Snow Leopard: Bring on the pain!

October 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

MacOS X 10.6.0 Snow Leopard was released over a month ago on August 28, 2009. While everyone jumped at the opportunity to be Apple’s outsourced QA, I followed my rule of “never use a dot-zero (.0) release.” Now, a month and a half later — and after the 10.6.1 update has been released — I’ve decided to install the upgrade.

Many people have suggested the upgrade was smooth and painless for them, and I totally believe this to be the case for probably 98% of Mac users, but I’m a developer and have installed lots of third-party (non-Apple) applications. I was completely expecting a bit of work to get my system running normally again, but my first symptom that something was wrong totally puzzled me: the system would stop performing I/O to disk, causing every process to spin the shiny hypnodisk at me. Basically, I could boot the system, and after about 3 minutes, everything would hang. So, keep this in mind as I describe all the things I fixed, because getting through each step involved several reboots just to make the necessary changes.

Here’s the list of problems I encountered and fixed:

Checkpoint SecureClient VPN

This complained at boot-up that the SecureClient service wasn’t started. A known work-around is to binary edit two files, StartupItemsMgr and SecureClientStarter and replace the string “kextload -s” with “kextload -r“. This worked for me.

MacPorts

The old MacPorts compiled against dependencies that are no longer available on Snow Leopard, including MacPorts.dylib itself. Luckily, I just grabbed the latest MacPorts installer .dmg for Snow Leopard which enabled me to selfupdate and upgrade outdated and get things working again.

Soundflower

Periodically, a dialog box complaining about Soundflower.kext popped up:

soundflower-kext-error.png

I had Soundflower 1.4.3 installed, which was the most recent release before Snow Leopard was released. Now, Soundflower 1.5.1 is available, so I upgraded to it. This appears to be sufficient to get it working again, too.

Oh, the agony …

At this point, my system appeared to be stable enough to use — no spurious errors being logged to /var/log/system.log and no more annoying hangs. I’m sure I’ll discover a few more annoyances next week when I start dealing with work stuff again, but for now I can at least use the machine again.

Was the upgrade worth it? I guess I’ll find out.

Tags: , ,

Filed Under: Apple, Geeking out Leave a Comment

My old alphanumeric pager

September 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Ah, the ultimate in retro push technology, my old Motorola 929.8625 MHz alphanumeric pager.

Found this little gem while cleaning out boxes of crap in my home office. I decided to take a pic of it for memory’s sake before I trash it.

My old alphanumeric pager

Tags: , , ,

Filed Under: Geeking out Leave a Comment

Reorganizing the home office

September 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

It’s a task I’ve been putting off for years — reorganizing the home office — but I’m finally doing it. The rack and servers that sat behind me for years is now finally in the basement, thanks to my Dad helping me run two 20A circuits for the equipment down there. Here’s what the room looks like mid-reorganization:

Home office reorganization in progress

Sure, my desk is still a mess, but that’ll also get taken care of once I put up some new shelves to better organize stuff.

The one thing I still can’t get over is how silent the room is, now. The fans from the various computers and the Liebert UPS were loud! Over the years, I just got used to the low level noise and tuned it out, but now with the contrast of the room without the noise, it’s eerie.

Tags:

Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy!, Geeking out Leave a Comment

Optimum WiFi at ETD in Kinnelon NJ

September 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

As I try to get some work done waiting for car repairs, I discovered that the ETD on Route 23 in Kinnelon, NJ, has Optimum WiFi within range. Being a Optimum Online customer, I get free access to it.

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

Optimum WiFi speed test at Speedtest.net

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

Tags: ,

Filed Under: Geeking out, Product placement Leave a Comment

What should I do with old vintage BX cable?

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I’m doing a bunch of electrical clean-up in the house and have a bunch of scrap vintage BX cable and boxes and switches – I’d hate to just throw these out in the recycling if they’re still worth something, to somebody.

It appears that the going rate for copper/steel BX scrap is around $0.20/pound and I probably only have 20-30 pounds of scrap so far, so it’s really not worth the aggravation of finding a scrap buyer.

Should I just dump this in the recycling bin? Anyone have better ideas?

Filed Under: Geeking out Leave a Comment

Getting Adaptec afacli working on Ubuntu

June 6, 2009 By 1 Comment

In order to get afacli working on Ubuntu Hardy, I did these things:

1. Get afa-apps-snmp.2807420-A04.tar.gz from Dell.

2. Get libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 from Debian afacli depends on libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3.

Since I’m running Ubuntu x86_64, I put libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 in /usr/lib32. Installing the rpm package under Ubuntu provides rpm2cpio which I used to extract afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm like this:

$ rpm2cpio afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm | (cd / && cpio -iudvm)

That’s it. You now have /usr/sbin/afacli.

Tags: , , ,

Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 1 Comment

I take that back, Wolfram Alpha is made of win!

June 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last week, I wrote that Wolfram Alpha still couldn’t answer such important (ha) questions such as “How is babby formed?“

As you might expect, Wolfram Alpha’s gotten smarter already. Look:

Wolfram Alpha knows!

That’s what I call awesome. Well done, guys.

Filed Under: Geeking out Leave a Comment

Wolfram Alpha may be cool, but …

May 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Wolfram Alpha may be cool, but it can’t answer the really important questions, yet, such as “How is babby formed?” …

Wolfram Alpha's attempt to answer "How is babby formed?" fails.
Filed Under: Geeking out Leave a Comment

You know it’s bad when …

April 16, 2009 By 6 Comments

This morning, I got a spam email with this subject line:

We are too lazy to change subjects every day, please buy our viagra

Wow, has it really come to this? Is there anyone left on this planet who wants to buy Viagra that doesn’t know how to get it, that spam like this has a non-zero conversion rate?!

I think spammers are now just sending spam to prove they can do it these days. They’re probably distributing URLs that link to sites that serve malware that exploit browser vulnerabilities simply to grow their botnets, under the guise of Viagra spam.

I’m waiting for the day when these botnet owners start distributing code to do large-scale grid crypto cracking. Imagine what kind of crypto you can brute-force in near-realtime with a grid of a few hundred thousand modern computers? That’s a supercomputer that no single organization could probably afford to purchase and manage.

Tags: , , ,

Filed Under: Geeking out 6 Comments

A simple “google for” Tcl script

November 24, 2008 By 3 Comments

I make extensive use of Google throughout the day and I’ve always got “g” set up as the keyword for a Quick Search in Firefox. However, I also spend a lot of time at shell prompts, and sometimes I don’t want to bounce to a browser just to Google for something.

So, tonight, I wrote a small Tcl script that lets me “google for” at the prompt. Just save the previous link and rename it to “google” and move it somewhere in your PATH like /usr/local/bin, then make it executable with chmod 755.

The script requires Tcl with tDOM installed, as well as Tidy–both of these things are installed out-of-the-box on MacOS X 10.5 Leopard.

Once you get the script installed, you can do something like this:

'google for' screenshot

If you notice, for Google search queries that have a special result like the one above, the script displays it separately before the results. The script also emits the search query URL so you can just Control-click on it in Terminal and then select “Open URL” and have it pop up in your browser, which also works for any of the search result URLs.

I don’t know if anyone else would find this script useful, but it’s already saved me a ton of time–especially when I’m on a slow 64 kb/s GPRS connection like I am this evening. Either way, I’m releasing this script into the public domain.

Tags: , ,

Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source, Tcl Tagged With: , 3 Comments
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »