I have moved my blog, you can now find it here - http://web.mac.com/andrewproudlove/Andrew
Look forward to seeing you there.
Andrew
Saturday 18 October 2008
Friday 29 August 2008
iPhone 3G
I managed to get my hands on an iPhone 3G a couple of days ago from Eurotel (O2) in the Czech Republic, its the 16GB Black model and I thought Id share a few impressions here after having had some time to use it.
First of all, in terms of ease of use, its exactly what you would expect from an apple product and has been easier to set up than most of the other phones that I have owned for other things besides basic calling.
When you first open the box and take the iphone out, you will need to put in a sim, if you are using a pre-existing sim of your own, then its a good idea on your old phone to switch off any PIN's that you have set and also copy across any numbers stored on your phone to the sim card or sync your phone with your computer to its address book. I did the second option and synced my Sony Ericsson with isync on my macbook pro to my address book and then afterwards sync the address book to the phone via itunes.
I'm getting ahead of myself a bt though, once the sim is in and you have powered on the phone, you will need to connect it to itunes, on the first connection it will check if there are any outstanding firmware updates and if there are, it will download and apply them. This happened to me and I needed to download a 250mb file (largest firmware update ever?) which took around 15 minutes and then afterwards the phone was "stuck" on the progress bar for around 10 or 15 minutes while it did its stuff, afterwards it rebooted, connected to iTunes and I was able to configure what I wanted it to sync.
So far in terms of syncing I havent experienced any issues but the phone does make a backup of itself before every sync and if a lot of things have changed, this can take a few minutes, there are methods to turn this off though (via the terminal) if it frustrates you, for me, for the most part I tend to sync my phone/ipod at the end of each day ready for the next, so I prefer to have a backup.
Calling via the phone works pretty much as you would expect and quality is good, either via the external headset or the built-in speaker and microphone, so nothing too exciting there but nothing to complain about either. The headphones also have a mic on the end that doubles as a remote control for the ipod/phone so you can accept and receive calls with it or pause/play/skip tracks without having to take the phone out of your pocket.
Ive only had it for a short while, so I am still playing with it but I will post some more comments up later.
First of all, in terms of ease of use, its exactly what you would expect from an apple product and has been easier to set up than most of the other phones that I have owned for other things besides basic calling.
When you first open the box and take the iphone out, you will need to put in a sim, if you are using a pre-existing sim of your own, then its a good idea on your old phone to switch off any PIN's that you have set and also copy across any numbers stored on your phone to the sim card or sync your phone with your computer to its address book. I did the second option and synced my Sony Ericsson with isync on my macbook pro to my address book and then afterwards sync the address book to the phone via itunes.
I'm getting ahead of myself a bt though, once the sim is in and you have powered on the phone, you will need to connect it to itunes, on the first connection it will check if there are any outstanding firmware updates and if there are, it will download and apply them. This happened to me and I needed to download a 250mb file (largest firmware update ever?) which took around 15 minutes and then afterwards the phone was "stuck" on the progress bar for around 10 or 15 minutes while it did its stuff, afterwards it rebooted, connected to iTunes and I was able to configure what I wanted it to sync.
So far in terms of syncing I havent experienced any issues but the phone does make a backup of itself before every sync and if a lot of things have changed, this can take a few minutes, there are methods to turn this off though (via the terminal) if it frustrates you, for me, for the most part I tend to sync my phone/ipod at the end of each day ready for the next, so I prefer to have a backup.
Calling via the phone works pretty much as you would expect and quality is good, either via the external headset or the built-in speaker and microphone, so nothing too exciting there but nothing to complain about either. The headphones also have a mic on the end that doubles as a remote control for the ipod/phone so you can accept and receive calls with it or pause/play/skip tracks without having to take the phone out of your pocket.
Ive only had it for a short while, so I am still playing with it but I will post some more comments up later.
Monday 25 August 2008
Transparent Dock Icons
Simply open Terminal.app (Applications > Utilities) and type the following command exactly:
Once you type the command and press enter, you need to restart the Dock by typing "killall Dock" and pressing enter. Once the Dock restarts and you hide applications, you will notice that hidden applications have a transparent look. If you want to reverse the command, just replace the "YES" with a "NO" and restart the Dock again.
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
Once you type the command and press enter, you need to restart the Dock by typing "killall Dock" and pressing enter. Once the Dock restarts and you hide applications, you will notice that hidden applications have a transparent look. If you want to reverse the command, just replace the "YES" with a "NO" and restart the Dock again.
Thursday 17 July 2008
Time Capsule
Yesterday I picked up an Apple Timecapsule 1TB, the plan being to have live backups of both my and my wifes computers (losing all of those baby/wedding/etc photos would be a disaster). I will also use it to put the colour printer on the network and my 500GB WD drive, which is where I will be keeping media for the time being.
Initially I plan to set it up as a N only network and my other access point as B/G only (also on a totally different channel) so that essentially only our laptops will connect to the time capsule and supposedly at N speeds making the backups and streaming better.
Eventually I will buy a Drobo and connect that to the time capsule and have the time capsule back itself up to the Drobo periodically, so I will have backups in two places. I also have copies of our photos stored in "The Cloud", so hopefully we're covered for a rainy day. After all as the quote goes, there are only two types of people, those whose disks have failed and those whose disks will fail (or was it backups?).
I havent done anything with the TC just yet though, last night I was consolidating data from various drives onto the WD drive and watching a film, for the first time in a while. Tonight I will hopefully get time to set it up and test it, so I'll let you know how that goes.
Initially I plan to set it up as a N only network and my other access point as B/G only (also on a totally different channel) so that essentially only our laptops will connect to the time capsule and supposedly at N speeds making the backups and streaming better.
Eventually I will buy a Drobo and connect that to the time capsule and have the time capsule back itself up to the Drobo periodically, so I will have backups in two places. I also have copies of our photos stored in "The Cloud", so hopefully we're covered for a rainy day. After all as the quote goes, there are only two types of people, those whose disks have failed and those whose disks will fail (or was it backups?).
I havent done anything with the TC just yet though, last night I was consolidating data from various drives onto the WD drive and watching a film, for the first time in a while. Tonight I will hopefully get time to set it up and test it, so I'll let you know how that goes.
Monday 14 July 2008
Microsoft Memory Mouse 8000
I recently picked up a new mouse as the title explains :) and I have to say that so far Im quite happy with it. Its a wireless notebook mouse with a rechargeable battery, it can be used as a standard notebook wireless mouse, i.e. with a USB dongle or you can switch it to bluetooth mode if your notebook supports it and fore go the dongle.
There are some nice things with this mouse though compared to previous ones that I have owned or used, first of all, the dongle also doubles as a 1GB USB disk, which is nice as I always hated losing a port just for the mouse. Secondly it has magnets on the end, which you attach a cable to and the other end you connect to magnets on the underside of the mouse, this then enables your notebook to charge the mouse and in the meantime you can continue to use it as a standard tethered mouse. The first initial charge takes 8 hours or something but afterwards 15 minutes is supposed to be enough for a whole day.
Another good thing with it is that the mouse is supported by windows and by OS X, so has no issues switching between operating systems when Im dual-booting.
I noticed some posts on the internet that there are problems apparently with pairing the mouse but I can say that I havent came across this at all. For me on my Leopard 10.5.4 system I did the following;
Installed the intellipoint drivers
Started bluetooth on the MBP
Took the cover off the bottom of the mouse and held the connect button until the mouse led started to flash green and red
Started the add device wizard from the bluetooth menu on the mbp
I chose mouse and then told it not to use a passkey
After a few seconds the mouse connected and that was it.
The only thing that I havent found a solution for is when I start the MBP and BT, I have to search for the mouse again (not pair it, it already is recognised) it just doesnt pick it up automatically, whereas windows xp does. Something to play with I guess but so far Im quite happy with it.
There are some nice things with this mouse though compared to previous ones that I have owned or used, first of all, the dongle also doubles as a 1GB USB disk, which is nice as I always hated losing a port just for the mouse. Secondly it has magnets on the end, which you attach a cable to and the other end you connect to magnets on the underside of the mouse, this then enables your notebook to charge the mouse and in the meantime you can continue to use it as a standard tethered mouse. The first initial charge takes 8 hours or something but afterwards 15 minutes is supposed to be enough for a whole day.
Another good thing with it is that the mouse is supported by windows and by OS X, so has no issues switching between operating systems when Im dual-booting.
I noticed some posts on the internet that there are problems apparently with pairing the mouse but I can say that I havent came across this at all. For me on my Leopard 10.5.4 system I did the following;
Installed the intellipoint drivers
Started bluetooth on the MBP
Took the cover off the bottom of the mouse and held the connect button until the mouse led started to flash green and red
Started the add device wizard from the bluetooth menu on the mbp
I chose mouse and then told it not to use a passkey
After a few seconds the mouse connected and that was it.
The only thing that I havent found a solution for is when I start the MBP and BT, I have to search for the mouse again (not pair it, it already is recognised) it just doesnt pick it up automatically, whereas windows xp does. Something to play with I guess but so far Im quite happy with it.
Thursday 3 July 2008
10.5.4 out but doesnt solve the 256 colour issues
So 10.5.4 came out and me being the sucker that I am I installed it to see if it would sort out some of those issues I was having. While it does appear to help with the slow shutdowns (no need to remove the sleepimage file every now and then anymore?), it does not fix the issues with Starcraft or Diablo II or any other application that requires 256 colour support for that matter.
There are some solutions floating around on the net, that basically involve replacing the kexts from the 10.5.3/4 update(s) with those from 10.5.2 but this seems like a bit of a kludge to me, so hopefully this will be addressed officially at some point. Hopefully before Starcraft 2 comes out :)
There are some solutions floating around on the net, that basically involve replacing the kexts from the 10.5.3/4 update(s) with those from 10.5.2 but this seems like a bit of a kludge to me, so hopefully this will be addressed officially at some point. Hopefully before Starcraft 2 comes out :)
10.5.3 - Part 2
So I managed to solve the problem albeit by a roundabout route. What I had to do in the end in order to make it work was to first install 10.5.2 and then update that to 10.5.3, so it would seem that the combo updater for 10.5.3 is missing something?
Thursday 19 June 2008
10.5.3 - Additional Issues
It seems that 10.5.3. is out to get me. Not that I believe I am being paranoid or anything but I have never had this much trouble with an OS X update before and I tend to be one of the "bleeding edge" crew in terms of installing these updates.
I am having problems with it now because I finally decided to reinstall my system, my justification being that I have played around with my current system so much and that it has so much crud on there that it would be quicker and easier to reinstall rather than manually clean up.
At the same point though I didnt want to be without my machine for any length of time, yet I didnt want to have to either rush the new installation or try to find the time to do it around the baby and work, so what I decided to do was to cheat a little. I installed OS X 10.5 onto an external USB drive that was connected to my mac and then afterwards booted from that.
