A Man and His Blog

iTerm 0.8.2 released

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:40:42 +0800

(... insert "FINALLY!" here)

Yes, iTerm 0.8.2 has been released, fixing various unpopular features that came in with version 0.8.1 (ie bugs).

Still the best thing since sliced bread, at least as far as terminal emulators for Mac OS X are concerned. =)

Big thanks to the iTerm team for pushing out another release. It's much appreciated!

iBlog 1.4.6 released

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:34:04 +0800

... and again, there was much rejoicing

Get that iBloggy goodness. It will make you feel better.

A quiz on Bebo: How well do you know Andrew?

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:12:27 +0800

I never thought I'd do one of these ...

Hi

I've written a quiz 'How well do you know Andrew?' on Bebo. Click below to answer the questions and see how well you do:

http://www.bebo.com/inviteq/2212889a225171620b

Andrew

More computer whinging

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 12:17:12 +0800

To continue with a happy theme ...

I appear to be having transient memory errors on the G3.

I'm frightfully anal^h^h^h^h^h meticulous when it comes to copying files from one place to another - I always verify my CD and DVD burns, I use the checksum option on rsync (when running it again after the initial sync) to check that files have transferred okay, etc. Sometimes I will use md5sum or similar to calculate the checksums of one set of files and then compare it with the other set. I don't know why, but I'm paranoid that copies will contain errors or otherwise be broken somehow and I'll end up losing data. Perish the thought!!

And it is only by doing this sort of thing that you tend to notice problems like this. I copied about 450MB of files from the G3 to the file server with rsync over ssh, and then as usual run the same command again with -c to make sure nothing's gone wrong. Well, this time a filename came up as it was rsynced again. Oh dear. Ran it again. Different file this time. Hmm. So I ran md5sum on the file server, generating a list of checksums for those files, and then ran md5sum -c against that listing multiple times on the file server and on the G3. Clean every time on the file server, but not so on the G3. Sometimes all OK, sometimes FAILED, but the failures were not consistently in the same files. So it's not the file server (good), but sadly the G3 barfing up once again. This beastie takes PC100 SDRAM, which is so many generations behind the current stuff that it's been ludicrously expensive for years. Oh well. I'll just start by taking out the oldest DIMM and see if that makes the problem go away ...

Similar thing a number of years ago, on a very old Linux PC, where a collection of .gz files would sometime test as OK and sometimes would fail (using gzip -tv). My big panic was that the disk was failing, but it actually turned out to be one of the sticks of RAM that was on its way out. With cheap PC hardware, you don't really know when things are failing, unless they do so really catastrophically. You don't see system log errors saying that an ECC bit was incorrect in SIMM #3 of bank 0, and you should contact your vendor to arrange a replacement. The PC doesn't say to you, "Hey my CPU fan isn't on properly, so I'm going to shut down at random intervals as I get too hot."

Still, if a PC did say that - would you believe it?

iBlog 1.4.5 released

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 11:54:57 +0800

... and I can tell you are interested from here

It's new, it's shiny, and contains fewer calories than previous versions. Download iBlog 1.4.5 now. Operators are standing by to take your call.

It includes support for commenting and trackback with Haloscan's weblog system, and Google Adsense. Scary. I don't think there'll be any appropriate Google ads for my blog somehow ...

Blue & White G3 woes update

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 12:34:06 +0800

... yea, the shadow of darkness felleth not o'er the Little Blue Keg

It was the keyboard, after all.

Yes, it WAS the KEYBOARD.

(Makes sense. I'd decided that the problem had to be at the kernel level, with either a device driver or a device itself. Turns out I was right. And damn glad it wasn't the drive, IDE controller, or RAM.)

I said I'd be annoyed, and I was. But I'm over it now. After my "woes" posting, I left an iTerm window open on a "tail -f /var/log/system.log" to watch for the "AppleUSBOHCI" errors, then pulled out the keyboard and left the Mac for several hours. When I came back ... no recurrances of the error. Put the keyboard in again, it started playing up again.

