Obviously, a text editor that can’t be used[1] to type text in the main languages I use is useless[2].

Well, boo fucking hoo and cry me a river right? Lots of things[3] are useless; there’s no need waste energy hating on them, though, right?

Generally, that is indeed the case. But textmate is a metastasizing virulent black hole of suck. It absorbs all this useful energy, the productive output of all these hackers making bundles and add-ons, absorbing it all down into the glistening gelatinous mass of its putrid guts.

So textmate not only sucks a shopsack full of dicks, but it makes all these other would-be useful tools suck, too.

None of this means that I don’t sniff at the vapors of textmate 2 with a considerable amount of interest. It just means textmate fucking sucks.

UPDATE: OK, I get it, I get it. Many of you loves you some fuckin textmate, and don’t care about typing in Japanese. And, somehow, you also found my blog. OK. Instead of emailing me about it, what I suggest you do is find Dr. Nickatina. He’ll give you your medicine, take you to the Bay Bridge, and instruct you on how to proceed from there. Thanks.

—

[0]: ok, nobody was actually speaking of that, but I earned the right to a rant by climbing a hill and singing the praises of Arq the other day

[1]: there’s a CJK plug-in, but it doesn’t make textmate conform to any reasonable interpretation of the phrase “it can be used to type Japanese” (or the phrase “it doesn’t suck” for that matter, harhar get it)

[2]: to ME, duh

[3]: most things?

I use various other backup software to completely backup my main workstation[1], but use Arq to assign peace-of-mind to certain applications on certain workstations and servers.

Example: we manage paper documents at each location by feeding them through a ScanSnap and into a PDF archival system. I tell Arq to clone the folder that stores the archival system’s data to Amazon’s cloud. All hardcopy can be shredded at the end of the day without worry, knowing we have a local copy and another copy, safe and encrypted, in some West Coast US datacenter.

Other one-off things that it might be handy to back up separately:

• master svn & hg repositories
• phone system (voicemail audio & call data)
• customer inquiry/support system (email and ticket data)
• financial/accounting software data files
• any set of very important documents
• ok pr0n too why not

Arq makes it EASY AND QUICK to set up, and its backups FULLY WORK, which is unfortunately not true of most Mac backup tools. Arq:

• passes all the backup bouncer tests (in other words, it really backs up your data, not a partially-corrupted copy of your data with various bits and attributes missing)
• fully documents the file format of its archives, providing confidence that you can get your data back even if Arq stops working and Haystack Software tells you to go fuck yourself
• stores versioned backups, keeping previous versions of your data around, too
• a properly designed encryption mechanism, not some bullshit where the datacenter operator or application publisher can read your data if they get subpoenaed or just happen to be assholes

Of course, S3, and therefore Arq, isn’t suitable for ALL backups; terabytes of data take time to transfer and for most applications would cost too much to store. But for gigabytes-of-data situations where a small amount of money (roughly $2 per GB per year) isn’t an issue, this setup really rocks.

If you’re lazy and rich, or if your home directory is small, Arq can be a complete backup solution, too. But I find it useful in situations where the entire machine isn’t my problem, or just doesn’t matter, but this one application is important and I have to make sure its data isn’t lost.

—

[1]: Nothing good, though. Although I toy with apps like CCC, Super Duper, and CrashPlan, I always end up going back to compiling Mike Bombich’s pain-in-the-ass-but-it-totally-works rsync myself and having a script run that nightly over ssh to another machine. But it’s definitely an unwanted hassle to set this all up again every time I get a new Mac.

