Charles on… anything that comes along

I’ve had this Powerbook since February last year, in the course of which I did a complete reinstall (on the first day - that was with 10.3) and then did an upgrade install of 10.4, aka OSX “Tiger”, when I got an - well, the - early review copy.

I’m starting to think that upgrade installs are a Bad Idea. Or else that something has got really screwed up in the past year or so.

Item: my wife’s (formerly my) 5-year-old iBook is on 10.3.9. It’s a 500MHz G3, running Eudora, Safari, Word, a few things like that. It wakes up and goes to sleep like that. Open: awake. Shut: asleep. No muss, no fuss.

And in the red corner, my 1.67GHz G4 with 1 gig of RAM (two 512MB chips, if you’re going to really enquire). I run Camino, Eudora, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Word, Address Book, VoodooPad, iCal, Preview…

I close the lid: there’s at least a 10-15 second delay before it goes to sleep. Sometimes longer. I open the lid: sometimes the screen wipes and it seems to be having a think before we come back. And there’s often some more musing on the machine’s part before we’re ready to do battle. Call it 30 seconds from opening the lid to being ready for business and you’re probably right.

Now, I’ve complained before that NetNewsWire and MarsEdit are resource hogs: NNW because I keep a lot of old articles; MarsEdit because it just seems to be a resource pig that refreshes web preview pages and part-pages that were fine unrefreshed, thanks (and on which you’ve clicked “Don’t refresh”). The folk at Ranchero know about the latter problem. A fix may be in sight, but not to me. (And while I was writing this MarsEdit lost all my shortcut settings for putting HTML tags in. This is just insane behaviour. Unless I somehow managed to press “Reset All”, which is not the sort of thing I’d try to do ever. Even if I’m considering a Reset All on this machine.)

That could be one cause of the delay. But more stuff is happening too. For example, from time to time applications hang all over the place, and there’s no recovery. Right now there’s a group including Camino, Mail, VoodooPad Pro (I’m testing the beta; it’s great), iCal, MenuCalendarClock and VoodooPad (stable version) which are all sitting in Activity Monitor, which declares that they’re “not responding”. Arse. I’ve got pages in Camino that I really don’t want to lose by force-quitting.

What makes this more annoying is that I had exactly this problem earlier today, when a whole bunch of other apps all just gave it the thousand-yard stare. Camino wasn’t going to do anything more. I couldn’t even launch Activity Monitor to find out what was hung; it bounced a few times, sat in the Dock but never came to life. “Can’t contact AppleSpell”, Mail said plaintively, in between giving me the SPOD. I had a Terminal window open, but couldn’t create a new one. Force-reboot was all that was left; even pressing the power button and pressing “Restart” didn’t work.

So that’s twice in one day that I’ve had a big crash, and in both cases it’s lost me work in progress. I’m starting to think that something in 10.4 has got badly futzed up somewhere along the line. Problem is that there’s only one way to properly fix that: back up, wipe, reinstall.

Oh nooooo.

Here’s why I don’t want to do this.

1. I have tons of apps in /Applications which aren’t Apple ones. Which means (a) moving those all to a special folder and backing that up (b) getting all the licence details out of /Preferences and /Application Support. Argh.
2. Backing up my home folder is going to be one of those hellish processes that will take forever. Even though I’ve moved all my music out, there’s still a ton of stuff in there - 29 gigabytes. Which means it’s too big for any attachable HFS+ disk I’ve got lying around. (Although.. hang on, 15GB of that is ripped DVDs from DVDs I own. OK, so 14GB. That’s closer to manageable. Though only just.)

It’s such a dread-full process even thinking about it that I’d much rather hear someone tell me in a lazy comment that it’s perfectly simple, this is a known bug in lookupd or configd or some other piece of Unix underpinning that can be fixed by a quick bit of bit twiddling. God, I hope so. The alternatives are

1) have machine that craps out occasionally for no obvious reason
2) have machine that has consumed huge amount of time but might still crap out for no obvious reason.

One thing I do know about my wife’s iBook: I did do a clean install of Panther on that. I backed up all the data and so on and did the move. In those days I had so much time….

(Postscript: all the time I have been writing this post - about 40 minutes - those apps mentioned above have been hung. I tried force-quitting Address Book and restarting it. It starts - but just goes into the SPOD. Same with VoodooPad Pro. And VoodooPad. Apps that weren’t running before start fine. Apps that were hung stay hung. What the hell is that about? Something not releasing? It’s infuriating. It feels as though the whole thing is just succumbing to digital cruft, heading into a spiral .. oh, hang on, Proteus (an IM app) started up but now is “not responding” too. I might have to save this post to stop it disappearing up some sort of “not responding” fundament.)

