repartition the 1TB drive, re-clone, and I’d be set. But, sitting where I am, I figured I’d try a reinstall of Leopard over the top of my current installation, and that’s when I discovered the partitioning woes. So, with no good, usable source, and no way to reliably fix the myriad system problems I’ve introduced, I’m left with the unattractive option of doing a fresh install.

I’m not totally against fresh installs. I mean, it’s pretty easy to accumulate loads of junque installed on the OS, so freshening things ain’t a bad thing. I’d just rather do it under better circumstances. I’ve been carrying a lot of these apps, data and stuff around ever since my first iMac G5 about four years ago. Badly quoting Adama from the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Don’t underestimate the power of a clean start.” I’ve gotta agree.

So tonight, it’s a clone back to the original boot drive. Tomorrow, I’ll entertain myself with a fresh install, and then begin to re-install my power apps — Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. — after letting the crazy machine do a boatload of updates.

Hopefully, I’ve learned a few things. This recovery? It’ll be fun. Really.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

“So, How’s the Patient?” You Might Ask…

The answer “not well” comes to mind.

So all the copying and cloning appeared to go well. The new 2TB drive is in place, the O/S has been moved to the 1TB drive, and the most persnickety apps — iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom — all seemed to still have their marbles intact.

And then I noticed the time in the menubar. It was wrong. By several hours. I opened the system preference panel for the clock, and noticed that I was on GMT. Permanently. No matter where I clicked on the little world map, I always ended up with my timezone set to GMT.

After a bunch of Googling, I was led to some information about the symbolic link that dealt with the timezone. I was just gonna force it by creating a new link, but that’s something I don’t do everyday, and decided I should look it up. But after typing man ln, the machine proceeded to tell me it couldn’t fulfill my request. And I thought, well who does it think I am? A quick whoami, and I was told permission denied. Another quick su, followed by a more trepidatious whoami, and was told again permission denied. WTF?

I took a look at the ownership of whoami and others, and found that either (and sometimes both) the user and group were numeric rather than the expect root, wheel, etc. This was really bad juju, and I decided it was time to repair permissions through the Disk Utility. It told me it had found some things, and would have that taken care of in 12 minutes. Cool.

It’s now been well over three hours (with the utility expecting it’ll take another two hours), and filenames are streaming by (largely files in /Library, so far), with complaints about user, group and permissions, apparently all being repaired. I’ve gone to Terminal, and confirmed that it appears to be fixing things, so I’m inclined to let it do its thing. However, I really wonder what went south in the simple disk cloning. I used Carbon Copy Cloner (which has never failed me), and things appeared to work well — although the cloning took about three hours, which was unexpected.

The bad news is that I’ve already skrogged my old boot disk. Things looked like they were working, and I had planned to move my iTunes library over there, so I blasted it in preparation for its new purpose in life. Potentially, this may have been a bad move. It shouldn’t have influenced what’s going on now, but it would’ve been a lifeline that is now unavailable.

Stay tuned for more on the ongoing progress of Doc Oc….

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Flinging Bits into the Magnetic Ether

Let me start by emphasizing that disk space is the perpetual bane of my electronic existence. Back in the pre-dawn of time, I can remember taking whole afternoons to format a box of bulk of floppy disks, in preparation for stuffing somewhere from 360KB to 1.44MB of goodness grabbed from BBSes via PC Pursuit. (Okay, so that should put a date to some of my exploits… for some of you.) Nowadays, it’s nothing to have hundreds of GB of photos, video, audio, etc. And as the envelope has been pushed for the size of magnetic storage, it seems my needs have grown just a little bigger.

Recently, I’ve felt like a 21st century Lucy, moving a folder from one drive to another so I had enough room to put something else on the first drive. Lots of spinning of plates, and not so much adherence to my own storage strategies. It wasn’t exactly keeping me up at night, but it was bothering me to encounter iTunes or some other app screaming at me ’cause I was down to my few MB on a TB drive.

Today I took a step in the direction of solving that little problem. Enter a new Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green SATA HD! I surely hope that will be enough space to last me for a while. I moved to a 1TB drive a little over two years ago, and I’ve gotta hope that it’s at least another two years until I need to double my storage space again.