Right. That keyboard has now been consigned to the Corner of the Room, from which it may find itself going into the Bin at some later stage. I should have gotten rid of it years ago when I found that the plug was dodgy and the USB cable needed to be bent at a certain angle (and held there with a wire kitchen tie) for the keyboard to work! Or, if not then, when all the letters had rubbed off the keyboard so that only touch-typers could use it ...

(This wasn't the original Apple keyboard, by the way. The one which came with the G3 died - drowned - when a glass of water went over it. So I bought the one I'd been using up until this point. The original Apple keyboard still has all its letters on.)

Since May 27th, then, my G3 has been running extremely happily with a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard. Wonder of wonders, the "meta" keys on the Sun keyboard (with a diamond picture, either side of the space bar) magically Just Work(tm) as "command" keys for Mac OS X. The "sleep" key works. The volume & mute keys work. Even the big "Help" key works, turning the cursor into a question mark so I can click on something and have it looked up in Mac OS X Help. Wonderful!

My only beef with the Sun Type 6 keyboard is that it doesn't have a hub in it; so my USB mouse has to run all the way back to the Mac via a couple of extension cables. But I have no qualms whatsoever forgiving it for that, when it's just so much better than having the computer freeze up all the time.

It's nicer to type on, too.

Existential thought for the day

Mon, 30 May 2005 14:24:16 +0800

Don't hurt your brain too much with this one though ...

WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE

Oh, dear, where can the matter be
When it's converted to energy?
There is a slight loss of parity.
Johnny's so long at the fair.

Courtesy of fortune(6).

Blue & White G3 woes

Fri, 27 May 2005 14:37:18 +0800

... is the shadow of darkness falling over the Little Blue Keg?

Little Blue Keg, my faithful B&W G3 PowerMac, is now freezing every few minutes and I can't work out why.

So far I have:

- cleaned all the dust out with the vacuum cleaner
- uninstalled Prosoft Engineering's Data Recycler X (which has background programmes that really need something gutsier than a G3-300 to run without killing the box anyway)
- disconnected all my USB peripherals except the keyboard and mouse
- disconnected the FireWire drive
- running DiskWarrior on the boot drive

The silly thing is still freezing. What it actually does is stop working - the menu bar clock stops ticking over, all active programs stop responding, etc - for maybe 30 seconds, a minute, or many minutes at a time, but while it does so, the mouse pointer can still move around. And if I keep typing, when it comes back to life, all that I've typed suddenly appears. The cursor (usually) doesn't beachball, but remains as the arrow or I-bar (whatever it was when the computer froze). It also seems to remember clicks and drags that happen during the freeze.

I've tried leaving 'top' running in a Terminal window, but haven't identified any process that is causing this problem. What it does show, however, is a big jump in the load average when the computer comes out of a freeze, indicating that more tasks have been started than have been completed. (I think that's what load average means on Mach.) The only other thing of note that happens during a freeze is that a ping from another host on the LAN jumps from <1ms to between 15ms and 30ms, then back to the usual <1ms responses once it becomes unstuck.

Haven't figured this out. My suspicion was that the boot disk was on its way out, but haven't found any evidence of IDE errors so far. Or maybe some of the RAM is going off-colour.

Some possible clues from /var/log/system.log:

May 27 14:27:18 localhost kernel: USBF: 2315.725 AppleUSBOHCI[0x11d0800]::MakeDevice error setting address. err=0xe00002ed device=0x1b45f00 - releasing device
May 27 14:27:18 localhost kernel: USBF: 2316.170 AppleUSBOHCI[0x11d0800]::MakeDevice error setting address. err=0xe00002ed device=0x1b45900 - releasing device
May 27 14:27:19 localhost kernel: USBF: 2316.615 AppleUSBOHCI[0x11d0800]::MakeDevice error setting address. err=0xe00002ed device=0x10e1900 - releasing device

These messages seem to be consistent with the freezes, but as to what is actually going wrong, I don't know. =(

The only USB devices left connected are the keyboard and the mouse, so I'll have to try some others to see if the problem goes away.

