The Big Think

Today was a totally wasted day. I woke up this morning hoping to get a big jump on work after being gone all day yesterday on the Thanksgiving shoot.

Instead, I was greeted with timeout and error messages in my email client. AT&T has been bugging us recently to change over our email settings in order to coincide with theirs. I thought I had done that but called ATT to make sure. First mistake. The “tier one” people who populate the phone lines at ATT have two job requirements: do not to speak the English very well, and make sure you take long periods to read the ineffectual phone “help” script before you tell the customer something that will further mess up his system. After fargling my email client even farther I asked to be escalated to tier 2. When I got there I got the well known complaint:

I’m sorry, sir. I’m not trained on the Mac. Well are you trained on email, meathead? So I finally got to tier 2 MAC support. Now this dude, this Todd guy, really knew his stuff, and he spent the better part of an hour getting my settings back to normal and my system working again. It turns out it was the mac.com email servers that were down, but I had messed up the other server settings (AT AT&T’s insistence), and only by invoking the gods of email were we able to get things working again. In the course of all this, however, I had to give Todd my user name and password so he could check things on his end. Fairly standard procedure, I think, but I was still nervous about things as this information would let him get into my iTunes account and download stuff on my credit card, were he the nefarious type.

So once the email was all up and running again (and here I’m in hour FIVE of this fiasco), I did an even stupider thing: I changed my .mac password. Simple, right? Go online and type in the new password, right? That seemed to work, and I was able to access the .mac webmail just fine. But when I put the password into the Mac’s MAIL application and have it go out to find my email I get either a timeout or this:

So I am once again adrift, only this time the problem is with APPLE’s product, not AT&T. I’ve followed the letter of the law, made my changes according to their rules, and everything should be working, but no fuzzy dice, Batman. I can only hope that things start to work again of their own accord, because the alternative is either a lifetime of checking email with the web application, calling tech support for a $50 fix, or junking the whole thing and moving away.

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed standard searching in OS X. Under the new system, called Spotlight, the computer looks at every single file you have, then adds it to a universal database index. It can take several hours to index a big drive the first time, but once it’s done it’s very easy to just search the index. You can also search inside many types of files, so you could look for instances of certain keywords within a file. Pretty cool. In theory.

The problem comes when, for obscure Unix/OS X reasons, Spotlight refuses to index the drive at all. When this happens there is no index to search, no files to look through, and no way to find a lost file on your hard drives short of looking through every folder. No way.

This is a MAJOR problem for me, and is the latest of a slew of crazy, unacceptable, “it shouldn’t happen in OS X” problems I’ve been having with this busted OS. Even after a complete clean reinstall I’m having issues. If Spotlight won’t index the drive, the OS doesn’t give you a fallback search function. In other words, you’re screwed.

So Google it! Oh, believe me, I did. I looked all over the place for solutions (it seems other people have had related problems). The best I can do is to delete the current “index file” (only a few K) and force Spotlight to reindex. When I do that, Spotlight takes three or four minutes to get its stuff together and then promptly quits indexing. Actually, it says it’s done, but you can’t search for so much as the letter “A” in Spotlight. No results. So it’s creating some kind of index, but it doesn’t have any useful data in it.

May be related: Every 5 seconds or so I get a new message in the console that says:

G4-MDD mdimportserver[335]: sniffer can’t check in… 1102

G4-MDD is the name of the computer and the number in brackets increments each time. The 1102 stays the same. I think it’s related somehow because “mdimport” is the name appended to files that are used in defining Spotlight searches. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Again… this is a brand new install of the OS. As far as I know, it has clean preferences and apps. Where do you go when Apple and Google fail you?

*Update* I got tired of trying to solve this annoying problem and just downloaded EasyFind. It’s a Spotlight replacement that doesn’t need to index the drive. Good Old-Skool searching. Downside: it’s an app that needs to run all the time (and takes time to boot at startup). Upside: unlike Spotlight, it works.

Not that you care, but for the internet archives.