And after 4.5hrs spent copying 900GB of data to the new drive, it’s time to start moving data around the drives in the big ol’ machine, hopefully with the goal of using the old 1TB drive as my boot drive, my 320GB drive as a festering cesspool for iTunes, and still using my twin 750GB drives as external backup drives for the important data.

Terabytes…. Whodathunk we’d be shoveling datasets this large around!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Steve to Phydeaux: “Will you quit whining now?!”

After what has seemed like an eternity — especially in dog years, which is a fairly common unit of measure at the Deauxmayne — Apple has *finally* solved the dilemma of how an ’08 Mac Pro crosses the road to get to Mini DisplayPort monitors. The answer is in the cards.

Along with a gazillion hardware announcements, and more than a few software updates, Uncle Steve’s kids announced some love for my beloved Doc Oc. There is finally an option to hang a 24″ LED Apple display off my now-defunct Mac Pro.

The path is through an ATI Radeon HD 4870, which would dent your wallet to the tune of $349. From everything I’ve read, this card is very fast — much faster than the card currently in Doc Oc. However, it won’t ship for 5-7 weeks, and will only work with OS X 10.5.7 (any bets on when that might be released? 🙂 ).

The cool thing is that the card supports both DVI and Mini DisplayPort, which means I can tackle the upgrade in phases, rather than all at once. Buy the card and gain the speed upgrade (in some instances, anyway), and then upgrade the monitor.

Funniest thing about the description on the Apple store?

“ATI Radeon HD 4870 includes two video ports: one Mini DisplayPort and one dual-link DVI port. This allows you to connect both the 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display or another Mini DisplayPort-based display, and a DVI-based display such as the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display.”

Another Mini DisplayPort-based display? There ain’t but one out there, and that’s the aforementioned Apple 24-inch display. I guess that’s future-proofing, but in March of 2009, that reads like humor!

In the new Mac Pro machines, there’s another DVI/Mini DisplayPort card available — the NVidia GeForce GT 120 — but the Apple store doesn’t list that as an upgrade option for the ’08 Mac Pros. ‘Tis a shame, as that card is only $149. For folks wanting to upgrade monitors, but not really needing the extra speed, it seems like this would be a good option. These are also 5-7 weeks out, so maybe that’ll change between now and ship time.

In any case, I’m thrilled that my now-obsolete Doc Oc has been included in the the No Mac Pro Left Behind program in this round of annoucements!

(And BTW, there’s some good analysis of the new Mac Pro, both its shiny and ugly bits, at the websites of digilloyd and Bare Feats.)

CORRECTION: It looks like you only need OS X 10.5.6 to run the new cards, either on the new Mac Pros or old. I guess 10.5.7’s date is still a bit of a mystery. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Let the Rampant Speculation Begin — The Apple Store Is Down

With the Apple Store down, and the rumors running wilder than Girls Gone Wild yesterday, it appears that there is some movement afoot at the House Steve Built.

New MacMinis, iMacs, Time Capsule, Mac Pros, Airport Extreme… who knows what’s in the bag of tricks this morning. It’s like Christmas in March!

I’d like to see a video card solution for my Mac Pro so I can use the new Mini DisplayPort LED monitors on Doc Oc. I’ve just gotta think there’ll be a solution… aside from “buy the new machine!”

In a few hours we’ll know what up Steve’s sleeve, the anticipation will be over, and I’ll know if I’ve still got something to be grumpy about. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Duplex is Good, But Sometimes It Ain’t

With Charter starting to do some network upgrades around town (for their home users; not sure if I’ll get any boost out of it yet), I decided to see how my line speed was doing. I check it occasionally, but it’s been a while. Ya know, if it’s working, don’t bother it.

When I ran the speed test (from Speakeasy), I noticed that my downlink speed was about half what it should’ve been, which wasn’t what I expected. Charter’s gotten very active on Twitter lately, so I popped a tweet to Eric (@Umatter2Charter), who was quick to ask for some details. This was way before he gets in, but I check Twitter via my iPhone pretty frequently, so I saw his response later in the morning. He though that I’d need to be home to help troubleshoot, so I figured I’d pop another tweet his way once I got home… assuming there was still a problem.

