So, it took two trips to the shop to get my brand-new Quad G5 running reliably, demonstrating once again that it’s never safe to buy The Latest Thing from Apple (or, to be fair, most vendors). It works great now, and when I took it in the second time, it received automatic priority as a “looper”, so it was done in two days. That’s the good news.

Now for the bad news: this morning, my PowerBook died with repeated kernel panics (most likely bad RAM, from the symptoms). I had backups, of course, but I didn’t need them. All I had to do was carry it over to another Mac, connect them with a FireWire cable, and reboot the second Mac from the PowerBook’s hard drive. In 30 seconds I was back in business, with everything exactly the way I like it.

I immediately made a fresh backup to a portable FireWire drive, and just for good measure, stored a disk image of that backup on the other Mac’s drive. Since I still need a laptop, I’m now booting my ancient 700MHz G3 iBook from the FireWire drive, and that’s what I’ll be carrying to work until the PowerBook is fixed. It’s a lot slower, and a bit clumsier to carry around, but I don’t have to spend any time fixing preferences, reinstalling applications, etc, etc.

Best of all, everything was done with vendor-supported tools that ship with Mac OS X, without ever opening up a case. You can rescue data from a broken Windows or Linux laptop, but the process is a touch more involved (coughcough), and the odds aren’t good that you can just boot another computer from that disk.

Update: okay, there are a few things that don’t “just work” when you pull this trick. The OS stores some of its preferences on a per-host basis, keying off the MAC address on the primary ethernet port. These are stored in ~/Library/ByHost/, and include that address in their name. Most of them are pretty obvious, like network port configurations, display preferences, and iDisk synchronization, but I was surprised that it included the input menu contents for multi-language input. The menu was there, but I had to click the checkboxes to re-enable Japanese input. So far, that’s the only host-specific preference I’ve had to set.

So, add 5 seconds to the transition time. :-)

There is one annoying side-effect to this. If you’ve turned on local mirroring of your iDisk, that mirrored copy is also host-specific. It makes sense, but it means that I have a hidden disk image chewing up 1GB.

I rather like the webcomic Misfile. The art and writing aren’t as polished as some others, but both are improving over time. The pacing is pretty good, and sometimes it just rings true:

If you’re going to make your VPN Client software completely incompatible with the Mac OS X built-in VPN support, could you at least make it capable of connecting to non-Cisco servers? It’s just not fun to be forced to delete my other VPN config and reboot every time I need to connect to one of your servers. It’s not like this stuff is some kind of standard or something…

Love, J

I always knew that American music agencies were rank amateurs at creating pop idols compared to the Japanese (c.f. Tiffany vs Hello! Project), but I hadn’t realized how much the fanbase contributes to this.

Case in point: last month, some paparazzi pictures were published of 18-year-old Kago Ai, an extremely popular idol singer, and they may have ended her career.

Now, if you’re used to Hollywood scandals and the all-too-common meltdown of former child stars, you’re probably thinking in terms of cocaine, public sex, car wrecks, shoplifting, armed robbery, drunken partying, and incredibly poor taste in boyfriends.

more...

the quiet forest
a white house stands before you
you see a mailbox.

climbing the dark stairs
you were eaten by a grue
GET THE LAMP next time.

(maybe more later…)

Please quit fucking with the concept of “plain-text” email in Mail.app. Your latest trick, stripping out leading tabs when text is cut-and-pasted using the Emacs key bindings, is a damned nuisance.

Oh, and while you have developers doing something useful, give me a switch to turn off the anti-WYSIWYG text-wrapping feature, shut off the foolish “unpack ‘safe’ files” feature in Safari, and don’t let the finder launch shell scripts that are pretending to be innocent data files.

Love, J

PS: please fix my Quad G5 correctly this time. Diagnostic LED #7 is not my friend.

Update: Well, time will tell if my Quad G5 is truly fixed, but at least they got it back to me quickly (after replacing one of the CPUs they replaced last time).

Here’s a nice demonstration of how the Republican Party started winning national elections, and why it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future:

In addition to winning hearts and minds, one must also acquire a clue.

As a general rule, I have little use for Internet Explorer. Not just because I use a Mac, but because it’s not a particularly good browser. The Windows version, for instance, ships unable to view many foreign-language web sites correctly (and even after you turn on support for that language, it may not be 100%), and still doesn’t support transparency in PNG images (my site logo does not have a grayish box around it).

Back in the days when I ran several hundred Solaris servers for Microsoft, my only real use for IE was filing expense reports. Maybe the occasional internal web site that used ActiveX controllers or NTLM authentication, but that was pretty rare.

On my Mac, I hadn’t fired it up in months. All I’d done recently was copy it to my teacher’s Mac, after one of her “helpful” support techs had deliberately removed it from her hard drive (“you don’t need that any more”). Good thing, too, since we discovered that it rendered all of the Japanese text on her Tamura Ryuichi site incorrectly.

[For future reference, the problem was that the text-encoding Content-Type META tag had not been placed immediately following the HEAD tag; the designer had placed it after the TITLE tag, indented with whitespace. Most browsers saw it and correctly rendered the page, but IE for Mac ignored it. Placing it immediately after the HEAD tag fixed the problem. More on Unicode and using it in browsers here.]

This week I found myself with an understandable but annoying need for Mac IE: getting my alumni discount at the Microsoft online company store. Forget buying stuff, you can’t even browse the product categories in Safari or Firefox.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. As in, “I’m sorry, I refuse to run on this machine, and here’s a cryptic dialog box explaining why”. Microsoft’s knowledge base article on this subject says “try repairing permissions, rebooting, or reinstalling the operating system”. The first two did nothing, the third was out of the question.

You can’t download Mac IE from Microsoft any more, so I couldn’t reinstall it. I got a fresh copy from a co-worker’s machine, and that didn’t work either. The error dialog referred to components of CarbonLib, specifically JNIlib, so I did some searching.

Java. Duh. A while back I followed instructions similar to these to switch the default version of Java on my machine from 1.4.2 to 1.5; Apple supplies both, and gives you a tool to tell GUI Java apps which one to use (Java Preferences.app, buried in /Applications/Utilities/Java/J2SE 5.0), but there’s no supported way to set the default for apps launched from the command line. I’ve now forgotten why I needed it at the time…

Switching the symlinks back to 1.4.2 and rebooting fixed IE. This suggests that IE may die for good when Apple decides that 1.5 should become the system default.