This worked like a charm and very soon I was running a clean version of OSX 10.5.1, all well and good so far, I then started the Apple update process which performed various updates, including installing 10.5.3.
The updates went quite well and all of them seemed to install successfully and then I received a message from the 10.5.3 patch that the system would restart once various boot caches had been cleared. Ok, I thought no problem and sure enough the computer restarted quite happily. It then got to the Apple logo with the spinning progress indicator and stayed there like that for an hour, before my patience ran out.
I hard shutdown the machine, restarted it and this time it went ahead and rebooted happily, allowing me to log in and get to the desktop again. I then started installing just the applications that I use daily/weekly (everything else got left off), setting up my email client, firewall and so on. During all of this though I had a couple of odd hiccups, for example mail and/or itunes wouldnt shut down. Mail was also almost always timing out when checking for new messages, sometimes windows wouldnt focus properly and a notification would appear behind an inactive window.
My suspicion here was that the 10.5.3 patch hadnt applied correctly hence the problems, I did try performing some permission repairs, cache cleaning and various other os x maintenance voodoo, which got the system running more or less nicely but still I had the feeling that things were not quite right.
So my plan for today was to put or rather rerun the 10.5.3. combo updater and then afterwards xslimmer and providing all went well, to clone the disk from the external to the internal. This was when I was in my happy place :) Unfortunately other forces stepped in here and decided otherwise.
Again the install went successfully, no issues, cleared boot caches, restarted and got stuck on the Apple screen again. So again I waited and nothing happened so again I switched off and powered on as before but the system again got stuck on the Apple logo.
I tried shutting down for a bit and then powering on but it didnt help, I then booted into the original installation on the internal disk and that went fine, so I tried the external again and again it froze. At this point I tried some more voodoo, for example resetting the PRAM and so on but this didnt help either.
Not good - my nice, shiny clean installation was inaccessible. :(
I booted back into the original install and set the external disk to be the main startup disk (up until now I had been using the option key to bring up the boot menu), I made this change as it would allow me to use some of the startup functionality in the OS X "BIOS".
The first step was to boot into verbose mode (Apple + V), this displays all of the unix/linux type boot up info instead of the Apple logo and enabled me to see that the bootup process was freezing at this point;
localhost DirectoryService[31]: launched version 53 (v514.19)
This didnt say anything to me so I tried googling, unfortunately I couldnt find anything that sufficiently explained either a) what the DirectoryService does b) what 31 means, if anything and c) if the launched version was relevant.
I then tried broadening the search and although a lot of other users had similar issues none had a working solution, though I did come across a post at Macfixit that was very similar to my issue and the user noted there that he had fixed the problem by deleting the DirectoryServices folder from /Library/Preferences.
Being the happy, risk-taker that I am :) I backed up the aforementioned folder, then deleted it and tried again, this time I got the following error;
localhost DirectoryService[31]: dstouch: file was asked to be opened : no such file or directory
Hmmm... thats not a problem I thought, I'll just copy the working versions from my current install, set the permissions and be good to go, which is exactly what I did and exactly what didnt work.
I next tried various things, ranging from repairing the drive, (I was unable to repair permissions on the drive itself while booted from the internal drive, somewhat understandably), removing the files that I had just copied over, removing the whole directory, none of it worked.
I then booted from the OS X installation DVD and used that to repair the permissions on the drive and the drive itself, all of this completed successfully, so I was quite hopeful that it would work now but unfortunately still no joy.
Finally after trying all of that I couldnt see any other option besides a reinstall (something else which is recommended on the web), so I popped in the install DVD again and this time performed an archive and install.
This worked out quite well, the machine booted again :) It copied across most (I say most because I havent checked every single thing yet and I'm paranoid remember? :) ) of my data, so far so good. I ran software update again but this time left 10.5.3 off and let everything else install, tried a few reboots and so on and had absolutely no problems anywhere.
So with my confidence at a high again, I tried 10.5.3 one more time, again the install completed successfully, again it rebooted, this time though it did something as after a few seconds it rebooted again but after this second reboot it stuck at exactly the same point as last time :(
Now Im at an impasse of sorts, I dont fully understand why its sticking where it is, so I can try to do some more research there, or I can just do another archive and install, then install 10.5.2 and either leave it at that (I could play starcraft again) or see if 10.5.3 would work better if it were installed on top of 10.5.2 (even though I used the combo updater before). Or I could just install the 10.5.3 update from software update and see if that would be any different than the combo updater? Finally, I could just go clean up the current install as this is already starting to become just as much work... :(
Still, I dont like giving up on things and Im a sucker for problems, even self generated ones, so I think I will attempt to get to the bottom of this...
I am having problems with it now because I finally decided to reinstall my system, my justification being that I have played around with my current system so much and that it has so much crud on there that it would be quicker and easier to reinstall rather than manually clean up.
At the same point though I didnt want to be without my machine for any length of time, yet I didnt want to have to either rush the new installation or try to find the time to do it around the baby and work, so what I decided to do was to cheat a little. I installed OS X 10.5 onto an external USB drive that was connected to my mac and then afterwards booted from that.
This worked like a charm and very soon I was running a clean version of OSX 10.5.1, all well and good so far, I then started the Apple update process which performed various updates, including installing 10.5.3.
The updates went quite well and all of them seemed to install successfully and then I received a message from the 10.5.3 patch that the system would restart once various boot caches had been cleared. Ok, I thought no problem and sure enough the computer restarted quite happily. It then got to the Apple logo with the spinning progress indicator and stayed there like that for an hour, before my patience ran out.
I hard shutdown the machine, restarted it and this time it went ahead and rebooted happily, allowing me to log in and get to the desktop again. I then started installing just the applications that I use daily/weekly (everything else got left off), setting up my email client, firewall and so on. During all of this though I had a couple of odd hiccups, for example mail and/or itunes wouldnt shut down. Mail was also almost always timing out when checking for new messages, sometimes windows wouldnt focus properly and a notification would appear behind an inactive window.
My suspicion here was that the 10.5.3 patch hadnt applied correctly hence the problems, I did try performing some permission repairs, cache cleaning and various other os x maintenance voodoo, which got the system running more or less nicely but still I had the feeling that things were not quite right.
So my plan for today was to put or rather rerun the 10.5.3. combo updater and then afterwards xslimmer and providing all went well, to clone the disk from the external to the internal. This was when I was in my happy place :) Unfortunately other forces stepped in here and decided otherwise.
Again the install went successfully, no issues, cleared boot caches, restarted and got stuck on the Apple screen again. So again I waited and nothing happened so again I switched off and powered on as before but the system again got stuck on the Apple logo.
I tried shutting down for a bit and then powering on but it didnt help, I then booted into the original installation on the internal disk and that went fine, so I tried the external again and again it froze. At this point I tried some more voodoo, for example resetting the PRAM and so on but this didnt help either.
Not good - my nice, shiny clean installation was inaccessible. :(
I booted back into the original install and set the external disk to be the main startup disk (up until now I had been using the option key to bring up the boot menu), I made this change as it would allow me to use some of the startup functionality in the OS X "BIOS".
The first step was to boot into verbose mode (Apple + V), this displays all of the unix/linux type boot up info instead of the Apple logo and enabled me to see that the bootup process was freezing at this point;
localhost DirectoryService[31]: launched version 53 (v514.19)
This didnt say anything to me so I tried googling, unfortunately I couldnt find anything that sufficiently explained either a) what the DirectoryService does b) what 31 means, if anything and c) if the launched version was relevant.
I then tried broadening the search and although a lot of other users had similar issues none had a working solution, though I did come across a post at Macfixit that was very similar to my issue and the user noted there that he had fixed the problem by deleting the DirectoryServices folder from /Library/Preferences.
Being the happy, risk-taker that I am :) I backed up the aforementioned folder, then deleted it and tried again, this time I got the following error;
localhost DirectoryService[31]: dstouch: file was asked to be opened : no such file or directory
Hmmm... thats not a problem I thought, I'll just copy the working versions from my current install, set the permissions and be good to go, which is exactly what I did and exactly what didnt work.
I next tried various things, ranging from repairing the drive, (I was unable to repair permissions on the drive itself while booted from the internal drive, somewhat understandably), removing the files that I had just copied over, removing the whole directory, none of it worked.
I then booted from the OS X installation DVD and used that to repair the permissions on the drive and the drive itself, all of this completed successfully, so I was quite hopeful that it would work now but unfortunately still no joy.
Finally after trying all of that I couldnt see any other option besides a reinstall (something else which is recommended on the web), so I popped in the install DVD again and this time performed an archive and install.
This worked out quite well, the machine booted again :) It copied across most (I say most because I havent checked every single thing yet and I'm paranoid remember? :) ) of my data, so far so good. I ran software update again but this time left 10.5.3 off and let everything else install, tried a few reboots and so on and had absolutely no problems anywhere.
So with my confidence at a high again, I tried 10.5.3 one more time, again the install completed successfully, again it rebooted, this time though it did something as after a few seconds it rebooted again but after this second reboot it stuck at exactly the same point as last time :(
Now Im at an impasse of sorts, I dont fully understand why its sticking where it is, so I can try to do some more research there, or I can just do another archive and install, then install 10.5.2 and either leave it at that (I could play starcraft again) or see if 10.5.3 would work better if it were installed on top of 10.5.2 (even though I used the combo updater before). Or I could just install the 10.5.3 update from software update and see if that would be any different than the combo updater? Finally, I could just go clean up the current install as this is already starting to become just as much work... :(
Still, I dont like giving up on things and Im a sucker for problems, even self generated ones, so I think I will attempt to get to the bottom of this...
Wednesday 11 June 2008
10.5.3 Breaks StarCraft
I found out today that 10.5.3 breaks StarCraft :( Basically, after installing 10.5.3 if you launch StarCraft it will show the initial configuration dialogue but then crash back to the desktop.
Apparently the reason for this is that StarCraft tries to switch to 256 colour mode but this was disabled by Apple in the latest update, so the game simply crashes.
So far neither Blizzard nor Apple has published a fix, what was disappointing though is that neither of the companies has published this information on their websites. For example I downloaded StarCraft from the Blizzard store and after a 2 hour download, it installed fine but obviously wouldnt launch. No where though on their site do they state it doesnt work with 10.5.3.
This supposedly also impacts Diablo II as well but I havent had an opportunity to test this.
Lets hope that they fix this soon and in the meantime, please consider letting Apple and Blizzard know that they should fix this!
Apparently the reason for this is that StarCraft tries to switch to 256 colour mode but this was disabled by Apple in the latest update, so the game simply crashes.
So far neither Blizzard nor Apple has published a fix, what was disappointing though is that neither of the companies has published this information on their websites. For example I downloaded StarCraft from the Blizzard store and after a 2 hour download, it installed fine but obviously wouldnt launch. No where though on their site do they state it doesnt work with 10.5.3.
