Category: Geekery

Help me lazyweb!

Update: See my next post for what I think is a solution.

(I’ve noticed a bunch of people using the term “lazyweb” to mean throwing your question out to a web based audience who might know the answer off the top of their heads either instead of or as well as attempting to research the answer yourself. Works for me.)

I bought two new external drives – one to use as a TimeMachine drive for our laptops, and one to act as a Linux backup disk. I’ve had terrible luck with external USB drives – I’d say fewer than 50% have actually worked right for what I want them for, which is sitting idle 20 hours a day and then doing a nightly backup using rsync. And it’s always the fault of the enclosure, not the drive – ripping the drive out and using the drive as an internal drive and/or putting a new drive in the enclosure has proven that beyond a doubt. So this time I bought Seagate “FreeAgent”s – I figured if Seagate made the drive and the enclosure, there could be no doubt whose fault it was if it didn’t work.
Continue reading “Help me lazyweb!”

Leopard is making me see spots

Yesterday, I took my laptop into the kitchen and set it down exactly where I have been setting it down every morning since Vicki’s surgery. It said it couldn’t get a signal. So I took it out to the dining room. It still said it couldn’t get a signal. I put it down on top of Vicki’s iBook which was saying it had 4 bars of signal, and it still couldn’t get a signal. I took it out to the living room, where it got a signal but MacStumbler was saying the strength was -50 or worse. Software Update says there was an update, so I installed that. When it was done, it said it needed to reboot.

I tried shutting down important apps before rebooting, and many of them went to whirling pizzas instead of shutting down. I tried rebooting it, and as usual since I “upgraded” to Leopard, it froze up while shutting down – it gets to the point where most of the applications have shut down, but then then whirling pizza of death is the only thing happening, although the background is happily changing on schedule. So I forced a reboot, and as usual since I “upgraded” to Leopard, that failed the first time as well – I got some warning about having to rebuild some caches(?) and then when I clicked ok it froze again. So I forced another boot and that worked.

Wifi still wasn’t working right – I can get a signal in some parts of the kitchen, but not in my usual spot. And it doesn’t seem to want to unmount things – the Adobe Updater put something in the list of mounted drives, and after it was finished updating it wouldn’t leave the list. I also attached my new TimeMachine drive and after it was finished backing up overnight I was unable to unmount it. Then it started spewing popups every few seconds telling me it lost contact with my NFS mounted music collection, even though it was playing music from that collection just fine. I quit iTunes and attempted to unmount the drive, but it wouldn’t unmount either. I pulled the TimeMachine drive cable, and it gave me the stern warning about removing devices without unmounting them first.

So another attempted reboot, another failure to shut down and a forced shut down, and lo and behold it actually came up after the forced shutdown with no extra shenanigins. But by that time I was out of time so I left for work without trying to discover if I could unmount mounted drives this time or if my network connection actually works where it used to.

You know, the only reason I wanted Leopard was for TimeMachine, although the eye candy (or as Vicki says, “iCandy”) is cool, and if I’m not imagining things, I think the OS is a little less memory hungry than Tiger. But this network and drive flakyness is making me wish I’d waited for a point release.

Leopard, First Look

Ok, it’s been a few hours since I upgraded to Leopard. The first time it booted after it installed, I got a kernel panic. But it booted the second time. It’s been at 100% CPU usage ever since, installing the XCode stuff (which I always install but never use) and reindexing for Spotlight. That’s colouring a few impressions, because it means Cover Flow, for instance, is very slow. But in brief

  • iScroll doesn’t work. It’s probably what caused the kernel panic on that first boot. I hope there is an update soon, because I like two fingered scrolling.
  • Safari has a really disconcerting and distracting way it gets really dark when you switch to it, and light when you switch away. Some of the other apps do that as well, but Safari gets too dark.
  • Months ago I quite distinctly remember reading that the Airport Express’s external drives would be usable with Time Machine. As a matter of fact, that was a major reason for buying the AE. But now it turns out that AE drives aren’t supported in Time Machine. And considering what a piece of shit the AE turned out to be, I can’t think of any reason not to put it on Craigs List.
  • I was also looking forward to being able to use Mail again. The Tiger version of Mail insisted on indexing and scanning every file in my ~/Mail directory on the IMAP server, which was incredibly time consuming. Every other IMAP client I’ve tried, from Thunderbird to SnapperMail, has the ability to specify that you only subscribe to specific folders instead of all of them. Well, Leopard’s Mail is supposed to have that as well, but when I open up the dialog, no folders are listed there and I can’t find a way to add or remove folder subscriptions. I’ll try again when the CPU isn’t pegged, and maybe it will work right.

I was really looking forward to getting the advantages of Time Machine without having to have a hard disk on my desk, but if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I’ll do. In the mean time, I’m glad that Apple finally came out with Spaces so I don’t need a third party virtual desktop software (actually, I gave up on those ages ago because they kept getting broken by OS updates). And Vicki and I will have to experiment with some of the remote desktop stuff.

Joel on Software

The more I read Joel on Software, the more I’m convinced that if there software jobs in heaven, they’ll look an awful lot like this. Today’s post, called Evidence Based Scheduling, is just one example of the sort of nirvana that I’m hoping awaits me after death if I’ve been sufficiently good, because I sure as hell haven’t seen anything like it in this life.

I’ve certainly seen my share of the ones he gives as bad examples. The schedules passed down from above. The “I’ll give them 30% less time than they said it would take, and then creep the feature list” managers who think it’s motivating to put you under stress, the managers who do the same and then put the blame on you when the project is late, the projects with no schedules and no clear deliverables, but which still manage to make you feel like you’re not producing enough, the “fire 30% of the team but don’t change the schedule” managers, the “if you guys were any good you wouldn’t need so much time for debugging” managers (who not coincidentally are the ones who didn’t give you any time for designing up front), the ones who are as fickle as the wind when it comes to deciding what features are absolutely 100% necessary to win this customer (who turns out to have already decided to go with your competitor), and the “compile it, run it once, deliver it to the customer and if they complain, roll them back to yesterday’s build” ones.

Yes, that’s what life is like down here on earth.

Gmail on my Treo

Now that Gmail supports IMAP, I got it working on my Treo. W00t! It’s pretty simple, but you have to use SnapperMail (the expensive version that supports IMAP rather than the cheap version that doesn’t). I created a new account. Obvious stuff under “Your Name” and “Email Address”. Under Server:

  • Incoming Mail:
    • IMAP4 Server: imap.gmail.com
    • Username: yyyyy@gmail.com
    • Password: zzzzzzz
  • Outgoing Mail:
    • SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
    • Username: yyyyy@gmail.com
    • Password: zzzzzz

Then click the “More…” button. Change the IMAP port to 993, and the SSL option to “Always Secure (wrapped port)”. Change the SMTP SSL option to “Always Secure (STARTTLS)”. I made a couple of other changes but they didn’t stick, and it’s still working.

The best thing is that if like me you’ve got filter options that label things and skip the inbox, IMAP treats those labels like folders so you can sync them as well. And if you delete something on your Treo, it gets archived but not deleted on GMail.

I can’t wait to see how well this work with the new Leopard Mail.app. I hated the way Mail.app worked with multiple accounts and multiple folders in Tiger, but I’m told that’s all fixed now.