I did a google search and discovered that the “Illegal name” issue was due to an Illustrator file. I had installed Illustrator last night and it installed a folder called “legal.txt” or something. In that folder were a bunch of localized files for czech, german, italian, etc. The file name on the vietnamese file had some illegal characters that caused OS X’s Disk Utility to freak out. Tossing the whole folder and emptying the trash fixed the problem. I ran Disk Utility (from another OS X partition) and it cleaned up the mess.

I don’t get the “Illegal file” error any more, but I still have that annoying 128 MEGAbyte partition cluttering up my desktop. Are there any cool Unix commands I can use to permanently disable or unmount an unwanted partition? I’d rather do this than reformat the whole drive and start over.

I’m at the end of a three day computer rebuild. My old system was giving me all sorts of problems (random lockups, much slowness, etc) and it’s been a few years since I’ve raked the thing down to raw metal and rebuilt it. When I do a rebuild I generally do it from the ground up instead of one of the quick and easy ways that you can do it. This way, all the pref files are new and there’s no way for the old problems to crop back up again.

Which doesn’t mean new ones can’t appear.

The system is up and running but I’m starting to see odd behavior that I can’t fix. I wiped one of the drives and made it my new boot drive, installed OS X on it, and got everything working. It worked great this morning but I started to see some little weirdnesses when I tried to install OS 9 onto my new business partition. For one thing, the software refused to install. I believe its exact words were “Can’t install on this computer. Please see documentation”. Gee, thanks. So I gave that up and booted back into X to Carbon Copy Clone my old work partition over. I’m not crazy about this since I’ll essentially be using a 4 year old system, with all its accumulated detritus, to run my business. I’d much rather start afresh, but when the system refuses to even install I don’t have much choice.

When I booted back into X I ran Disk Utility and noticed the the new drive suddenly had a 128mb ghost partition called “Uluru”- the name of the old partition that was on that drive. That’s weird. I had wiped that partition before creating the two new ones. And only 128mb? How useless is that? The undead “Uluru” partition was greyed out in Disk Utility and the only way I could access it was to erase it and make it a mountable partition. Now I have a useless 128mb stub hanging out my desktop.

To make matters worse, when I ran ‘verify disk’ in Disk Utility on my main OS X partition, I got an “Illegal Name” error and the dire warning that the disk needed to be repaired. Naturally, Disk Utility couldn’t repair it. Sigh.

So I’m at a brick wall here. I’m going to try and reboot into my old old old original drive, which is still around, and try to fix things from there. If that doesn’t work, the only recourse I can see is to go buy another new hard drive and start this whole farce all over again, this time using a known wiped drive. This really sucks.

If anybody out there has seen behavior like this or can offer advice, I’d appreciate an email. Something other than “OS X isn’t supposed to do that”, which is the most common frustrating advice I’ve been getting lately.

Grr… got a great deal on a 320gb drive from frys.com the other day. I installed the drive yesterday and put some data on it (a carbon copy clone of my OS 9 partition). I let it run for 24 hours, intending to wipe the other drives today and reinstall everything from scratch. Well, on one of my reboots that drive went completely belly-up. I get a kernel panic on reboot. Took the drive out and the computer booted fine. So it’s definitely something to do with the drive.

I have had really bad luck when it comes to drives. According to published statistics, the “infant mortality” of drives (failure within the first three months) is somewhere between 1-3%, so it’s odd that I would get one. I’ve also had terrible luck when it comes to brand new computers. Of the last six Macintosh computer I have owned (and LC, a Performa 635cd, a G3/333, a Powerbook, and my current G4, plus Erin’s new iMac), five of them have had to have their drives wiped and the OS reinstalled in the first 24 hours. In a few cases the computers wouldn’t boot at all after a few hours, and in some there were significant freezes or lockups that were solved by a reinstall. Fortunately, when it comes to a new machine, a complete lobotomy/drive wipe/reinstall isn’t that traumatic since there’s nothing of value on the drive yet, but it has made me very skeptical of newer machines and drives. Once my system is stable and functioning well I don’t like to mess with it.