This supposedly also impacts Diablo II as well but I havent had an opportunity to test this.
Lets hope that they fix this soon and in the meantime, please consider letting Apple and Blizzard know that they should fix this!
Tuesday 10 June 2008
So Ive been using Twitter for a couple of days now and although I believe that I finally "get it", I have to say that like anything these days the community is key and thats what has left me a little disappointed here.
I was kind of hoping that it would allow you to find like-minded people and generate some discussions of sorts, whether it was about the latest movie or a plea for help but for me personally, it just seems like a lot of broadcasting with very little going on in terms of actual conversations.
Now I freely admit that what Im saying could be boring (I have 28 followers so far), pointless or whatever but even when Ive replied to comments other people have made it doesnt seem to generate much in the way of discourse. Perhaps I need to use it longer or perhaps I dont get it after all but it does seem like being on an island at times.
Lets see how it goes after a couple more days
I was kind of hoping that it would allow you to find like-minded people and generate some discussions of sorts, whether it was about the latest movie or a plea for help but for me personally, it just seems like a lot of broadcasting with very little going on in terms of actual conversations.
Now I freely admit that what Im saying could be boring (I have 28 followers so far), pointless or whatever but even when Ive replied to comments other people have made it doesnt seem to generate much in the way of discourse. Perhaps I need to use it longer or perhaps I dont get it after all but it does seem like being on an island at times.
Lets see how it goes after a couple more days
New iPhone 3G
So the new 3G iphone was released yesterday and it looks like this could be the one that would push me over the edge, GPS, Exchange support, push mail, contacts etc and if Apple manages to make the resellers stick to their "global price", it would be dirt cheap compared to its current price here in CZ.
Not much I can do now though but watch and wait but for once Im quite hopeful.
Not much I can do now though but watch and wait but for once Im quite hopeful.
Thursday 29 May 2008
Winclone updated
Winclone has been updated, the latest version is available here.
For those who dont know what it is, Winclone is an app, similar to SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner except that it backs up your windows bootcamp partition.
Just some waffle
Im really quite tired today, our daughter had a bad night yesterday and so slept very little, which of course meant that we didnt get to sleep either. Its easy to say take it in turns but just lately she seems to have developed a cry that can penetrate brick walls, doors and the sound barrier, which makes it difficult for the other partner to pretend nothing is happening, at least until exhaustion kicks in.
We're not sure why shes getting so upset just lately though, as we have kept to the same rhythm for a couple of weeks now, our best guess is teeth. Hopefully tonight will be better and she'll get some rest, hope so at least as Im not too sure how long I will last today.
On the tech side I havent done too much today to be honest, Ive been working from home via Citrix, occasionally pitching in to help look after Ellie and trying not to fall asleep on the keyboard. I did update my MBP and my wife's MB to 10.5.3 in the wee hours of this morning though and at the moment all seems good, although earlier mine seemed a bit sluggish.
I also came across Quake: Enemy Territory today and it looks quite good, plus they have a mac version and from the screens it seems that it could even replace BF2. The problem is that I cant find anywhere here that sells it and ordering it online from the UK or US seems a bit drastic and none of the online services like direct2drive have a mac option which is a bit sad. I guess its just a sign though that despite the drastic increase in market share that macs/Apple are gaining it still has little traction as a gaming platform. Guess I will just have to do some digging in some of the local resellers or go the Amazon route.
Wednesday 28 May 2008
Microsofts multitouch demo in Windows 7
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/microsoft-shows-off-snippet-of-windows-7-at-d6-reveals-multi/ Seems that they ported the software they used in the table to desktops and laptops. Not a big surprise but still kind of nice to see where we could be in a couple of years time, though hopefully this will be a stepping stone to bigger and better things.
Macbook and Parallels
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I bought my wife a macbook for her birthday (2.2ghz, 2GB, 120GB HDD, DVD DL burner) that shes very happy with. Its already got her doing more things than Ive ever seen her even attempt to do on her old Dell.
One thing that I wanted to mention though was that I decided to install Parallels for her so that she could continue to use her Windows only software (dictionaries etc).
Parallels includes a tool for converting an existing windows installation into a virtual machine image, basically you install the tool on windows, pick a save location and let it run.
Her Dell had a 40GB drive but the parallels tool converted it into a 12GB (!!) image, which included all three of her partitions, the total conversion time was probably about 6 hours (its hard for me to say as I started it in the morning and then we went out for most of the day). After starting up the image on her MB, it chugged a little as it was installing the tools it needed for the display and device drivers etc which worked very well but it wasnt perfect, there were a couple of drivers that it couldnt identify but I just disabled these. Once done and a restart later and everything was chugging along nicely, so now she has the best of both worlds and is quite happy.
Me personally I was quite impressed at how easy the machine conversion was as in the past even with VMware this has been sometimes problematic. Now all I need to do is find the time to resolve the connection issue between our computers and set up her ipod and we're all done :)
One of the easiest "migrations" Ive ever done.
Tuesday 27 May 2008
Interesting company name
I photographed this with my mobile on my way to work yesterday - interesting name for a company but you would think that they would have paused to consider what it means in English right? :)
Macbook and Macbook Pro connectivity issues
I recently bought my wife a 2.2ghz Macbook, which shes really happy with. I set up screen sharing the other day, tried it and it worked, great I thought.
Later on though, when I wanted to copy some files over to her drop box, I couldnt connect to her machine and now even screen sharing doesnt work.
Ive checked her security preferences and she has screen and file sharing enabled, I have rights as well... cant see whats wrong for the life of me at the moment.
Later on though, when I wanted to copy some files over to her drop box, I couldnt connect to her machine and now even screen sharing doesnt work.
Ive checked her security preferences and she has screen and file sharing enabled, I have rights as well... cant see whats wrong for the life of me at the moment.
Playing with Twitterific
Decided to give in and finally try twitter and see what all of the fuss is about - any of you on there?
http://www.twitter.com/aproudlove
http://www.twitter.com/aproudlove
Tomato firmware now on V1.19
Tomato is firmware for Linksys routers (only certain models are supported, please check their site). The firmware improves options and functionality of the router over the original linksys firmware, for example its possible to monitor bandwidth in real time, set up QOS and so on. Well worth looking at, though to be honest I cant seem to make QOS work but I think thats just me...
OpenDNS providing free filtering
Im sure that some of you may have heard of OpenDNS but perhaps like me, you were just using them for their DNS service.
(OpenDNS provides name servers that contain an index of sorts for sites on the internet so that your computer can find them when you try to access them - at least thats the over simplified version)
I found out though that if you go and register with them for free, you gain access to a whole load of other options, reporting for example, content filtering (you can filter by categories, e.g. Pornorgraphy, Nudity, Religion and so on) or by domain. I think its great for anyone with kids who wants a bit more control over what they are up to online.
As you are making these changes on the OpenDNS server, its quite easy to keep track of things and slightly more difficult (though not impossible) for someone to circumvent. It helps of course if you configure the DNS addresses on your home router and then distribute the IP address to the other computers via DHCP or static DHCP.
Anyways, take a look perhaps some of you will find it useful(?)
(OpenDNS provides name servers that contain an index of sorts for sites on the internet so that your computer can find them when you try to access them - at least thats the over simplified version)
I found out though that if you go and register with them for free, you gain access to a whole load of other options, reporting for example, content filtering (you can filter by categories, e.g. Pornorgraphy, Nudity, Religion and so on) or by domain. I think its great for anyone with kids who wants a bit more control over what they are up to online.
As you are making these changes on the OpenDNS server, its quite easy to keep track of things and slightly more difficult (though not impossible) for someone to circumvent. It helps of course if you configure the DNS addresses on your home router and then distribute the IP address to the other computers via DHCP or static DHCP.
Anyways, take a look perhaps some of you will find it useful(?)
Wednesday 14 May 2008
Crysis
Just thought Id mention that Ive installed Crysis on my MBP (2.6ghz, 4GB ram and Geforce 8800 256MB Video card) and Im able to play with all of the settings on high, AA off and 1024 x 768 resolution. So far its not too bad and Im thinking of pumping up the resolution a notch or two to see how much I can get away with.
Anyways, if youre thinking of trying Crysis, give it a go.
The land of nod
Hi, its been a while since I posted something here but thats mainly because I havent done too much techie stuff to post about. Instead just lately we have been trying to teach my daughter to go to bed at 8pm instead of midnight and to fall asleep by herself without needing us to rock her.
The rocking started quite soon, when she was roughly a couple of weeks old but it was because she developed colic and the rocking was the only thing that seemed to help her relax and sleep, so although it was an evil of sorts, it was a necessary evil and we knew kind of what we were getting ourselves into.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago now we decided to try and tackle the bedtime issue first, so we didnt stress about the rocking, we just started setting up a system for her to get used to, starting with a bath, change of cloths, last feed and then some rocking.
It took 2 or 3 days but seemed to work out ok and now around 7ish she starts rubbing her eyes and getting a little fussy, so we start the bath etc and things seemed to be working out fine. The only hiccoughs in the whole thing is the fact that she was waking in the night and needed to be rocked asleep again but sometimes she wouldnt sleep for another two hours.
At first we were worried that we might have left it a bit too long as she 6 months old now but we did some research and found out some things that helped and some that definitely need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
One of the things that we came across was the cry it out method, at first we didnt like the idea of this approach, although it seemed to pop up on pretty much every site, so we tried other things such as the patting and shushing etc but all of these failed miserably.
Two nights ago now, we decided to give the CIO method a try but to use the gentler kind where you check on the baby every 5 minutes ago (although it has been suggested that this is more to ease the parents minds than the baby's).
The first night was really a test of nerves, we followed the usual bedtime routine but after her last feed and burp we kissed her good night and put her into her cot and left the room. From that moment she went absolutely ballistic with her crying and screaming, it was really quite hard for both of us but we stuck to our guns and just went in to see her every 2-5 minutes or so.
After half an hour it didnt look like we would have much luck, so we tried starting her musical mobile, this distracted her for a bit but not too long and the crying continued. Almost an hour later and I was saying to my wife that maybe this approach wouldnt work and we should just go and get her to sleep and try something else tomorrow when the crying stopped. We waited a minute and still nothing, total silence, so we snuck to the room and put our heads round the door and she was sleeping peacefully! It was a relief I can tell you :)
Unfortunately she woke up again at midnight but we kept to the same routine and just kissed her, told her that everything was ok but otherwise let her be and after 15 minutes she was asleep again.
The next night, we followed the same routine, bath, feed, bed but this time we also turned off the night light (its still light enough here at 8pm that theres a dim light coming through the window). Again she started to cry when we left the room but not as much or as intensely as before but still a fair bit. So we switched the mobile on again and continued our 5 minutes visits and then to our surprise after about 15-20 minutes the crying started to subside and after another 10 minutes she was sound asleep. :)
So, so far so good, we just need to keep this up now and see if she will master falling asleep by herself but it really looks promising so far, so keep your fingers crossed for us.
