Category Archives: Geek-Speak

Geeky spaces lie within — be careful where you step!

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? ๐Ÿ™‚ ).

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. ๐Ÿ™‚

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. ๐Ÿ™‚

Geek-Speak

I Found George!

For a few years, I have very lackadaisically played along in the Where’s George game. Essentially, it’s a site that tracks the movement of currency through the US. And how’s the currency tracked? Folks stamp bills with something encouraging the recipients to hit Where’s George, enter the serial number, and describe the condition of the bill, where they got it, and what they did with it. It’s a pretty nifty idea, although there have been some questions as to the real legality of stamping the bills.

Today, I found a marked bill in the Jeep — I have no idea where I got it or when, but when I keyed its serial number in, I discovered it was old and started life far away from me. After almost three years, it had traveled halfway across the country, and wound up in a soda machine today, helping quench my thirst.

Kinda cool. Below is a image snipped from Where’s George with the info about my little Georgie.

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. ๐Ÿ™‚

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!

Geek-Speak

Stay of Execution

Anyone who’s been around me for more than a week or two in my house has seen my eyes light up at the prospect of far off TV viewing. I just love the spring and summer when the weather and the ionosphere conspire to produce just the right conditions to watch TV from Wisconsin. Or Florida. Or Montana. Or Arizona. Or Cuba.

However, the move to digital TV here in the States will really foul that up. Oh, the propagation that allows those things to happen will still be there, but the telltale signs won’t. With analog signals, you can see other strong signals start to bleed through, and when there’s several on the same channel, there’s a glorious whine that is reproduced nowhere else in nature. It’s fun, and is one of my earliest memories of playing around with radio (well, TV is technically radio, right?). With digital signals, I imagine the only heads-up you’d have is unexpected blockiness, or perhaps other kinds of interference that won’t be real obvious as signs of long distance TV signals coming in.

And I’ve been counting down the days until the mandated switch to digital, with woe and despair. This week though, the President’s wish was granted, and analog TV got a four month stay of execution. Yippee! Maybe Barack likes chasing long distance TV signals too. ๐Ÿ™‚

So now we have what could be the perfect storm. Many stations already have their plans in place to switch to digital, cut the analog umbilical cord, and stop feeding two transmitters and possibly two transmitter sites — our local ABC affiliate was showing commercials tonight indicating that they will be turning off their analog signal at 11.59pm on the old cutover night. I say, let ’em do it.

Here’s where the perfect storm comes in. Some stations probably will keep their analog transmitters live through June. I’m sure many won’t. It’ll just depend on their plans. But for those that do, they’ll be entering a time when tropospheric ducting and E-layer ionospheric conditions could bring some of those far off signals to me… without having to fight some of the local (and local-ish) stations just to see the far off stuff. In particular, it’ll be interesting to see what our stations on the VHF channels do (channels 2, 4 and 5).

If they all move in a couple of weeks, it could be a DXers paradise around here for four months. From what I can tell, the only VHF station that will shutdown on February 17th will be channel 4. That’ll help, leaving both channel 3 and 4 available for some of that long haul stuff.

And the last bit of silver lining? Canada doesn’t complete its digital transition until August 2011, with Mexico having started, but not completing the transition until 2021. Quiet, mostly abandoned VHF bands, and targets within one E-layer hop from here may make for some pretty cool stuff over the next few years.

Sit back kids, and help me watch for Star Trek in French from Quebec, and futbol from Mexico!

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!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iPhone Space, The “Other” Frontier

Last night, I dropped my iPhone and iPod Touch into their little cradles… and began my descent through various layers of USB-based hell. This morning, I sat at my little workstation, getting my news and feeds to start my day, and found error messages on my screen indicating that my iPhone couldn’t be found by iTunes, and that my Wacom tablet was not alive.

Best as I can figure, the USB hub dropped it’s communication, which confused my tablet, and may have interrupted the sync process to my iPhone. Apparently that had caused everything that was once called “music” ok the device to now be called “other”… making that space untouchable and unmanageable. From what I’ve been able to gather from Da Goog, it appears that a full restore is in my future tonight.

Blecch!

Geek-Speak

Zune-Zune

In the wee hours of the morning, an easter egg from Microsoft reared its ugly head, and every 30GB Zune on the planet (probably) stopped working. The culprit? A date driver that can’t handle leap years. See, this is the first time the 30GB Zune has had to face the spectre of a leap year — it’s a device from the pre-leap year dark ages of 2006.

The fora have been waaaaay active, with Zune v. iPod jihadists going about their typical sniping, with Microsoft being very, very, very quiet on a solution to the issue until about 45mins ago when they said they’d identified the problem, and that it would resolve itself at midnight GMT tonight — sorta like a New Year’s present from the dudes at Redmond. They’ve even committed to a firmware update prior to the next leap year… in 2012. I assume it won’t take them quite that long.

I’m enjoying poking fun at this just as much as anyone else, but it could’ve been anyone’s devices suffering this fate, and I would be just as amused. Like several folks noted today, thank heaven it wasn’t something in aircraft or satellites or something far more insidious that was affected by this little glitch of testing. It is entertaining though to watch from the sidelines as folks go through Hannah Montana withdrawals all over the net, threatening lawsuits, allegiance changes, sailing their Zunes into the streets on high arc trajectories… At the end of the day, it is just music, but I certainly get the point of the rabid fans who want their tunes. I even saw one poster bemoaning the fact that he would have to go home tonight listening to CDs. Imagine the humiliation!

I guess this will become a cautionary tale of things are tested, and why you don’t just test the happy paths — you test all the paths. Today… The Day The Zunes Stood Still. Y2K9. Insert your own pun here. ๐Ÿ™‚