AutoSave and AppleCare

I was working on a long post earlier tonight about subversion and document management, when my computer locked up for the 6th time this week. Usually OSX is so stable that I measure my uptime in weeks if not months. I’ve been known to delay doing system updates because it would wreck my uptime. The sad thing is that I’ve known what my problem was, and how to fix it, and only now got around to doing something about it.

First, a little history. The video card that shipped with the original Mac Pro systems in the Fall of 2006 was an nVidia GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of video RAM. When I purchased the system, I decided that I’d go ahead and blow some extra cash on the ATi Radeon X1900XT – with more video RAM, and decidedly better performance. I got the system, and it blew the doors off my vintage Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5. I don’t run many games on the card, but I do use Photoshop and Aperture, and they are taxing on the Core Image subsystems of OSX. Aperture, in particular, was a horrible performer on my G5 – even though it had a supported graphics card. It was only a 128 MB ATI 9800 Pro, and just couldn’t keep up. The new Mac Pro was amazing, and fast for the photo work that I do.

Last spring, I started having some problems with the system. Strange horizontal multicolored lines started appearing when I was working in Photoshop, and they would go away if I resized the window they appeared in. As the summer wore on the lines would appear anywhere – even in Finder windows and on the menu bar clock. I realized that in 10.5, everything in the window manager runs through the graphics card for final composting and rendering to screen. Somewhere in that pipeline, there was a problem. Additionally, the computer was getting louder and louder. When I’d first set everything up, the Shuttle I was using as a test Solaris box was the loudest thing in the apartment. By the end of last summer, it was the Mac Pro, by a healthy margin. Following some advice online, I took the video card out, and run some compressed air through the heatsink. It seemed to help – the fan was a lot quieter then – but I still occasionally had the video problems. Determined to get a glitch free system, I downloaded smcFanControl, and set all my system fans a few hundred RPM higher. This fixed the display problems for awhile, while getting me used to the noise of running the fans cranked up all the time.

By the time this spring rolled around the PCIe fans were set to 1500 rpm at all times. In late April, they got turned up to 2000 rpm. Now, even with it constantly set to 2000 rpm, I still had the occasional line across the screen, and if I didn’t watch it, the whole box will lock up. I think it has something to do with the summer months, and the fact that we don’t run the A/C here 24/7/365 like we did in the last apartment.

So, doing some digging online over the last few weeks, I found that a LOT of other people had problems with the X1900XT. And that Apple has replaced many of the cards. So, today, I finally called Apple up and gave them all my specs. Turns out, yes, I do qualify for a replacement card – even though the box is out of warranty. Which is nice, because the cheapest card I can find for the MacPro that is still in production and has 2 DVI ports is over $200 on sale. They are shipping me a new card this week, and once I have it, I’ll swap them out and send the bad one back to Apple.

Preferences

From the title of this post, one could easily assume I’m talking about tech stuff. However, this time, I’m talking about our children, and the different ways they react to both of us. To be clear, I’m talking about our son Qais, and our puppy Greta.

Greta is a little easier to understand – mostly because I’ve dealt with dogs before. Charlotte is home more than I am, but I think I may do more of the walking and feeding. That is up to debate, but Greta certainly treats the two of us differently. Not in a bad way, mind you, but different.

Qais on the other hand often calms down more when Charlotte holds him. Recently, though, we had some friends over, and he wouldn’t calm down for anyone but me. I had to circle the block twice before he would really calm down. There are other times that Charlotte has told me that I have a calming touch – usually when I come in from being out, and pick him up. I don’t see that I’m making much of a difference, but Charlotte swears I am.

Tonight, I took Q for our usual after-work dog walk. Due to bad planning, I forgot to bring his pacifier with me. I did the longer loop – which is about a mile and a half – which we often do. I was trying to get a little exercise for myself and Greta, and give Charlotte a bit of a break at the end of a day of caring for my son. Maybe halfway through the walk Qais just lost it. Screaming, crying, the whole nine yards. Once I got him home, and he got out of the carrier, he calmed down, like nothing had happened. I think he was just showing his preference to not be with me. Which is ok – but it was a long walk home.

Children’s Clothing

I’m starting to develop a healthy distrust of the child-clothing industry. The other day, we had Qais in a onsie marked 0-3 months, and was changing him into a different one, marked 12 months. Guess which one was bigger? The 0-3. Right now, Qais wears anything from 0-3 to 12 months – he’s already outgrown some of his 6 month stuff, and he’s not big enough for some of the same.

Apparently in Europe, they size clothing for kids based on ranges in height (in centimeters). So there’s 40-50 cm, 50-60cm, etc. Which makes a lot more sense to me.

iPhone 3.0 LDAP Search Crashing – An Exploration

I updated to the new iPhone 3.0 OS last night. I had forgotten until this morning the feature I was most looking forward to was now on my phone – the ability to add an LDAP server to the Contacts application. So, I loaded the server we have here on campus, and tried a search. Yay, it returns matches! It even waits for you to stop typing and will bring a list back, which you can then refine by adding more search terms. This is exactly what I wanted. I then tapped on an entry to see what the contact card would look like.

And the Contacts application died. Just went back to the home page of apps. No error, no warning. Just dead.

Luckily, I have admin rights on the LDAP servers. So I bounce over, and look through the logs for my searches. And there they are. So I extract the iPhone search, and run it manually:

ldapsearch -x -h ldap.example.com \
-b ou=people,dc=example,dc=com \
"(|(givenName=username*)(sn=username*) \
(cn=username*)(mail=username*))" \
givenName sn cn mail telephoneNumber \
facsimileTelephoneNumber o title ou \
buildingName street l st postalCode \
c jpegPhoto mobile co pager \
destinationIndicator labeledURI IMHandle \
homePhone postalAddress homePostalAddress

(Server, search base, and test username excluded to protect the innocent). The search returns swimmingly – and, according to the logs, this is what the server gave back to the iPhone. I run the search myself, and save the output, trying to see if something is out of place. Nothing looks wrong – so I hit another entry, for a student this time – an it works. Weird. Some people’s entries are causing the app to crash. I start looking up entries, and comparing fields. This isn’t the fastest process, as often the app will crash out from under my fingers. Finally, I get the problem field isolated:

IMHandle: AIM:username

Any entry with an IMHandle attribute kills the application, so far. This is valid for AIM: and jabber: entries. Next up – start modifying data and see if it’s a format problem for the attr, or if the iPhone just can’t handle it at all. And if it can’t handle it, why is it asking for it?

We’ll find out soon.

Write a little, every night

My posting frequency is way up. I’ve done this, in part, by writing a little on a bunch of different posts each night. I revisit and edit, as well as add content every time I touch a post. I often wind up with nothing that I started from – sometimes not even the title – but it’s always better than my first draft. One of those hard lessons from school I guess – your first draft is never good enough.

This is particularly true for the longer technical posts. There’s a lot of content in each one, and a lot of research that needs to be done to make sure you have the right data, links and topics ready for a coherent article. As I’m now trying to produce for Shufflegazine now as well, I need all the practice I can get.