Sunday 20 April 2008
Front Row Plugins
I came across a couple of really useful Front Row plugins today totally by accident while browsing for something else.
The first addresses something that I mentioned in a previous post which is the ability to show posters and movie info for files in your movies folder, just as the movie trailers do in Front Row. Its called Sapphire and can be downloaded from here, make sure to check out the screenshots and the manual.
The next plugin(s) are for EyeTV and Front Row, it basically adds menu options in Front Row and EyeTV to allow you to switch between the two gracefully, its called PyeTV and is available from here.
The final plugin allows ads to be skipped in EyeTV recordings but I havent had opportunity to try this yet but it can be found here.
Friday 18 April 2008
Uninstalling games in Crossover Games
As promised heres how to uninstall games from Crossover games and then uninstall the application itself for those of you interested.
- On the Crossover games menu, select Configure and Manage Bottles
- Select the bottle on the left hand side
- On the right hand pane, click the applications tab
- Under the applications tab, select the application to uninstall, in my case Starcraft
- Click Repair or Remove
- The games uninstaller should appear (it did for SC)
- Click uninstall and after a couple of seconds the installer should finish
Now the bottle will remain there so that you can install into it again if you wish, if you dont, then on the left hand side make sure that the correct bottle is selected again and click the minus symbol in the bottom left hand corner to delete it.
Confirm the delete and that should be it.
I tried this for BF2 and everything worked as described as above except that after the uninstallation had successfully completed, Crossover games quit unexpectedly. I relaunched it and checked the BF2 bottle and there were two directx runtimes listed but the uninstall option for them was greyed out, so I just removed the bottle entirely.
Finally I removed Diablo 2 and this also went without a hitch.
So it seems that uninstalling games is not too difficult, the hdd also reported the space as being recovered which was good to see.
I then used Appzapper to remove Crossover games and that was pretty much that.
I look forward to the next encounter though - to be honest it reminds me of when I tried some Linux distros a couple of years back, they were huge improvements but not quite ready for prime time like some of them are now and I have the same impression from Crossover as I have already mentioned but it is getting closer and closer each time.
Still at the end of the day, I didnt find a way to solve my Diablo 2 fix, so I guess I will just have to get upgraded discs for that too...
Crossover Games 7 - User experience
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I enjoy gaming, though the days where I could game through the night or during weekends are long behind me, I do still enjoy a game of something here or there, time, work and life allowing.
My mac is a physical symbol of this dual personality of mine, Ive got my OS X partition where I do my work and general tinkering and my Windows bootcamp partition for the gaming. So far this setup hasnt worked out too badly, though recently when I have had time, I sometimes cant be bothered to reboot into Windows and for how often I get around to playing games, having a chunk of windows real estate taking up a good few gigs of my hdd made me think if there wasnt an alternative solution to get my gaming fix.
Ideally I would prefer to be able to play all of my games under OS X, I prefer it and should opportunity present itself, then a game is just a click away. Unfortunately due to directx and other associated windows technologies, some games that Id like to play just simply arent available, others may come out as cider ports eventually and EA Games has just simply let most mac gamers down by not delivering on its promises.
So this made me think that I would try and see what alternatives to bootcamp there are, in terms of getting some of the games Id like to play under windows running in OS X. Bearing in mind the technological difficulties mentioned above, I decided to focus on some older titles as the hardware should be more than able to cope and technologically we've long since moved on from Directx 8, so even the software should cope...shouldnt it?
Now as you may know, I have been giving Crossover Games a try and thought that I would use this as an opportunity to detail my experiences with it and my thoughts. Now remember these are my own personal experiences, I admit I may have done something wrong not having used a Crossover product before but still worth sharing.
Initially I was quite excited by the idea that I would be able to run a lot of my older games under Crossover and what initially pushed me in that direction as well was that my "hybrid" mac/pc CD's for Diablo 2 etc were actually just PC versions.
The games I have tested so far with Crossover are Diablo 2, Diablo 2 - The Frozen Throne, StarCraft, and Battlefield 2.
How it works.
Crossover works by creating a bottle that is essentially a self-contained "windows" environment that you install the game into in order to run it. You can create bottles based on Windows 2000, XP, 98 and so on.
There are different ways to install games, first of all you can create a bottle as I mentioned above and then install the game into that or you can run the game installer from the CD (Crossover usually detects it) and then from there create the bottle to install the game into. I have tried both methods and I cant honestly say that one approach is better than the other, at least for me, it didnt seem to make a difference whether the game(s) would work or not.
I first tried Diablo 2, numerous times without success. I have the multi-disc version and on my initial attempt (I put the install CD in and let Crossover do its thing), it would not detect my play disc when it was inserted.
I next tried to create the bottle first (win2k) and then install into that and ran into the same problem, the play disc was not detected. Again as I mention in one of my posts below, I came across a post on the internet that suggested using disc images instead, so I imaged my Diablo discs using DD and then tried again.
The first time this work and I managed to successfully install Diablo 2 by using crossover to eject the discs and toast to mount them as the installer requested them. Unfortunately I then immediately tried to install the expansion, which got to 99% and then started to request a non-existent disc, forcing me to cancel it.
The second time, I repeated the above, except at the end of the Diablo 2 install, I instead downloaded and installed the latest Windows patch for Diablo 2 from Blizzard.
To do this;
- From the Crossover Games home screen click Install Unsupported Software
- Click continue
- Click Other existing bottle and select your bottle (it will say its likely to produce errors but it always says that)
- Click continue
- Click "Choose installer file" and Install
- In the window that opens, navigate to the .exe file you want and click "use this"
Crossover will then attempt to run the installer and let it do its thing.
The patch finished successfully, so with Diablo 2 now up to date, I tried launching it and it informed me that it cannot find the Diablo 2 playdisc.
So I thought I would be clever and try a nocd patch. I havent managed to make this work for Diablo, it could be that I didnt find the correct patch or that it simply doesnt work. I havent had time to do more digging and to be honest, I prefer to buy stuff as its less hassle (usually) and you can go online without too many worries. That being said usually the first thing I do with a game Ive bought is look for a nocd patch as having to have the disc in the drive is a pain.
To put a nocd or to copy any other kind of file (such as a savegame) into a game directory in a bottle, do the following;
- On the Crossover Games menubar, click on Configure and Manage Bottles
- On the left hand side of the window, select the bottle that you want to copy the file to
- On the tabs on the right hand side, click advanced
- From the advanced tab, click the button open C: drive in finder
- Now you can just drag and drop your file into this window
So, after trying to get diablo 2 to work and not having much luck, I decided to try with the expansion, so I duplicated the Diablo 2 bottle and then installed the expansion onto the original bottle.
To install the expansion I basically mounted both the diablo 2 playdisc and the expansion disc images using toast, when Crossover detected that the discs were inserted it asked me if I wanted to install the game, so I told it to go ahead with the expansion install and left it to work.
Mounting both of the discs was a bit of an experiment but it seemed to work ok, interestingly enough as well, it avoided the problem I had (mentioned in my previous post) about the expansion asking for a different disc at the end. Once installed I again patched it to the latest version using the method described earlier but ran into the same problems as with Diablo 2. For some reason it would no longer detect any of the CD's even though they were used for the install, it wouldnt detect the original CD when inserted into the drive and I couldnt find a no-cd in order to make it work.
I next tried StarCraft, for this I created a win2000 bottle, installed StarCraft into it, patched it and that was it - this worked providing I had the disc image mounted. (Why it works here and not for Diablo I dont know). The game runs in fullscreen though and the fans go into high gear quite quickly.
One problem I did come across with it though was that the mouse cursor was lagging horribly. So I quit the game and decided to try running it in a window. Crossover allows you to run commands like this, just as you would from the run option in windows, just do the following;
- In Crossover, click on Programs and Run Command.
- Select the bottle from the dropdown menu.
- Click the browse button and find the game .exe and select ok
- At the end of the string that appears in the Run Command field, append what you need e.g. -window
- You can save this custom setting by clicking the button "Save command to the programs menu" which also assigns a standard icon to it and makes it easy to run again later.
For StarCraft though, this didnt quite work, when I started the game it still started in fullscreen mode though now the cursor worked fine but the game still pushed the fans quite hard. In the end due to the fan noise I just replaced my starcraft cds for updated versions and installed in under OS X.
Finally I decided to give BF2 a try as I quite like this game and saw that it had an honourable mention in the Crossover forums. I installed it into an XP bottle and followed the steps outlined in the forum for applying a nocd patch to it but when it launched I just got a black screen and then it quit.
I tried patching it to 1.41 and using a nocd for that but again it would launch with a black screen and then quit. This was a shame as Id love to be able to play BF2 on the mac.
So to sum up my impressions of Crossover and whats becoming a long post, I think it definitely has potential and hopefully one day I will be able to use it to replace the bootcamp partition on my hdd, unfortunately for me, that day isnt here yet. I think I will give it some more time to get to the next point release or two before I try it again. That being said the program is definitely good though a little clunky at times but what they have accomplished so far is impressive, I think in a couple of releases it really will be a viable contender to replace the bootcamp partition for some people.
If I had had more time, I would have tried it with steam as this is supposed to be support quite well, I would have liked to have tried Half Life 2 Episode 1 and Bioshock, the former I have no doubt would work but the question is how well? As for Bioshock, I wouldnt expect it to work but I wanted to try and see. Unfortunately I only have one day left of the trial period and I know I will not have time to take advantage of it this weekend. So what I plan to do now is try to uninstall the games and then uninstall Crossover but I will cover that in the next post.
Tuesday 15 April 2008
Slow shutdown - yet again
As I mentioned in the comments to one of the posts, my slow shutdown problem resurfaced again two days ago. I tried the same trick as before, disabling hibernatemode and then deleting the sleepimage before re-enabling hibernatemode again. Guess what? Problem gone...
At least until next time ;)
At least until next time ;)
Monday 14 April 2008
Diablo 2...
I just realised why it didnt run when I tried it - I hadnt installed the patch to update it to a carbon app - d'oh.
Quick question...
Does anyone know how to run Warcraft 3 in windowed mode?
Cheers
UPDATE : Its easy - COMMAND (Apple) + M :)
Old Games - Crossover, Mac and Windows
Like a lot of you out there I suspect, I enjoy gaming, though these days if I have time to play its more the exception than the rule. Nevertheless if opportunity arises I like to get in a frag or some world domination here and there.
At the moment I do a lot of my gaming on my XP bootcamp partition, purely because for newer games it better if they run on windows directly.
I have some older games, Diablo II, StarCraft, Warcraft 3 and so on, that recently I have been having a craving or an urge to play again. As they were old though (and also because space on my windows partition is low) I thought I would try to get them to run under OS X, as it should easily handle it and also its easier just to fire up a game there, than to have to reboot the whole system.
