I’m finding I’d rather leave IM off, than see it traced across my desktop.

(I use MkConsole to keep an eye on things).

Update: it looks like 1.3.2b1 fixes this. Yay!

I’ve spent countless hours since then trying to get it to work smoothly. For instance, if you create a bluetooth connection to his HP printer, it prints. Once or twice. Then you need to delete the printer and re-create it for it to work. My MacBook Pro connected once, and all was good.

Another issue has been with network connectivity. He’s using a GSM USB dongle to get wireless internet, and it’s rather flaky. I plugged the same dongle into my laptop, and it worked. I can’t recall if I needed to install any software, but, and here’s the important part, if I did install a driver, it used the system’s networking stack, rather than installing another one. This is something that the PC world just doesn’t seem to get. I had to “fix” a similar problem with my sister’s machine. Using the basic Windows WiFi driver gave a much better result than the one that came with the laptop.

Finally, he decided that it was worth the effort getting an iMac. He’d then set up most of the stuff before I arrived, including the wireless internet, and all I had to do with install VMWare (and WinXP) so he can run his share-tracking program, and anything else he may have to run under Windows. Oh, and Office. I’ve got him trying out iWork, but we’ll see how that goes.

I also had to help him transfer across all of his iTunes music and photos. I’d bought my laptop with me, and had set up an ad-hoc wireless network, which I had confirmed was working. I had shared his Public directory on the iMac, and was able to connect to it from the PC, but was having trouble getting the PC share to actually appear on the Macs. Eventually I did, and copied the files across. As it turned out, I needed to change the ad-hoc network name several times as I tweaked the settings, as Windows seems brain-dead when dealing with changed network properties and the same network name. I’d hit this issue in the past when trying to connect with an old laptop (no WPA) to an ad-hoc network created by one of my machines.

I then imported all of his photos into iPhoto. Which, I discovered, is now not the clunky old program it used to be. It feels more like iTunes, but is even more snappy. It has the nice little feature of scrubbing over all of the contained images like the new iTunes view.

I think I’m going to have another try with iPhoto. I got right into Lightroom when I had a DSLR, but since I don’t take too many photos anymore, so something less high-end will do me fine.

And, I can then use the fairly cool screensaver that uses the iPhoto library to create mosaics. I’d forgotten how cool that was. I think that feature alone caused his other daughter to proclaim she too would get a Mac.

Getting rid of the cruft I had installed seems to make my machine boot up a whole lot faster, but.

When I reload iSync, the setting has reverted back to being checked. This doesn’t seem to happen all of the time, just sometimes.

Anyway, I took some snaps this time.

I wasn’t able to take a shot of the initial boot screen (ironically, it caused my phone to crash. Twice).

This second one shows how the text is now overwriting the green corruption. Sorry about the blurriness, but if you look carefully you may notice that the file with the incorrect block count is pcscd.pub, or something. This appears to be the file /var/run/pcscd.run, but I don’t really know what this does.

I’d been using the machine all day, on and off, on both battery and power. I showed some code to a lecturer, and then closed my laptop and moved to another lecture theatre. It was there that, after about half an hour, when I was bored, I decided to open my laptop and check my email.

Screen was black. I’ve had some issues with the graphics card not always working properly (it’s related to a garbage display when scrolling issue), so I thought that might have reappeared. I don’t remember why, but I pressed the power button. I wasn’t expecting anything (if the display was disabled, then at most I should get a beep).

The screen came on (or, as I later figured out, the whole machine came on), but the display was overlaid with a pink pixelated pattern. Initially I thought something was odd, and I force-restarted it, since it didn’t appear to be responding.

The next time it booted up, it had the same pattern. Leaving it a little longer, I noticed that it displayed the grey screen with the darker apple logo, and the spinner underneath. After about a minute, it had a kernel panic.

Restarting it always had the same result. Zapping the PRAM, resetting the SMC, booting off a system DVD all had the same result.

I even tried swapping out the RAM, but nothing looked to fix it.

Finally, I tried booting up in safe mode. ⌘S will do this, and when this kicked in, the screen turned black, as expected. The areas that were pink now turned green. I got to a command prompt, but when I typed “exit” to continue booting, it seemed to hang on the WindowServer loading. (I must confess I restarted quite early, since I wasn’t having any keyboard response, even though it may not respond at this point).