I got home, found there was still a problem, and tweeted Eric about it…. and that’s when I thought to try the test from a different machine on the network. Sure ’nuff, the other machine was just fine. I was about to send Charter on a wild goose chase for something that was on my end. Not good. I tweeted Eric, and got him off the hook just in the nick of time before he called out the dogs. 🙂

As it ends up, my MacPro was sitting at an MTU of 1500, which is not the way it should’ve been set — everything in the house is using jumbo packets instead. Dunno how it got changed, but that wasn’t the culprit. It was my duplexing settings. Again, for some reason unknown to me, the MacPro was sitting at “full-duplex, flow control” instead of “full-duplex”, and through the arcanity of ethernet protocol compliance, that was slowing down my connection as the MacPro saw it. Once the settings were what I would’ve expected, all was well.

I sure wish I knew how things got ugly, but I’m just glad to get ’em fixed!

Apple Existence

This is the iLife!

I came home today to find that iLife ’09 was waiting for me in my mailbox. This little box started out 250 miles to my south, traveled 475 to the northeast of its starting point, and then another 375 to the west of its first landing point, to finally arrive in my mailbox a week to the day after I ordered it. What a strange trip it seems to have been.

So, how is it? Well, I don’t know yet. I just got home and got it installed — installation takes a little while BTW — and haven’t yet fired it up. The impressive thing so far is seeing that iLife is supported on G4’s… that’s some old, old iron.

Stay tuned for more!

Apple Existence

Still Waiting

So, early in January, Apple announced the new version of their personal software, iLife ’09. They said the release would be sometime in January. Sure ’nuff, last Tuesday, folks starting getting shipping notices. On Tuesday, I decided to order mine too. I picked ground shipping, which I thought woulda been okay. On Wednesday, Apple dropped me an e-mail saying iLife has shipped. However, at that point the story gets a little glacial….

shippinghistory

Kinda looks like the combination of DHL and the USPS have turned this into a Pony Express event of some sort. And now, with a predicted delivery date of Thursday the 5th, I’m questioning whether the higher cost for faster shipping woulda made more sense. Or, I guess I coulda driven through the snow and ice to the Apple Store. I’m sure I woulda been back here by now! 🙂

Apple Existence

It’s Not the End of the World, But We Can See It From Here

With the hoopla that is MacWorld going on last week, there was a note from Uncle Steve, talking to why he was away from MacWorld — an easy-to-treat hormone imbalance. Today, the other shoe fell, and it appears that things may have been something more serious.

Man, this really sucks. Not just for the brand, or the markets, or the company, but for the man himself. Regardless of what you think of Apple gear and fanboys, Jobs has led a brilliant campaign upon his rejoining Apple, and with that, his folks have designed some beautiful gear that works very well, and has re-shaped two industries — the home computer market, and the music distribution and listening market. If indeed this is something serious, then we stand to lose someone that I see as a visionary.

Yep, I’m a fanboy — not because it’s Apple, but because Apple makes really good stuff. I have the same view of Jeep, and have had with Icom, Garmin, Bose, Canon and other brands over the years. Companies like those make great gear that does what I need to do without a whole lot of “happy accidents” that I have to work through. That kind of stability has allowed me to explore, and not worry about whether the products I was relying on would work well or not.

My best wishes are with you Uncle Steve — I hope all goes well with the recovery, and I look forward to your hand on the rudder come summer.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iPhone Update

After reading sooooo many things indicating that I’d have to completely reset/reload my iPhone, I was building myself up for an evening’s worth of working on my iPhone. Until…

I found a comment to a blog post that pointed to a piece of code called DiskAid. This little piece of code lets you explore the filesystem on the iPhone (or iPod), and from there, I was able to resolve my issue without a long, tedious battle waged between iTunes and my iPhone.

So what did I do?

Well, I went into the file system, and deleted all the music subfolders in the /iTunes Control Folder/Music. Once I did that, I hard reset the iPhone, and then fired up the little dude, synced (syanc? syunc?) the iPhone, and suddenly, I had music, and a reasonable amount of “Other” space taken up on my iPhone (about 300MB).

I feel like I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!