Now most blizzard games are hybrid CD's, that is to say the installation discs includes Mac and Windows installers. Which sounded really promising at the start, so I popped the Diablo II disc into the drive, opened it and saw just a windows installer.
After a bit of googling, I found out that I probably have an old set of discs that only include either the windows or classic installers, so what now? Luckily (or at least I thought), Blizzard includes a Diablo II OSX Installer for just this situation, so I downloaded it, launched it and got stuck right away. Why? Well because the OSX Installer asks me to insert the "Diablo II Install Disc", whereas my disc when its mounted is listed as "INSTALL". I tried messing around a bit with Disktool and renaming Install to Diablo II install Disc but couldnt get it to work, so in the end because I was a)tired and b)my daughter was crying I gave up (for now), fired a question off to Blizzard Support (no answer yet) and decided to attack it from a different angle tomorrow (that being today).
The Different Angle - Crossover Games
As many of you may know, Crossover recently released Crossover games which is supposed to specialise on running windows games under OS X and Linux as well as providing support for more games than the standard release of crossover.
Sounds promising right? When I checked out their compatibility list for games, I found that Diablo 2 is listed, though only as an honourable mention - i.e. someone tried it and got it to work but officially its not supported. Not being deterred easily, I decided to give it a try anyway.
I installed the trial version of Crossover Games 7, which runs for 7 days as a full version and then you have to pay up if you want to keep using it.
At the moment I do a lot of my gaming on my XP bootcamp partition, purely because for newer games it better if they run on windows directly.
I have some older games, Diablo II, StarCraft, Warcraft 3 and so on, that recently I have been having a craving or an urge to play again. As they were old though (and also because space on my windows partition is low) I thought I would try to get them to run under OS X, as it should easily handle it and also its easier just to fire up a game there, than to have to reboot the whole system.
Now most blizzard games are hybrid CD's, that is to say the installation discs includes Mac and Windows installers. Which sounded really promising at the start, so I popped the Diablo II disc into the drive, opened it and saw just a windows installer.
After a bit of googling, I found out that I probably have an old set of discs that only include either the windows or classic installers, so what now? Luckily (or at least I thought), Blizzard includes a Diablo II OSX Installer for just this situation, so I downloaded it, launched it and got stuck right away. Why? Well because the OSX Installer asks me to insert the "Diablo II Install Disc", whereas my disc when its mounted is listed as "INSTALL". I tried messing around a bit with Disktool and renaming Install to Diablo II install Disc but couldnt get it to work, so in the end because I was a)tired and b)my daughter was crying I gave up (for now), fired a question off to Blizzard Support (no answer yet) and decided to attack it from a different angle tomorrow (that being today).
The Different Angle - Crossover Games
As many of you may know, Crossover recently released Crossover games which is supposed to specialise on running windows games under OS X and Linux as well as providing support for more games than the standard release of crossover.
Sounds promising right? When I checked out their compatibility list for games, I found that Diablo 2 is listed, though only as an honourable mention - i.e. someone tried it and got it to work but officially its not supported. Not being deterred easily, I decided to give it a try anyway.
I installed the trial version of Crossover Games 7, which runs for 7 days as a full version and then you have to pay up if you want to keep using it.
I tried to use it to install Diablo 2 and got a bit further than with the os x installer. I created a bottle (basically a container that provides an emulation layer for the game) put the install disc in the drive and got through the first part of the installation. It then asked me for the Diablo 2 Play Disc, so I inserted the disc into the drive, clicked ok and it asked me for the Diablo 2 play disc. I tried again, same thing.
So I then used the Crossover window to eject the disc and tried inserting it again but it still didnt work, this time however when I tried to eject the disc via crossover it wasnt recognised. At this point I gave up on this attempt and cancelled the install.
I tried the install again this time by just inserting the install disc into the mac (you can set crossover to recognise windows discs), unfortunately this met with the same result as above. I tried checking the crossover support and Google but everything brought back results mostly for linux. There was a post about making images of the discs and using those though which I thought was worth an attempt.
Initially I tried to make images of the disk using Disk Utility and although they completed successfully they werent true one to one copies. I tried Toast but for some reason that didnt work either, so I then went to the terminal and entered the following;
drutil status - this tells you the device name for the disc - usually disk1dd if=/dev/yourdeviceof=yourpath /yourisoimagename.iso bs=2048 This command will make a one to one backup of your disc.
So using the above command, I made images of all 3 Diablo 2 disks and the frozen throne expansion. I next mounted the Install disk image (which still mounts as INSTALL) and started the installation procedure.
This time, when it asked me to insert the play disc, I used Crossover to eject the install disk and then mounted the play disc, clicked ok and the installation continued without a hitch. I then continued to mount the cinematics disc and finally the install disc again.
NB: I am using toast 8's "mount it" option from the ctrl+click or right+click menu to mount the images.
So now Ive got the installation successfully completed I realised that for Crossover it hadnt, it was still showing the installation as being in progress, so after moving some windows around I found the cause, the video test window was open behind the D2 installation window. So I cancelled that (I read on the crossover site to do this if you plan to install the expansion) and finally the installation was finished.
Flushed with this success, I decided to go ahead and install the expansion, so following the same procedure as above, I mounted the expansion image that I made, told crossover to install it into the D2 bottle and then selected upgrade from the installer.
Everything was chugging along nicely, until I got to 99% and then it asked me to insert the "Expansion disc". Eh? It in the drive... so I eject it, remount it and try again - no joy. So I tried again, still nothing, so I unmounted the image and tried with the real CD, still wouldnt work. Tried the image again and at this stage I realised that Crossover was no longer ejecting discs if I clicked on its eject option. So I clicked cancel and the install supposedly rolled back. I say supposedly because afterwards when I tried to run Diablo 2, I couldnt get it to work, even after trying the video test.
In the end, I made the assumption (perhaps incorrectly, perhaps not), that the install was botched and so deleted the entire bottle. I plan to try again tomorrow time willing - for some reason I really feel like playing D2.
The Mac Native Bit ;)
Anyway, not wanting to give up totally, I tried Warcraft 3. This time the installer from the CD worked and the game installed directly under OS X without me needing to use Crossover. So not learning from my above lesson I pushed my luck and installed the expansion, this also finished successfully.
So there was no stopping me now and I launched the game - after a second where it looked like it had bombed out, it started. The intro video didnt play, I just got a black screen but I pressed space to skip it and got to the menu screen.
At this point the fans were all going nuts, on 4000+rpm, which is quite loud as you can imagine and the game was reporting that it was version 1.07. I connected to Battle.Net to auto-download the update but it wasnt working. After quitting the game, I found the reason why - Little Snitch was blocking it by default. So I unblocked it but left it at that and went to help my wife get my daughter to sleep and went to bed myself.
Today while I was at work and writing a report, I decided to use the time to see if it would work, so I started up the game, went into Battle.Net and sure enough it connected and started to download the patch. It took a long time, around 45 minutes on a 6mbps connection (admittedly shared with the rest of the office) but once done it restarted and patched the game up to version 1.21 if memory serves.
I tried a couple of quick custom games and they started and ran without any problems, the patch also seems to have updated the game to a universal binary, which means that its not running in rosetta and so the fans no longer run at full blast, which is good :)
So finally after some fiddling I got one of the games to work. I plan to go back to D2 tomorrow as Ive said but it may come down to me having to exchange my discs with Blizzard for newer versions if they still do that. I also want to try to get StarCraft going if I can.
Im a bit disappointed with Crossover, I was hoping that it would cope with an old game like D2 without too much issue but it might have just been me, we'll see tomorrow. I'll also try searching a bit harder for something on Google, after all someone must have trod this path already right?
Btw those images that you made earlier also come in handy for playing the game as theyre one to one copies, the game(s) will play as long as theyre mounted.
Ok thats all for now, more tomorrow.
Saturday 5 April 2008
Slow shutdown with Leopard and hibernate
Just for kicks yesterday, I reset my hibernatemode to 3 as I had previously set it to 0 as outlined in one of my posts below.
Interestingly enough, my MBP now shuts down just as quickly as it did when I had hibernatemode set to 0 and thats also without having to eject my windows bootcamp partition.
At the moment I have no idea why this is the case, I still have to check my log files but I thought I would share the info at least.
Friday 4 April 2008
Just some waffle
Nothing new today Im afraid, Ive been too busy at work the past couple of days to even contemplate messing around with anything on the MBP.
I also just finished watching Ashes to Ashes series 1, which wasnt bad but Life on Mars was much more... profound or at least it had a bigger impact on me than ashes to ashes. Still I enjoyed it and Im looking forward to series 2 when it comes out next year.
Today is also the day that BSG series 4 starts finally, so Im looking forward to that.
Anyway in the world of computers Ive downloaded the Bento demo but havent managed to install it yet, though Im curious to see what it can do.
You know, theres one application that I would like to see on the Mac and Im not sure if it exists or not, perhaps it does but I would like to see an app that would scan my movies folder for any films in there and then would just display that movies poster as a big thumbnail (as opposed to the 1st frame of the movie), clicking on the movie would "zoom" the post to a large size and display the details for it and then pressing play would start it.
I guess basically what I am talking about is the way that the original frontrow worked but with a touch more functionality. I much preferred seeing all of the films posters than the way it currently works and furthermore, the current version doesnt always display all of a films info which is a shame.
Still if something like this existed as a standalone app that would just pick up on any folder(s) that you told it too, would go to the net to retrieve info and would work in fullscreen with the apple remote (or via remote buddy), I would be a happy person indeed.
Thursday 3 April 2008
Slow shutdown with Leopard - steps taken so far - Summary post
I thought it might be useful for me to summarise what has happened so far and what steps Ive taken, mainly for anyone new coming across this via Google and also just to attempt to make sense of the jumble of posts that I have so far. So here goes :)
The issue
My new MBP (2.6GHz Merom / 320GB HDD / 4GB RAM) started to take a while to shutdown, roughly from 50 seconds to a minute, which is a big difference from the 7 seconds a new install takes. During the shutdown process I would see the "progress cog" appear on my desktop and spin around for a bit until the computer shutdown. Sleep also took a long time, regardless of whether I had 2GB or 4GB of RAM.
I initially had this problem on my original core due MBP and first noticed it when I was testing my new 2.6ghz MBP with a fresh install of Leopard.
The reason that the issue got passed onto my new MBP was because I wanted to keep the bigger drive, so I unplugged it from the original MBP and swapped it with the drive in the new MBP, so I got the extra space at the cost of the slow shutdown/sleep.
Steps taken so far
So far I have tried the following, ranging from the standard Mac voodoo to the non-standard...
Phase 1
- Repaired permissions
- Ran monthly scripts
- Cleared out caches (internet, kernel, system, font etc)
- Verified the drive (no errors)
- Checked out and cleared out any unnecessary items from startup items
- Cleared out any old preference settings for uninstalled applications
Phase 2
- Examined the console logs, found some messages first that suggested it may be parallels trying to close down its network connections.