Same deal for Verbose mode (⌘V). Stuck at WindowServer.

Rebooting again in Safe mode, I did an fsck -fy. About halfway through this I noticed that the text that was appearing was overwriting the green graphics glitches. When it completed (and it did find one error), I restarted, and the machine appears to be back to normal.

I wouldn’t have lost much data (I do have backups), but I would have lost work time. Or blogging time, or whatever!

Postscript: Interestingly, checking the panic.log shows me that it was WindowServer that was causing the panic. I don’t know why, but I hope it ceases to occur!

Instead, I can rest assured that I can type any random sequence of characters into the password box, and have the keychain remember them. It has the side effect that I don’t use Firefox, only Safari (or Camino, which also accesses the Keychain, like a good OS X application should).

It gets even better when you use something like QuickPass, which lives in the menu bar, and every time you need a password, it generates a whole stack of random ones for you:

Note, that since I didn’t actually choose any of these, they aren’t used for any of my passwords. Selecting one puts it into the clipboard, which is the only real security issue. If someone else got access to my clipboard, then they could see my password.

Since no one else gets hold of my laptop at all, then I’m fairly secure.

I will not use any other password storage system, since not only does it save my web passwords, but passwords for dozens of other applications too. Ecto stores it’s passwords for blogs there. Airport Utility stores passwords for the wireless routers I manage, as well as WPA keys for networks I use. These passwords are all secured (with the keychain protected by my login password), and yet I don’t need to copy-paste them, since the application(s) that need access are granted access on a need-to-know basis by the system.

I think this is one of the best features of the OS. No longer do I need to remember passwords, nor store them in a text file. As long as the browser I use accesses keychain, then I have all of my web passwords available in each browser.

So, the idea of Gorilla Password doesn’t appeal to me at all. Not least that I don’t have to use other machines (other than one unix system, which I only use at Uni, and then only store one password on, to access the Uni learning web-app), but the fact it doesn’t use system-provided services. That’s one of the main issues of cross-platforminess.

It’s less useful when applications write more stuff to the system logs than is strictly necessary. For instance:

That’s just a small segment of the issue, but it clearly shows that the latest release of AdiumX, 1.3.1 is dumping two lines to the console or system log every minute.

For google, the logfile data that is coming out is:

11/09/08 6:41:18 PM [0x0-0x48048].com.adiumX.adiumX[828] INFO cmdproc.c:98:show_debug_cmd() S: 000: QNG 42
11/09/08 6:41:37 PM [0x0-0x48048].com.adiumX.adiumX[828] INFO cmdproc.c:98:show_debug_cmd() C: 000: OUT

Time to go without IM for a little while.

Might get more work done anyway. But only if I kill Twitterific too, I suspect.

Cool. I like Navicat.

Tue Jul 29 13:50:14 2008
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x00192FD4): "pmap_flush_tlbs() timeout: " "cpu 1 failing to respond to interrupts, pmap=0x6b58ae0 cpus_to_signal=2"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.5.20/osfmk/i386/pmap.c:4570
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x628bfa18 : 0x12b0fa (0x4592a4 0x628bfa4c 0x133243 0x0)
0x628bfa68 : 0x192fd4 (0x45f414 0x1 0x6b58ae0 0x2)
0x628bfad8 : 0x1932b8 (0x6b58ae0 0x200000 0x0 0x0)
0x628bfb88 : 0x195721 (0x6b58ae0 0x215000 0x0 0x14160a8)
0x628bfbe8 : 0x169e6f (0x6b58ae0 0x215000 0x0 0x216000)
0x628bfd08 : 0x16a437 (0x216000 0x0 0x0 0x0)
0x628bfd48 : 0x182517 (0x1b32618 0x215000 0x0 0x216000)
0x628bfd78 : 0x159209 (0x1b32618 0x215000 0x45 0x11d992)
0x628bfdb8 : 0x12d17e (0x12a66d9c 0x874e0a0 0x0 0x0)
0x628bfdf8 : 0x126257 (0x12a66d00 0x0 0x28 0x628bfee4)
0x628bff08 : 0x1973dd (0x628bff44 0x0 0x0 0x0)
0x628bffc8 : 0x19f3b3 (0x6b61820 0x0 0x1a20b5 0x12b56f20)
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbffff508

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: configd

Doesn’t really give me much info, does it.