My Motley Meanderings

I realised this morning that I hadn't backed up my home Mac Mini for a few weeks, so I kicked off a fresh clone to the external Firewire drive. The backup disk ran out of space part way through (it shouldn't really do this because the backup partition is bigger than the internal disk), so I wiped it and tried again. Naturally the machine chose this moment to totally crap out. Rebooting in single user mode revealed that the internal disk has corrupted itself in a new and entertaining fashion that fsck doesn't know how to fix[1]. I've persuaded it to boot into graphical mode again but it's acting very flaky (applications not starting or running for a bit then crashing, the whole machine randomly freezing for thirty seconds at a time...). I'm trying to back up as much data as I can to the Firewire disk before I attempt to reinstall it tomorrow. Annoyingly this is the third time this particular machine has corrupted its internal disk - I suspect it must have a hardware fault. Luckily there is very little on it that isn't also stored elsewhere.

ETA: Google suggests the disk error code I'm getting basically means "the disk is about to die." I'd better order a replacement in the morning...

( [1]... )

I installed the beta of Safari 3 earlier today and the installer asked me to reboot the machine afterwards (quite unusual for an OSX application - I guess it must have updated some core system frameworks). The machine froze hard part way through the first attempt to boot and required a power cycle; on subsequent attempts it booted fully but then crashed a few minutes later showing the black box that asks you to hold down the power switch in several different languages. I'm currently booted from my external firewire backup disk and it seems to be stable. A check of the internal disk hasn't shown up any filesystem errors.

It's quite possible that the problem wasn't caused by the Safari upgrade (this laptop is getting rather old and tends to act up in hot weather). The reboot may simply have revealed some existing disk corruption. However, if you're going to try installing it yourself I'd recommend doing a full backup first just in case.

And Safari 3? It seems slightly faster, the movable tabs are quite nice (especially the way you can drag the contents of a pop-up window to a tab on your main browser window), it finally asks you if you're sure you want to close a window that has multiple tabs in it, and the TiddlyWiki title bar bug is fixed. Apparently they've also ported it to Windows.

ETA: I installed it on my home Mac Mini and it hasn't crashed horribly. I guess the increasing flakiness of my old iBook is to blame for the above problems then. I also discovered two other nice Safari 3 features: you can resize multi-line text entry boxes, and it includes a fairly impressive debugging tool for web designers (right click on anything in a page and select "inspect element" - I'm not sure if you need to have turned on the Debug menu with Tinkertool first).

ETA2: Restored my iBook's internal disk from the backup. Installed Safari 3 beta again. The machine locked up while shutting down for the reboot after the install had finished, but after a power cycle it booted up OK and seems to be running reliably now. I'm posting this update using Safari 3.

What's the current PC virtualisation software of choice for x86 OSX?

ETA: I was going to try the demo version of Parallels but I couldn't find a spare copy of Windows anywhere in the office, so I decided to try Darwine instead, which runs Windows apps natively by simulating the Win32 ABI. It's poorly documented and a bit of a hassle to install, but it did allow me to successfully run my "problem" application.

Apparently Steve Jobs has told a reporter that the iPhone will be locked down - the only new software you'll be able to add to it is stuff you've bought from Apple.

"We define everything that is on the phone," he said. "You don't want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."

It's a shame they've crippled it like that, but at least it'll stop me spending lots of money I don't have on a gadget I don't really need. I was already distinctly unimpressed by the lack of support for memory cards.

Coincidentally I got my new work phone yesterday - a Nokia E50. The hardware is nice and shiny but I'm not at all impressed with the user interface. It took me nearly 15 minutes this morning just to work out how to copy files from my old phone via Bluetooth. I thought there would be some way to use the new phone to browse the filesystem on the old phone and select the files I want to retrieve. BlueTooth File Exchange on the Mac can do that so I know the Bluetooth file transfer protocol supports it. As far as I can tell after trying everything I could think of, that isn't possible. It seems the only way to do it is to tell the old phone to send each file to the new phone one at a time and accept them on the new one as bluetooth messages. Then instead of simply asking me where to save the MP3 file I'd just sent across, it opened it in the media player which saved the file somewhere without asking me where I wanted to put it, and it took another few minutes of trawling through the file manager to work out where it was. Also, as far as I can tell, using Bluetooth to transfer your contacts from an old phone only works if the contacts are stored in the old phone's internal memory rather than the SIM card. I have briefly played with the camera, and the still image quality seems acceptable but the video quality still sucks (though not as badly as on my old phone, which was completely unusable).

<Apple Fanboy>OMG, Apple's new iPhone is the most wonderful gadget ever made. Drool.</Apple Fanboy>

Back here in the real world, it can't possibly be as cool as it looks but I still want one. The way it handles browsing, zooming and rotating when displaying photos is just beautiful. I was about to complain that it doesn't have a GPS receiver so you can't use it as a sat-nav, then I realised it has Bluetooth so you could potentially just pair it with a separate Bluetooth module and load some appropriate software on. It runs a version of OSX, and I suspect you'll be able to develop your own widgets for it in xCode.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is what kind of storage expansion slot it will have. Edit: Apparently it won't have one :(

My new Mac Mini and matching Iomega 250GB external disk drive have arrived. The boxes they came in were so small my mum chased the UPS guy up the drive because she thought he'd just brought a couple of accessories and was about to leave without giving her the box with the actual computer in it! Here is how my home desk looks right now as I wait around impatiently for the data to copy across from my old iBook:



UPDATE: It's now up and running and I'm happy with it so far. I wouldn't call it blazingly fast, but it is certainly a big improvement over my G4-800 iBook. Mind you, it is still doing the initial mdimport (indexing every file on the system for the Spotlight search facility) as well as a set of software updates in the background, so it will probably speed up significantly once those have finished. The Rosetta emulator appears to be flawless. I can't tell which apps are running in x86 mode and which are emulated PPC; both are faster than they were on the iBook. This is the second time Apple have pulled off this feat: I remember it used to be possible to seamlessly run 68K software on early PowerMacs faster than on a real 68K Mac. The dual cores definitely seem to help with foreground responsiveness while heavy tasks are going on in the background. I've always had a soft spot for SMP, but you used to have to buy a big hulking tower PC or a fantastically expensive Unix workstation to get it. Little things like rendering web pages, resizing windows, scrolling, and Expose are now much quicker, and I can finally watch video on YouTube without dropping frames! I'm going to name it Dors after Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's android wife in the Foundation novels. This fits in with my pattern of naming machines after robots and AIs (my iBook is Giskard, my test box at work is Daneel, my home gateway is Marvin, my home router is Holly, my Mum's iMac is TalkieToaster, and I have a couple of servers at work called Troy and Bender).