- To check, I uninstalled Parallels but there was no change and things were still just as slow. I went back to the console and found that EyeTV Helper couldnt quit.
- I started looking into EyeTV as a possible culprit but it seems that this may have been a wild goose chase.
- Checked if EyeTV was up to date (at the time it was).
- Tried manually quitting the process via activity monitor and then shutting down but shutdown was still slow.
During this time, I discovered a utility called SmartSleep (its in an earlier blog post), which to cut it short puts the computer to sleep instead of hibernating it based on the battery level. I installed this and the sleep time was dramatically reduced but the slow shutdown still remained.
Phase 3
I couldnt find anything else in the logs to indicate why things were so slow and so I decided to see if the menu applets or widgets that I use were causing an issue. So I created a new user account with no menu items besides the standard Apple ones and also no widgets running (in hindsight I should have tried this as part of Phase1).
This wasnt the solution I was looking for though as the result was still the same, the shutdown was just as slow with the new user as with my standard account.
I next installed Leopard onto an external HDD, booted from that, applied all of the updates to date and tried a few shutdowns and restarts and it was amazing how fast it was compared to my current install.
At this stage I was debating just dragging over my apps and documents to the new installation and then cloning it to my internal drive but I didnt want to go through the hassle of authorizing and deauthorizing etc in iTunes and I also didnt want to give up, I wanted to find the cause and learn basically.
I went back into the new user account and started to compare the console logs from the new account with the old ones but couldnt find anything to suggest what could be the cause, so I started Googling.
Via Google I found some forums where people were mentioning external drives as causes for slow shutdowns, which gave me an idea that perhaps my bootcamp partition was influencing my shutdown. I tried unmounting the window drive and my computer was able to shutdown in 15 seconds as opposed to a minute.
I was (and still am) in the process of trying to determine why this was when a guy Bob posted in the comments and let me know about the terminal commands to disable hibernate, which he found on macosxhints (theyre a couple of posts below this one if youre interested).
I tried this out - leaving the windows partition still mounted and the computer shutdown again very quickly, around 7 to 15 seconds.
So thats the stage that I am currently at and I am now trying to understand why. If anyone would care to share their insight here it would be more than welcome :)
Slow Shutdown with Leopard - Possible Solution 2
Hi, I thought I would share with you all something that Bob posted in the comments that has also resulted in an improvement in the shutdown times of our macs, this is something that he mentioned finding over at macosxhints.com but I thought I would share it here as well as its useful information.
For this solution, you will need to use the terminal but its quite easy, open the terminal and enter the following commands pressing enter after each one (NB: After the first command you will be prompted for you password, enter it and after that you should not be prompted again).
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=falsesudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
After entering these commands my MBP shuts down in seconds, mainly because its not creating a 4GB sleepimage or trying to page the contents of RAM there. Im trying to understand now though what the correlation between the windows drive and sleep is, as unmounting windows also has the same effect...
Tuesday 1 April 2008
Slow shutdown with Leopard - further examination
I have been trying to see if I can get to the bottom of what is going on with the computer during the shutdown process. At the moment, theres not really too much new to add as the situation is still the same, eject the Bootcamp disk and the computer shutdowns quickly, dont eject it and it doesnt.
I have tried uninstalling MacFUSE and NTFS-3G (instructions for uninstalling MacFUSE here and NTFS-3G here, download the dmg, mount and inside follow the uninstall readme).
I have tried uninstalling MacFUSE and NTFS-3G (instructions for uninstalling MacFUSE here and NTFS-3G here, download the dmg, mount and inside follow the uninstall readme).
This doesnt seem to have made any difference however, so its back to the drawing board for now.
Slow shutdown with Leopard - Possible Solution?
I was just playing around with this again and remembered that in the past, having external drives connected could cause the computer to shutdown slowly, one of the things that didnt occur to me until now though, was that my Windows Bootcamp partition may be an external drive of sorts, or at the least, may be affecting the shutdown cycle.
So I ejected it and then tried shutting down. The computer now shuts off in 15 seconds or less as opposed to almost a minute before, it still doesnt seem as fast as a new install of Leopard but its definitely a big improvement.
The question now though is why or what is it doing with the Windows partition before it shuts down? It also possibly invalidates the earlier line of research I was following with the menu applets, so clearly I need to look into this some more but its the first definite improvement I have seen.
If you try this and it improves your shutdown speed please let me know, it will be interesting to compare.
So I ejected it and then tried shutting down. The computer now shuts off in 15 seconds or less as opposed to almost a minute before, it still doesnt seem as fast as a new install of Leopard but its definitely a big improvement.
The question now though is why or what is it doing with the Windows partition before it shuts down? It also possibly invalidates the earlier line of research I was following with the menu applets, so clearly I need to look into this some more but its the first definite improvement I have seen.
If you try this and it improves your shutdown speed please let me know, it will be interesting to compare.
Slow Shutdown with Leopard - update
So as I mentioned yesterday, I managed to find time to partition an external drive and install Leopard on it, plus all of the updates currently available.
Afterwards, I did a couple of restart and shutdown tests and it was fast, in fact it surprised me how fast it was having been used to the time my current install of Leopard takes to slowdown. The shutdown speed wasnt the only improvement though as the startup time was also noticeably faster.
Admittedly this is a new installation of the OS, which as most of us know, tends to be faster than a "used" install as a general rule of thumb, so Ive now set about trying to determine what is causing the issue on my current installation by trying to break the new one.
So far in the limited amount of testing that I have had time to do, I have installed some of the menubar applications that I use often (I say some because I have not yet installed QuickSilver, Slim Battery Monitor and SMCFanControl). I have installed the following programs though and have not noticed any changes in performance; SmartSleep, iStatMenus.
I have also exported the console log from the new install in order to compare it with my current one; for reference here is a copy.
I plan to add the other menu items as mentioned above as well as EyeTV and also VMWare later on to see if one of them is the culprit but in the meantime I want to review the two console logs. I know it would be quite easy to migrate my settings onto the new install now and then clone that image back to my internal drive but it seems like the easy way out and I would like to beat this. Plus I cant be bothered at the moment to remember to deauthorize itunes and all of those other little things that you need to do in advance.
As always if any of you have any ideas, please let me know.
Afterwards, I did a couple of restart and shutdown tests and it was fast, in fact it surprised me how fast it was having been used to the time my current install of Leopard takes to slowdown. The shutdown speed wasnt the only improvement though as the startup time was also noticeably faster.
Admittedly this is a new installation of the OS, which as most of us know, tends to be faster than a "used" install as a general rule of thumb, so Ive now set about trying to determine what is causing the issue on my current installation by trying to break the new one.
So far in the limited amount of testing that I have had time to do, I have installed some of the menubar applications that I use often (I say some because I have not yet installed QuickSilver, Slim Battery Monitor and SMCFanControl). I have installed the following programs though and have not noticed any changes in performance; SmartSleep, iStatMenus.
I have also exported the console log from the new install in order to compare it with my current one; for reference here is a copy.
I plan to add the other menu items as mentioned above as well as EyeTV and also VMWare later on to see if one of them is the culprit but in the meantime I want to review the two console logs. I know it would be quite easy to migrate my settings onto the new install now and then clone that image back to my internal drive but it seems like the easy way out and I would like to beat this. Plus I cant be bothered at the moment to remember to deauthorize itunes and all of those other little things that you need to do in advance.
As always if any of you have any ideas, please let me know.
4/1/08 9:30:39 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] BootCacheControl: could not open /var/db/BootCache.playlist:
4/1/08 9:30:39 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] No such file or directory
4/1/08 9:30:40 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
4/1/08 9:30:40 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 9:30:40 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ...Generating key pair...
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ...creating certificate...
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Serial Number : 6A 4E 20 40
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Issuer Name :
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Common Name : com.apple.systemdefault
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Org : System Identity
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Subject Name :
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Common Name : com.apple.systemdefault
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Org : System Identity
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Cert Sig Algorithm : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 0D 01 01 05 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] alg params : 05 00
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Not Before : 07:31:02 Apr 1, 2008
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Not After : 07:31:02 Mar 27, 2028
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Pub Key Algorithm : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 0D 01 01 01 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] alg params : 05 00
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Pub key Bytes : Length 140 bytes : 30 81 89 02 81 81 00 BD ...
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] CSSM Key :
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Algorithm : RSA
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Key Size : 1024 bits
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Key Use : CSSM_KEYUSE_ENCRYPT CSSM_KEYUSE_VERIFY CSSM_KEYUSE_WRAP
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Signature : 128 bytes : 4F 29 CD 44 F6 8F 94 8B ...
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Other field: : OID : < 06 0C 60 86 48 01 86 F8 4D 02 01 01 01 17 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Other field: : OID : < 06 0C 60 86 48 01 86 F8 4D 02 01 01 01 16 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Extension struct : OID : < 06 03 55 1D 25 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Critical : FALSE
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] purpose 0 : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 63 64 04 04 >
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ..cert stored in Keychain.
4/1/08 9:31:02 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ..identity registered for domain com.apple.systemdefault.
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ...Generating key pair...
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ...creating certificate...
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Serial Number : 3E B6 EE CB
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Issuer Name :
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Common Name : com.apple.kerberos.kdc
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Org : System Identity
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Subject Name :
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Common Name : com.apple.kerberos.kdc
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Org : System Identity
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Cert Sig Algorithm : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 0D 01 01 05 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] alg params : 05 00
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Not Before : 07:31:03 Apr 1, 2008
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Not After : 07:31:03 Mar 27, 2028
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Pub Key Algorithm : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 0D 01 01 01 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] alg params : 05 00
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Pub key Bytes : Length 140 bytes : 30 81 89 02 81 81 00 B7 ...
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] CSSM Key :
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Algorithm : RSA
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Key Size : 1024 bits
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Key Use : CSSM_KEYUSE_ENCRYPT CSSM_KEYUSE_VERIFY CSSM_KEYUSE_WRAP
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Signature : 128 bytes : 13 83 C3 4A EA 6F 65 E7 ...
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Other field: : OID : < 06 0C 60 86 48 01 86 F8 4D 02 01 01 01 17 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Other field: : OID : < 06 0C 60 86 48 01 86 F8 4D 02 01 01 01 16 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Extension struct : OID : < 06 03 55 1D 25 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Critical : FALSE
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] purpose 0 : OID : < 06 09 2A 86 48 86 F7 63 64 04 04 >
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ..cert stored in Keychain.
4/1/08 9:31:03 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] ..identity registered for domain com.apple.kerberos.kdc.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] launchctl: Error unloading: com.apple.kdcmond
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q add_principal -randkey afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] WARNING: no policy specified for afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4; defaulting to no policy
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Principal "afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4" created.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q ktadd afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type Triple DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type ArcFour with HMAC/md5 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type DES cbc mode with CRC-32 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/bin/defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleFileServer kerberosPrincipal afpserver/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q add_principal -randkey cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] WARNING: no policy specified for cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4; defaulting to no policy
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Principal "cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4" created.
