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New user? Saturday, May 3, 2008
Starting fresh on my MacBook Pro
On Monday morning, I woke up to find my MacBook Pro shut down. I didn't shut it down... when I rebooted, I looked at the crash log, and it said something about an hfs issue with trying to write a corrupted block (or something like that, I forgot to save it).
I used Disk Utility to verify the filesystem, it said it appeared to be fine. But when I started Mail.app it acted like it was the first launch! I used Time Machine to restore my ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file, that fixed that problem. Of course I wondered what other files might be missing or damaged, but that's not an easy question to get the right answer to.
After wasting a couple of hours trying to diff different Time Machine backups, I decided to forget about it for a while because I was too busy. My instinct told me it was time to re-install from scratch because the integrity of my system was compromised, but I ignored that because I needed to get things done.
As I mentioned earlier this week, I've also been having issues with the display not reacting properly when I wake up the MBP. I don't think it's related because lots of other people are having the same problem and I know some of them tried many fresh installs to try to avoid the problem without success.
Then this evening my system kernel panicked. I think I might now need two hands to count the number of kernel panicks I've had on my machines since Mac OS X launched in March 2001. Damn.
I rebooted the machine and it came up fine, but now I don't really trust the system. Something is up, and I suspect it's related to the unexpected shutdown. I'm running a backup of the system right now and typing this on my old PowerBook G4, which my wife uses nowadays.
Tomorrow morning I think I'll likely make one more (non-Time Machine) backup of the hard drive onto an external hard disk, and then reformat and reinstall everything from scratch...
Time-consuming things I have to install:
- Mac OS X Leopard
- Xcode/WebObjects
- iLife 08 and iWork 08
- Microsoft Office 2008 (I bought it earlier this month to write my final papers on, Numbers just wasn't going to cut it for my charting/graphing needs)
- Adobe Creative Suite CS3
- Eclipse and WOLips
And then there's the dozens of other apps I have in my Applications folders. I won't be copying them across from my current Applications folder this time, because I fear they may be corrupted. So I'll have to re-download all of them and re-install them all.
But what about my Documents and Music and Movies and Pictures folders? Not much I can do about those, I think. At least I've got a few months of Time Machine backups if I ever realize something is missing or corrupt, assuming I'll be able to use those old backups on my new installation.
Thankfully I committed all of today's work to my client's Subversion repository at the end of the day, so none of that is lost.
It's days like this I wish I had a Mac Pro with hot-swappable hard drives.
Friday, May 2, 2008
links for 2008-05-03
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It's a good thing I don't have three grand available to blow on something incredibly cool right now....
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Another followup to the JRuby or Groovy piece, I'm glad the Erlang folk are on top of this FUD.
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"For concurrent programming to become mainstream, we must discard threads as a programming model."
Twitter and Ruby on Rails, and Irony
The following tweet by Twitter's Evan Williams is in response to a story on TechCrunch that suggested Twitter plans to abandon Ruby on Rails.
Twitter / Evan Williams: FWIW: Twitter currently has...
When I saw the above link on reddit to Evan William's tweet, I clicked on it. The Twitter web site responded with the correct page. I then clicked on the "Evan Williams" link below the tweet. But Twitter wouldn't respond.
I've been trying and trying to load that page on Twitter while I write this, but no dice. Maybe Evan should reconsider.
Ted Rall says D.C. cops must "Arrest Bush"
Yahoo! News: ARREST BUSH
Thursday, May 1, 2008
links for 2008-05-02
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I wonder how the Electrical Engineering grads of Spring 2008 are feeling knowing they just graduated as the last class that will learn the wrong stuff...
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Note that Ted is wrong when it comes to Erlang not having "managability and monitorability baked in". Ted, meet OTP. OTP, educate Ted.
HRC says: "Rich people, god bless us"
TheZoo: Excuse me….who’s an elitist?
Hopefully she doesn't mean that literally and she'd actually leave some opportunities for the rest of America...
MacBook Pro, sometimes my display won't wake from sleep
This problem is widely reported on Apple's Support discussion groups, I haven't checked it lately but last time I did there was no known solution.
Sometimes I can get an external display to work even if the main display won't, but it's not perfect. I have to reboot the machine to get the main display back.
I really hope Apple fixes this soon, I've never had so many issues with sleep with a Mac as I had with this MBP (2.4GHz), my first Intel-based Mac. Actually I've pretty much never had any issues with any of my Macs before this one.