I think the problem started occurring after a crash a few days agowhen I was trying to play a DVD from a mounted disk image (!) using vlc. But that may just be a coincidence. If this all turns out to be just because of my bodgy old keyboard I will be soooooo annoyed!

iBlog 1.4.4 available

Fri, 27 May 2005 14:08:42 +0800

... and the people did feast upon the lambs, and carp, and breakfast cereals, and orang-utans (Monty Python)

Why not update to the latest version? iBlog 1.4.4 is out now and waiting for you.

A bunch of software updates

Tue, 03 May 2005 16:58:14 +0800

... and Preview.app died again, grrrr

I don't normally post updates of software, but a whole stack of stuff has come out recently (mostly due to the release of Mac OS X 10.4, aka Tiger). So here we go ...

* Fire, the multi-protocol IM app, is now up to 1.5.2
* PithHelmet, the ad blocker for Safari, has version 2.5 for Tiger only, 2.4.1 for 10.3.9 only (Safari 1.3), and 2.3.8 for 10.3.8 and below
* Firefox is up to version 1.0.3, again for Tiger support
* Acidsearch, the well wicked search-box-improving add-on for Safari, supports Safari 1.3 with version 0.41
* Synergy Advance pre-release is out for the really hard-core early adopters =)

And indeed, Preview stopped working for me again. So I trashed its prefs again, and it started working again. WTF is going on here?

Preview problem with 10.3.9 fixed

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 10:49:47 +0800

I am so smart, I am so smart! S.M.R.T. ... I mean S.M.A.R.T. ... (Homer Simpson)

On the advice of one of the MacFixit articles about the 10.3.9 upgrade, I downloaded the full "Combo" installer and ran that, to reinstall all the cumulative updates since 10.3.0. After doing so, Preview.app worked again in another user account but still not in my main account. Argh. Then I tried the decades-old "trash the prefs" fix ('rm Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist' in Terminal) and, lo and behold, it all works again. I do not like doing that in OS X. It should all just work ...

Meanwhile, MacFixit has a lengthy article on problems encountered with the 10.3.9 upgrade which may provide some help to people who've encountered some difficulties.

Curiously I can't see the MacFixit article where I posted my problem any more. It was only a day ago, yet MacFixit tells me I need to update my subscription and pay them $50 or something. That's just insane.

10.3.9 update woes

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 10:33:56 +0800

Or it might be something else's fault ...

My Preview.app is broken. I go to Print something and then click Preview, and the app starts up and hangs. Same if I use Preview to open PDFs, JPGs etc from the Finder. It's just not fair.

Haven't looked yet to see if this is a known problem, and if there is a fix ...

iBlog 1.4.3 released unto the masses

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:10:55 +0800

... who are, no doubt, an ungrateful bunch

So I downloaded iBlog 1.4.3, because iBlog 1.4.x was telling me to. I'm running it now. It still keeps turning on Auto Abstract when I make a new entry. And I don't know why.

Still, it works, and so you should install it and try it for yourself. =)

Candles & cake

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 21:57:35 +0800

... and maybe red cordial

Happy birthday to Raymond. =)

Also belated happy birthdays to Jeremy (yesterday), my brother Dave (three Saturdays ago) and best-friend-extraordinaire Dan (three weeks ago today).

Pop goes the weasel

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 01:23:15 +0800

Who woulda thought a simple question could be so hard?

T'was at the dinner table tonight that "Pop Goes The Weasel" was sung, with some disagreement over the lyrics. I remembered "Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel" and not tuppenny rice and a pound of treacle!

So I took it upon myself to find out what it was really all about, turning to my friend Google! once again. (Last big success in this field was tracking down "See saw Majorie Daw". Nothing to do with doors after all.)

I found an article on The Straight Dope, another on World Wide Words, and one, two and three different listings of the lyrics on the KIDiddles website. As usual it looks like we're all right about the lyrics, there being dozens of verses and variations. "Pop Goes The Weasel" could mean to pawn a coat, or the exploding of a small furry animal. =)