4/1/08 9:31:05 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q ktadd cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type Triple DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type ArcFour with HMAC/md5 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal cifs/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type DES cbc mode with CRC-32 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/bin/defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server LocalKerberosRealm LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q add_principal -randkey vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] WARNING: no policy specified for vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4; defaulting to no policy
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Principal "vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4" created.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] /usr/sbin/kadmin.local-q ktadd vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Authenticating as principal root/admin@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with password.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type Triple DES cbc mode with HMAC/sha1 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type ArcFour with HMAC/md5 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] Entry for principal vnc/LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4@LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4 with kvno 3, encryption type DES cbc mode with CRC-32 added to keytab WRFILE:/etc/krb5.keytab.
4/1/08 9:31:06 AM com.apple.configureLocalKDC[56] LKDC:SHA1.800D5674405F377B9E6690FB821E9508FAFD69D4
4/1/08 9:31:11 AM com.apple.ATSServer[133] FODBCheck: New annex file created
4/1/08 9:31:20 AM [0x0-0x4004].com.apple.SetupAssistant[142] ...System identity already exists for domain com.apple.systemdefault. Done.
4/1/08 9:34:30 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 9:35:53 AM [0x0-0x4004].com.apple.SetupAssistant[142] Creating socket...
4/1/08 9:35:53 AM [0x0-0x4004].com.apple.SetupAssistant[142] Connection in progress (will timeout in 5 seconds)...
4/1/08 9:35:53 AM [0x0-0x4004].com.apple.SetupAssistant[142] PPPoE can't connect the socket, errno = 65
4/1/08 9:35:53 AM [0x0-0x4004].com.apple.SetupAssistant[142] PPPoE Server not found...
4/1/08 9:37:20 AM Setup Assistant[142] .Mac cert config scheduled
4/1/08 9:37:30 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[138]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 9:37:30 AM com.apple.KerberosAutoConfig[274] The machine is standalone
4/1/08 9:37:30 AM com.apple.KerberosAutoConfig[274] Removing /Library/Preferences/edu.mit.Kerberos
4/1/08 9:37:32 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[270]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 9:37:34 AM com.apple.ATSServer[299] FODBCheck: New annex file created
4/1/08 9:37:39 AM SyncServer[313] SyncServer: Reaping records for inactive clients. Next reap on 2008-05-16 09:37:39 +0200
4/1/08 9:37:45 AM SoftwareUpdateCheck[318] Checking for updates
4/1/08 9:37:47 AM SystemUIServer[297] Could not find image named 'TMDisk'.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Contrast.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Contrast and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Geometry.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Geometry. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Geometry.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Geometry.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Geometry.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Geometry and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/VPT.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/VPT. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/VPT.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/VPT.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/VPT.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/VPT and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Bezel.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Bezel. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Bezel.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Bezel.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Bezel.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Bezel and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ExtendedTouchSwitch.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/ExtendedTouchSwitch. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ExtendedTouchSwitch.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/ExtendedTouchSwitch.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ExtendedTouchSwitch.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/ExtendedTouchSwitch and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/PowerMode.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/PowerMode. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/PowerMode.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/PowerMode.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/PowerMode.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/PowerMode and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Authorization.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Authorization. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Authorization.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Authorization.
4/1/08 9:40:56 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[362] objc[362]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/Authorization.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Authorization and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/TVOptions.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/TVOptions. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/TVOptions.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/TVOptions.
4/1/08 9:46:51 AM com.apple.loginwindow[267] Shutdown NOW!
4/1/08 9:47:58 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
4/1/08 9:47:58 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 9:47:58 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 9:48:16 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[108]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 9:48:35 AM Software Update[141] arguments=(null)
4/1/08 9:48:57 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] BootCacheControl: could not fetch history: Cannot allocate memory
4/1/08 9:48:57 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] BootCacheControl: could not stop cache/fetch history: Cannot allocate memory
4/1/08 10:14:17 AM com.apple.launchd[101] (com.apple.pboard[122]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 10:14:17 AM com.apple.launchd[101] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-Aqua[120]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 10:14:26 AM com.apple.AirPortBaseStationAgent[292] Tue Apr 1 10:14:26 andrew-proudloves-macbook-pro.local AirPort Base Station Agent[292]: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.
4/1/08 10:14:26 AM com.apple.AirPortBaseStationAgent[292] _RegisterApplication(), FAILED TO establish the default connection to the WindowServer, _CGSDefaultConnection() is NULL.
4/1/08 10:14:27 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.installdb.system) Throttling respawn: Will start in 2 seconds
4/1/08 10:14:37 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.installdb.system) Throttling respawn: Will start in 2 seconds
4/1/08 10:16:07 AM com.apple.dyld[424] update_dyld_shared_cache[424] regenerated cache for arch=i386
4/1/08 10:16:08 AM com.apple.dyld[814] update_dyld_shared_cache[814] current cache invalid because /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/AE.framework/Versions/A/AE has changed
4/1/08 10:16:12 AM com.apple.dyld[814] update_dyld_shared_cache[814] for arch=i386 failed: read failure copying dylib errno=0 for /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation while copying /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation to shared cache
4/1/08 10:16:12 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.dyld) Throttling respawn: Will start in 56 seconds
4/1/08 10:17:12 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.dyld[821]) Exited abnormally: Segmentation fault
4/1/08 10:17:12 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.dyld) Throttling respawn: Will start in 57 seconds
4/1/08 10:18:02 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10d5d0.update_dyld_shar[1336]) Check-in of Mach service failed. PID 1336 is not privileged: com.apple.dyld
4/1/08 10:18:09 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] current cache invalid because /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Versions/A/QuickLook has changed
4/1/08 10:18:17 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.installdb.system) Throttling respawn: Will start in 4 seconds
4/1/08 10:18:20 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] for arch=i386 failed: could not resolve _CGSGetGestureEventSubmask from /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/HIToolbox in /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/HIToolbox
4/1/08 10:18:20 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] for arch=i386 failed: read failure copying dylib errno=2 for /usr/lib/libsasl2.2.dylib while copying /usr/lib/libsasl2.2.dylib to shared cache
4/1/08 10:18:20 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] for arch=i386 failed: read failure copying dylib errno=2 for /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageCapture.framework/Versions/A/ImageCapture while copying /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageCapture.framework/Versions/A/ImageCapture to shared cache
4/1/08 10:18:20 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] for arch=i386 failed: read failure copying dylib errno=2 for /System/Library/Frameworks/DirectoryService.framework/Versions/A/DirectoryService while copying /System/Library/Frameworks/DirectoryService.framework/Versions/A/DirectoryService to shared cache
4/1/08 10:18:20 AM com.apple.dyld[1337] update_dyld_shared_cache[1337] for arch=i386 failed: read failure copying dylib errno=2 for /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/QD.framework/Versions/A/QD while copying /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/QD.framework/Versions/A/QD to shared cache
4/1/08 10:18:42 AM [0x0-0x18018].com.apple.SoftwareUpdate[270] reboot: / is busy updating; waiting for lock
4/1/08 10:21:33 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
4/1/08 10:21:33 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 10:21:33 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 10:22:17 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[102]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 10:25:56 AM com.apple.firmwaresyncd[27] kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/msdosfs.kext loaded successfully
4/1/08 10:37:41 AM System Preferences[252] SmartSleepPref setStatus: file does not exist yet - copying
4/1/08 10:37:41 AM [0x0-0x15015].com.apple.systempreferences[252] launchdworkaround: starting
4/1/08 10:37:41 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[260] SmartSleepDaemon: setting hibernation state to: 0
4/1/08 10:40:38 AM com.apple.launchd[108] ([0x0-0x9009].com.apple.systemuiserver[124]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 10:40:45 AM SystemUIServer[293]
MenuCracker
see http://sourceforge.net/projects/menucracker
MenuCracker is now loaded. Ready to accept new menus. Ignore the failure message that follow.
4/1/08 10:40:45 AM SystemUIServer[293] failed to load Menu Extra: NSBundle (loaded)
4/1/08 10:40:45 AM SystemUIServer[293] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusCPU'.
4/1/08 10:41:02 AM SystemUIServer[293] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusMemory'.
4/1/08 10:41:16 AM SystemUIServer[293] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusDisks'.
4/1/08 10:41:44 AM SystemUIServer[293] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusNetwork'.
4/1/08 10:42:22 AM SystemUIServer[293] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusTemps'.
4/1/08 10:43:32 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
4/1/08 10:43:32 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 10:43:32 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
4/1/08 10:43:43 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[38] SmartSleepDaemon: machine d
4/1/08 10:43:43 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[38] oes not support sleep.
4/1/08 10:43:44 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[38] SmartSleepDaemon: machine does not support sleep.
4/1/08 10:43:51 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[79]) Exited: Terminated
4/1/08 10:43:53 AM Dock[100] _DESCRegisterDockExtraClient failed 268435459
4/1/08 10:43:55 AM SystemUIServer[101]
MenuCracker
see http://sourceforge.net/projects/menucracker
MenuCracker is now loaded. Ready to accept new menus. Ignore the failure message that follow.
4/1/08 10:43:56 AM SystemUIServer[101] failed to load Menu Extra: NSBundle (loaded)
4/1/08 10:43:56 AM SystemUIServer[101] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusCPU'.
4/1/08 10:43:56 AM SystemUIServer[101] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusMemory'.
4/1/08 10:43:57 AM SystemUIServer[101] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusDisks'.
4/1/08 10:43:57 AM SystemUIServer[101] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusNetwork'.
4/1/08 10:43:57 AM SystemUIServer[101] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusTemps'.
Monday 31 March 2008
Quicktime focus issue - update
I just found out that simply clicking inside the window on the video itself as opposed to the window brings the focus back to the window correctly after switching from fullscreen. So just to make it clear after returning from fullscreen using command+f, I have to click directly on the video thats playing (twice) in order for the focus to come back correctly so that keyboard control will work. Clicking once brings the focus back to the window but not keyboard control.
Short update - slow shutdown
So I managed to find some time to look at the slow shutdown issue again, well at least a couple of minutes anyway. I created a new account on the mbp and started in that, making sure that none of my startup items from my present account were loading (I left the ones in the /library/preferencepanes on purpose. Sure enough it took a while to shutdown as well, which suggests that its a system wide issue as opposed to being limited to my user account.
During the weekend I also prepared and partition an external hdd ready to install leopard onto for further testing but I still want to see if I cant get to the bottom of this.
The thing thats been holding me back though is "Life on Mars", which is a BBC TV series, so far its been great and if Ive managed to find some time somewhere I have been watching that instead... bad bad but its definitely worth checking out if you havent done so already.