I’m having a very strange problem on the Mac and can’t seem to track it down. Every morning I come downstairs to the kitchen table (where my computer has been exiled while the studio is under construction). I start it up (cold start) and once it’s booted, open up my email client and Firefox. About three minutes after start the computer does something OS X is supposedly not supposed to do: it freezes. Total lockup. There’s no kernel panic dialog and never any evidence in the crashlog (the last crash it reports was nine days ago!). I have to hold the power button in for 5 seconds to get it to reboot

If I do not open any apps the mac will still freeze after about 3 minutes (iCal is set to auto open so that’s the only open app). I haven’t timed it but it feels like exactly the same amount of time each morning- about 3 minutes.

Here’s what’s odd. Once I do the reset button thing and reboot it the computer is fine for the rest of the day. It will occasionally freeze during the day (ever couple of days), but is otherwise normal.

What the heck could be going on?!? I haven’t rebuild the hard drive in three years. I need a bigger drive anyway so I’m going to be dropping one in and doing a complete rebuild, but does anyone have any idea what could be causing such strange and yet predictable behavior?

I’ve been having some issues with OS X lately and am about to go crazy. The latest symptom (and there have been many): all of my podcasts in iTunes have vanished. I have about a dozen podcasts I follow. Each day iTunes dutifully downloads the latest and then puts them on the iPod when I sync. I went to sync today and iTunes opened up. No podcasts. Even the old podcasts I hadn’t listened to yet were gone. The entire podcast window in iTunes is blank and iTunes complains that “Podcasts on the iPod “Walkabout” cannot be synced because all of the podcasts selected for syncing no longer exist.” Well DUH. They no longer exist because you have spontaneously decided to nuke them all.

So now I have to go back and remember what they all were and resubscribe to them in iTunes. I still have no guarantee that it wont happen again. I had a similar thing happen last week when iTunes decided to wipe my entire 30gb iPod. I hadn’t changed any settings or altered anything in the program. I just plugged the iPod in and iTunes nuked it happily. Luckily it hasn’t erased all of my music off the hard drive yet. This stinks.

Oh, and I just noticed that all of my playlists are gone. Thanks, iTunes.

Well, the issues with my Mac have become so widespread lately I’ve almost decided to just wipe the thing and reinstall everything. I don’t really want to, but I’ve reached the limit of what I can do under OS X. My current problem is with Mail. I got it up and working with the new SBC connection. It was working fine today, but now when I try and send an email via Mail I get a weird problem. I’ll hit “send” and the email will go to the “Drafts” box and sit there. The program won’t even try to send it. It happens with each of my five (!) email addresses. I’ve got email from every address to a variety of places that won’t get sent. There’s no warning or error or anything. It’s like I’ve just hit “save” and left it for later.

So if I don’t answer an email from you for a few days, it’s because of this ridiculousness.

When I tried to log into Apple’s support pages to post a question I got a message saying that my account had been disabled for security reasons. Huh?!?

At least my blogging software is working… I hope.

*UPDATE* I may have found a solution here, but it’s too late for me to try now. I’ll wade into this mess tomorrow. Thank goodness for Google. Oh, and thank goodness for Giles, too who helped me with some very late night troubleshooting. Off to bed…

Mac completely froze in Mail. I installed the new 512MB DIMM the other day and immediately began having problems. Typical manifestation is that the OS will totally freeze (clock, mouse, etc) and I have to force a reboot. It’s done this four times now, starting about 60 seconds after I first installed the RAM. Did it on reboot, then it was okay for a few days. I just opened up the box to remove an old hard drive, closed it up, and it froze on the next reboot after about 30 minutes.

Strangely, it never freezes when I’m logged in on Erin’s screen name. So is it hardware, software, or voodoo?

Frustrating. I strongly suspect the new RAM.

Kernel Panic again this morning. This time I didn’t get the multi-language box. Instead I got the gibberish screen. I think it’s almost certainly related to my 2408/324 hardware. They’re not rewriting a simple driver because they want me to spend $200-$500 to upgrade my digital recording hardware.
The big dumbheads.