Post-postscript: I’ve had to restart the whole thing (and now MarsEdit’s shortcuts have come back. I feel ill..), because apps that I quit wouldn’t restart. Then I had the bright idea of looking at the console.log:
Jun 19 17:26:51 Charless-PowerBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/Technology, flags 524288, pid 39
Jun 19 17:26:51 Charless-PowerBook KernelEventAgent[39]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
Jun 19 17:30:06 Charless-PowerBook ntpd[269]: sendto(17.72.133.42): Can't assign requested address
And that’s pretty much when the troubles started - this evening, at least. Which makes it all seem like the system got very, very upset when I pulled the Ethernet cord out rather than pressing the “Eject” icon on the screen at work (the link to “/Volumes/Technology” went down, see). Which seems pretty rubbish to me: can’t this system withstand a loss of network? Sometimes I wonder if some of these apps aren’t so determinedly network-aware that if there’s not a network there they go into a complete tizz.
Doesn’t stop me suspecting I’m going to have to reinstall the whole dawg, though.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 38.48%)
• Late results: two-year-old vs slot-loading Wii drive; adult vs three-headed screw (12 August 2007; score: 33.77%)
• "Tails are cool" (26 October 2005; score: 33.48%)

• The luckiest of the unlucky
  

  After spending 22 days in hospital following Tom’s meningitis (a stay that included a coma, grave warnings about prognosis and more anguish than I care to dwell on) three hours of surgery is a walk in the park. Well, maybe not that easy - there is no fun to be had being an anaesthetist’s accomplice - but within a few hours Tom was being thoroughly entertained by his grandfather and was getting distinctly fed up about the lack of biscuits coming his way.

Now it’s Implant Day + 3 and Tom is as cheerful as we’ve ever seen him. The wound from the implant is almost laughably insignificant (my father did more damage to himself during a contretemps with his garage door), we have had to administer no analgesia and are having to convince people that this is the boy who has experienced two months of sheer awfulness.

You know you’ve been through hell when an operation that leaves a six-inch scar feels insignificant. The ‘Tom’ of the blog is a 20-month-old previously hearing child who survived meningitis in April. Nice to know he’s doing well. It’ll be really interesting to know how he reacts when the implant is activated - known as “switch-on” day. One doesn’t expect fireworks, literal or metaphorical, of course.. (Seen at My Son Tom)

And now, here’s a headline for Google: Engineers hope to provide smooth slide for kids with cochlear implants. (Photo: Washington University of St Louis; sourced externally. Used here because I’m media, and it’s news - stuff I care about, stuff I want to pass on. So nyah, Mr T&C webpage.)

Still, a great intro:

For some deaf children, a plastic slide is a more formidable foe than the school wedgie-giver.

The reason: static buildup. It zaps the external processor.

A useful paragraph explaining what a CI is:

Cochlear implants, often referred to as bionic ears, help provide a sense of sound to a profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing person. The costly surgical procedure invites a doctor to wind an array of up to 22 electrodes through a diseased cochlea, the part of the inner ear that sends electrical impulses to the brain. An externally-worn speech processor filters sound, selecting and prioritizing tonal frequencies specifically for its wearer, and sends it to a magnetic transmitter behind the external ear. The internal device, then, perceives the processed sounds after the transmitter sends

them by electromagnetic induction. The catch? Once the device is implanted in the cochlea, the patient submits to total hearing loss when their unit is switched off or malfunctioning.

Very fine - though (1) it’s not a “diseased” cochlea; often it’s simply defective (2) what’s with the passive voice? “The surgical procedures invites a doctor…” “The patient submits to total hearing loss”. It’s like a report in my local paper the other day: “The motorbike was in collision with a brick wall.” Unless the wall was on the back of a truck, it’s pretty clear that the wall didn’t swerve out in front of the bike. Saying “the motorbike collided with a brick wall” doesn’t assign blame to the driver, just states what happened - unlike “the motorbike collided with the other car”, which would imply the car was not at fault. It should be “the doctor [tries to] wind..” and “the patient experiences total hearing loss..” Anyway.

The speech processors aren’t zap-proof. Their smarts can scramble if a wearer removes her sweater too fast or slides down a high-voltage-generating plastic slide. When a child discharges the electricity by touching something-like a fellow slider - the processor temporarily loses function. Restoring hearing requires an inconvenient visit to an audiologist to have the unit reprogrammed.

“The kids who have cochlear implants are told that if they want to go to the playground and go down the plastic slides like the other kids, they have to take off their speech processors,” Morley explained. “So then, of course, they are at a disadvantage on the playground because they can’t hear.”

And a useful stat:

Nearly 100,000 people worldwide have restored functional hearing because of their cochlear implants. About half of those people are children.

Compare and contrast the Wired story on the same topic:

By hooking sensors to children as they slid down slides in St. Louis and Tucson, Arizona, the scientists found that children easily built up 25,000 volts of electricity, the limit of the measuring devices.

“That’s a pretty good lightning bolt,” said study lead author Bob Morley, an associate professor of electrical and systems engineering at Washington University.

Plastic slides are such a strong generator of static because large parts of the body come in contact with the surface area, causing electrons to be rubbed free and cling to the kids, Morley said.

For the time being, however, children with cochlear implants should stay away from plastic playground slides. (Metal slides don’t pose a great risk — at least one playground designed for the disabled has installed them to protect implant-wearing kids — but they get hotter in the summer.)

Except, as someone pointed out to Wired, you can simply take off your external processor. OK, you won’t be able to hear, but you’ll still be able to play, right?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• I might watch through my fingers: cochlear implants live on the Net! (6 July 2007; score: 123.64%)
• My own call for papers - on cochlear implants (8 May 2006; score: 93.57%)
• Better cochlear implants; the power law of homelessness and pollution (13 February 2006; score: 74.8%)