Maybe when I finish watching it I will finally sort this problem out? ;)
During the weekend I also prepared and partition an external hdd ready to install leopard onto for further testing but I still want to see if I cant get to the bottom of this.
The thing thats been holding me back though is "Life on Mars", which is a BBC TV series, so far its been great and if Ive managed to find some time somewhere I have been watching that instead... bad bad but its definitely worth checking out if you havent done so already.
Maybe when I finish watching it I will finally sort this problem out? ;)
Wednesday 26 March 2008
Quicktime focus issue - spacebar etc not working
One issue that Ive came across with Quicktime (and judging by the number of posts about it that Ive came across on the internet Im not the only one), is the issue where Quicktime stops responding to keyboard commands, for example the spacebar no longer plays or pauses and so on.
It mainly seems to occur if you put a video into fullscreen and then for whatever reason, close fullscreen but still live the window with the video open on the desktop. Afterwards it will not respond to any keyboard commands unless you put it back into fullscreen.
Tabbing between applications until you get back to Quicktime does not resolve the problem, neither does moving it to a different workspace.
Other posts on the internet suggest reinstalling Quicktime by downloading the standalone file from Apple. Although I havent tried this yet, I have found a workaround that seems to fix the issue temporarily.
It appears though, that minimising Quicktime to the dock and then restoring it, is enough to put the focus back on the application.
Update : It seems that my solution may not be as reliable as I first thought, Ive tried it just now and it didnt work... will take another look at it and post anything I find here.
It mainly seems to occur if you put a video into fullscreen and then for whatever reason, close fullscreen but still live the window with the video open on the desktop. Afterwards it will not respond to any keyboard commands unless you put it back into fullscreen.
Tabbing between applications until you get back to Quicktime does not resolve the problem, neither does moving it to a different workspace.
Other posts on the internet suggest reinstalling Quicktime by downloading the standalone file from Apple. Although I havent tried this yet, I have found a workaround that seems to fix the issue temporarily.
It appears though, that minimising Quicktime to the dock and then restoring it, is enough to put the focus back on the application.
Update : It seems that my solution may not be as reliable as I first thought, Ive tried it just now and it didnt work... will take another look at it and post anything I find here.
Saturday 22 March 2008
Syncserver crash
Every time I opened mail.app (under Leopard 10.5.2), I got a dialogue that syncserver had quit unexpectedly. I couldnt find anything wrong though and a quick search on google also didnt turn up anything that seemed to relate to me. I did see a post about someone getting the error while using .mac though and this caused me to check my .mac syncing.
Funnily enough it had been disabled which was weird, so I reenabled it and then had to tell it to rewrite the items on .mac with what was on my computer but afterwards it synced ok and also took away my mail.app problem.
Funnily enough it had been disabled which was weird, so I reenabled it and then had to tell it to rewrite the items on .mac with what was on my computer but afterwards it synced ok and also took away my mail.app problem.
Noise Ninja
If you take any photos in higher isos - say 400 upwards or just in dim light, you should really check out Noise Ninja, it does an amazing job of removing noise from the photos. I bought a license for it today as it really impressed me with what it did for our photos.
Vmware
Unfortunately this post wont be as interesting as I hoped it would be, in the sense that my father-in-law didnt want me to try converting his laptop into a vmware image, so in the end I just did a basic vmware/windows xp/ms office install for him.
Hes quite happy now that windows is working as he uses ms money a lot but for some reason outlook is really slow. Or is now after he imported his calendar into it. If I start it in safe mode though (outlook /safe) it starts up and works instantly. Hes planning to reinstall it when he gets back home though, so its not really that big a deal...
Hes quite happy now that windows is working as he uses ms money a lot but for some reason outlook is really slow. Or is now after he imported his calendar into it. If I start it in safe mode though (outlook /safe) it starts up and works instantly. Hes planning to reinstall it when he gets back home though, so its not really that big a deal...
Friday 21 March 2008
Sleep, blessed sleep :)
I havent done too much with my computer for the past couple of days, including looking some more into the slow shutdown problem, simply because Ive just been too tired to do anything after getting home from work.
Mostly once we've got our daughter to sleep, we've just been relaxing (or sleeping) ourselves.
Tonight (or tomorrow), Im planning to try to convert my father-in-laws windows laptop into a vmware image that I can then port into vmware fusion on the mac for him. Hopefully it will work but if not then I'll just install windows and ms office for him.
Im still stumped with the slow shutdown thing too, so if any of you would happen to have any ideas, I really would appreciate it.
Mostly once we've got our daughter to sleep, we've just been relaxing (or sleeping) ourselves.
Tonight (or tomorrow), Im planning to try to convert my father-in-laws windows laptop into a vmware image that I can then port into vmware fusion on the mac for him. Hopefully it will work but if not then I'll just install windows and ms office for him.
Im still stumped with the slow shutdown thing too, so if any of you would happen to have any ideas, I really would appreciate it.
Wednesday 19 March 2008
Slow shutdown - The console strikes back
I just found a comment in an earlier posting on this subject from Tyler (thanks Tyler!) that raised a good point. He was commenting on the difference he noticed in the shutdown speed after upgrading from 2GB of RAM to 4GB.
Now by default the "new" (all intel MBP's I believe) MBP's create a sleepimage file by default as they are set to hibernate instead of sleep, so you could draw a conclusion from this that a 4GB file would take longer to create than that of a 2GB file but this would only make sense if you were sleeping the MBP, not I would have thought, shutting it down.
It also doesnt explain why, on a fresh install of Leopard, that my MBP shuts down just as quickly with 4GB as with 2GB of RAM, which can only mean that its something I have done in terms of a program I have installed.
Tylers point made me think though if the "quality" of the RAM could factor into this equation as well? Then again, am I just over complicating this?
Now by default the "new" (all intel MBP's I believe) MBP's create a sleepimage file by default as they are set to hibernate instead of sleep, so you could draw a conclusion from this that a 4GB file would take longer to create than that of a 2GB file but this would only make sense if you were sleeping the MBP, not I would have thought, shutting it down.
It also doesnt explain why, on a fresh install of Leopard, that my MBP shuts down just as quickly with 4GB as with 2GB of RAM, which can only mean that its something I have done in terms of a program I have installed.
Tylers point made me think though if the "quality" of the RAM could factor into this equation as well? Then again, am I just over complicating this?
Slow shutdown revisted
This os really driving me nuts, the only thing that Ive managed to find when digging in the console is an error with the EyeTV Helper not quitting but even if I manually quit this and then try to shutdown there is no change.
Im seriously thinking about installing OSX on an external drive and then migrating things over to it one by one until I find the culprit but it seems a bit excessive for this. Ive posted a log file here in the hope that one of you can see something that Im missing. If you do and if you could let me know I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance...
UPDATE Further adventures in my slow shutdown saga can be found using the links below.
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/slow-shutdown-console-strikes-back.html
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/short-update-slow-shutdown.html
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/slow-shutdown-with-leopard-update.html
UPDATE Further adventures in my slow shutdown saga can be found using the links below.
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/slow-shutdown-console-strikes-back.html
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/short-update-slow-shutdown.html
http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/slow-shutdown-with-leopard-update.html
3/19/08 6:13:38 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist3/19/08 6:13:38 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight3/19/08 6:13:38 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.ntp.ntpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight3/19/08 6:13:45 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] VMware Fusion 72241: Starting VMware Fusion:3/19/08 6:13:45 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[40] SmartSleepDaemon: machine does not support sleep.3/19/08 6:13:45 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] kextload: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/kexts/vmmon.kext loaded successfully3/19/08 6:13:45 AM de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[40] SmartSleepDaemon: machine does not support sleep.3/19/08 6:13:46 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] kextload: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/kexts/vmci.kext loaded successfully3/19/08 6:13:47 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] kextload: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/kexts/vmioplug.kext loaded successfully3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] kextload: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/kexts/vmnet.kext loaded successfully3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Internet Software Consortium DHCP Server 2.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 The Internet Software Consortium.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] All rights reserved.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Please contribute if you find this software useful.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/dhcp-contrib.html3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Configured subnet: 192.168.99.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Setting vmnet-dhcp IP address: 192.168.99.2543/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Opened:3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Recving on VNet/vmnet8/192.168.99.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Sending on VNet/vmnet8/192.168.99.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Internet Software Consortium DHCP Server 2.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 The Internet Software Consortium.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] All rights reserved.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Please contribute if you find this software useful.3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/dhcp-contrib.html3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Configured subnet: 192.168.205.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Setting vmnet-dhcp IP address: 192.168.205.2543/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Opened:3/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Recving on VNet/vmnet1/192.168.205.03/19/08 6:13:48 AM com.vmware.launchd.vmware[41] Sending on VNet/vmnet1/192.168.205.03/19/08 6:13:52 AM org.ntp.ntpd[14] Error : nodename nor servname provided, or not known3/19/08 6:16:59 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.UserEventAgent-LoginWindow[288]) Exited: Terminated3/19/08 6:17:16 AM SystemUIServer[322]MenuCrackersee http://sourceforge.net/projects/menucrackerMenuCracker is now loaded. Ready to accept new menus. Ignore the failure message that follow.3/19/08 6:17:23 AM SystemUIServer[322] failed to load Menu Extra: NSBundle (loaded)3/19/08 6:17:31 AM Overflow[337] Custom ColorPicker class with name .com.freeverselib could not be loaded.3/19/08 6:17:30 AM [0x0-0x17017].com.elgato.eyetvhelper[338] EyeTV Helper version 3.0b1 build 2663/19/08 6:17:34 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusCPU'.3/19/08 6:17:35 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusMemory'.3/19/08 6:17:35 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusDisks'.3/19/08 6:17:35 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusNetwork'.3/19/08 6:17:35 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusTemps'.3/19/08 6:17:36 AM SystemUIServer[322] MenuCracker: Loading 'iStatMenusFans'.3/19/08 6:17:38 AM SyncServer[330] Ignoring exception NSObjectNotAvailableException trying to remove lock file: Can't remove existing lock for /Users/andrew/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/conflicts3/19/08 6:17:39 AM textexpanderd[340] textexpanderd 2.0.5 at your service3/19/08 6:28:06 AM com.apple.launchd[305] (0x40d500.Locum[374]) Exited: Terminated3/19/08 6:30:47 AM com.apple.launchd[305] (0x40c5b0.Locum[389]) Exited: Terminated3/19/08 6:31:53 AM DashboardClient[391] JavaScript says: missing ecb currency on: ecb_ZAR3/19/08 6:31:53 AM [0x0-0xa00a].com.apple.dock[318] 2008-03-19 06:31:53.391 DashboardClient[391:10b] JavaScript says: missing ecb currency on: ecb_ZAR3/19/08 6:32:12 AM [0x0-0x2a02a].com.apple.iTunes[395]
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