Just had a kernel panic in OS X. Went to homestarrunner.com/sbemail and immediately got a crash. Going to try it again to see if it’s repeatable.
Bummer

Yup, another one. I’m getting very familiar with the kernel panic screen. I think I’m tracking it down, though. It seems to happen often (though not exclusively) in Safari when I’m trying to play Quicktime movies. I think it may have to do with the MOTU 324 drivers for my 2408 digital interface. I play all my audio out this interface all the time, and this seems to cause the crash (though, as I stated before, it’s non-reproducible in the same Safari movie).
I’m all updated as of today (w/repaired permissions) and I still got the kernel panic.
I tried to use the internal speaker on the computer and went back to the same site to play the movie. No crash. However I really want to use my mixer and speakers to hear audio (after all, I spent a lot on these things) so I plugged a cord into the back of the machine and router it into the mixer. I can hear the sound but I get a horrific amount of RFI from the computer itself, and This Will Not Do.
So I guess I’ll go back to using the 2408 and just putting up with the kernel panics. MOTU doesn’t mention problems and I haven’t heard of anyone else experiencing similar things. Familiar story: I’m off on my own desert island of technical problems and there’s no tech support lifeboat around- nothing to do but resigning myself to the next 1000 dinners from coconuts. I had hoped that the new computer would be a crystal clear and pristine start over, with no sneaky problems anywhere, but I guess that’s too much to hope for. Even for a Mac.

For what it’s worth, here’s the crash log:

Tue May 4 19:03:01 2004

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0×400 – Inst access DAR=0x000000001C084008 PC=0×0000000000000000
Latest crash info for cpu 0:
Exception state (sv=0x2D81C280)
PC=0×00000000; MSR=0×40009030; DAR=0x1C084008; DSISR=0×40000000; LR=0×00000000; R1=0x12013E20; XCP=0×00000010 (0×400 – Inst access)
Backtrace:
0×00000000
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2D81C280)
previously dumped as “Latest” state. skipping…
Exception state (sv=0×00920500)
PC=0×00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0×00000000; DSISR=0×00000000; LR=0×00000000; R1=0×00000000; XCP=0×00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 7.3.0:
Fri Mar 5 14:22:55 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.3.15.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC

panic(cpu 0): 0×400 – Inst access
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x000834B8 0x0008399C 0x0001EDA4 0x000909C0 0x00093C8C
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2D81C280)
PC=0×00000000; MSR=0×40009030; DAR=0x1C084008; DSISR=0×40000000; LR=0×00000000; R1=0x12013E20; XCP=0×00000010 (0×400 – Inst access)
Backtrace:
0×00000000
Exception state (sv=0×00920500)
PC=0×00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0×00000000; DSISR=0×00000000; LR=0×00000000; R1=0×00000000; XCP=0×00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 7.3.0:
Fri Mar 5 14:22:55 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.3.15.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC

Just booted up the computer and had a kernel panic WHILE BOOTING. Very weird. I had gone about 20 seconds into the boot and hadn’t even reached the blue screen (still on the grey screen). I think I’m going to try and disable some extensions and see what happens. Frustrating.

Okay, this is getting old. Had ANOTHER kernel panic just now (that makes 2 in 3 days). Panic.log says:

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily(1.4.4b1)@0x3e2000

Whatever that means. I was playing a QT movie in Safari from theindernet.com (the Homer Simpson one). *Bam*

This is getting old.

In Safari. Haven’t had a crash in awhile. I was clicking around online (doonsbury comic site on MSN’s Slate) and had a kernel panic. Just installed Panther a few weeks ago.

Another Kernel Panic. This time I was watching a flash/qt presentation in Safari when it happened (actually, I had just finished watching and tried to quit the program). Yesterday I had been watching QT in Safari. Maybe one of those is the issue?
For what it’s worth, OS X has been significantly LESS stable than OS 9 over my ownership of this machine. I’m very disappointed in it.
Fortunately, I can reboot into OS 9 and get my work done. Very glad I didn’t buy an OS X-only machine.

Again with the frozen computer. Clock, keyboard, mouse. Everything just froze. I was playing a QT video and it went south. That’s twice in one day OS X has completely locked up on me. Not good, Apple.
Repaired permissions but there were none wrong.
I could run Disk Warrior, but it can’t repair the boot disk. As I only have one OS X partition, I would have to install a completely different iteration of OS X on a separate drive in order to run Disk Warrior. An exercise in frustration.
Grr….