Wed Feb 17 18:06:05 2010
panic(cpu 0 caller 0×2a7ac2): Kernel trap at 0×6c413dae, type 14=page fault, registers:
CR0: 0×8001003b, CR2: 0×00000000, CR3: 0×00100000, CR4: 0×000006e0
EAX: 0×00000000, EBX: 0×094bd600, ECX: 0×00000000, EDX: 0×0081e038
CR2: 0×00000000, EBP: 0×50f83eb8, ESI: 0×094bd600, EDI: 0×00000001
EFL: 0×00010286, EIP: 0×6c413dae, CS: 0×00000008, DS: 0×079e0010
Error code: 0×00000000

Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0×50f83cb8 : 0×21b2bd (0×5cf868 0×50f83cec 0×223719 0×0)
0×50f83d08 : 0×2a7ac2 (0×591c30 0×6c413dae 0xe 0×591dfa)
0×50f83de8 : 0×29d968 (0×50f83e00 0×9355b7c 0×50f83eb8 0×6c413dae)
0×50f83df8 : 0×6c413dae (0xe 0×48 0×50f80010 0×50fc0010)
0×50f83eb8 : 0×6c413ec7 (0×94bd600 0×85dd80 0×50f83ed8 0×2191d5)
0×50f83ed8 : 0×53d8bb (0×94bd600 0×1 0×94bd600 0×94bd600)
0×50f83f48 : 0×53d9c1 (0×94bd600 0×9355b7c 0xca6ebebd 0×29c50a)
0×50f83f78 : 0×22f973 (0×94bd600 0×0 0×50f83fc8 0×227634)
0×50f83fc8 : 0×29d68c (0×863ea0 0×0 0×10 0×9432844)
Kernel Extensions in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.lge.docomo.FOMA_L02A.FOMAUSBCDCACMControl(1.0)@0×6c412000->0×6c414fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(3.8.5)@0×50fb8000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.6)@0×50d13000

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task

Mac OS version:
10C540

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 10.2.0: Tue Nov 3 10:37:10 PST 2009; root:xnu-1486.2.11~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro5,5 (Mac-F2268AC8)

System uptime in nanoseconds: 278279458881
unloaded kexts:
com.apple.driver.AppleFileSystemDriver 2.0 (addr 0×50eb5000, size 0×12288) – last unloaded 154325872670
loaded kexts:
com.lge.docomo.FOMA_L02A.FOMAUSBCDCACMData 1.0
com.lge.docomo.FOMA_L02A.FOMAUSBCDCACMControl 1.0
com.lge.docomo.FOMA_L02A.FOMAUSBCDC 1.0
com.vmware.kext.vmnet 3.0.0
com.vmware.kext.vmioplug 3.0.0
com.vmware.kext.vmci 3.0.0
com.vmware.kext.vmx86 3.0.0
com.orderedbytes.driver.ControllerMateFamily 4.4
com.orderedbytes.driver.CMUSBDevices 4.4

This Daring Fireball post was the first one that I’ve read that hits the nail on the head. The iPad isn’t just a “big iPhone”; rather, the phone is a dinky little miniaturized version of the pad.

The bummer is that The Community has to build it, which is always a slightly dubious prospect. But once in a while, that works out.

There’s just no economic justification for the investment (of money/effort) required to re-engineer a complex application that is, after all, a core part of every modern OS. That’s why we haven’t seen, and almost certainly won’t see, a commercial solution. (I personally would buy Brent’s mythical $500 IMAP client, in a heartbeat. But that only makes about three of us.)

I’ve been on a technology pilgrimage to IMAP mecca since around 1997. (Actually, a bit before, but memories get hazy — the best carbon-dating I can do is remember how excited I was about Ethan’s pitch for a Newton OS IMAP client, and the Newton got Steved in ‘97.)

Nowadays (and for the past several years), if you aren’t using IMAP for your email, then you’re doing it wrong. But the pilgrimage continues, because while things are much better than before IMAP was widely implemented, none of the email clients have really nailed it yet.

Over the years, I think I’ve at least launched every single IMAP client developed for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Palm OS (lol I’m serious), and fiddled around a bit further with most of them. Off the top of my head: Mulberry, mutt, Eudhorfa, Outlook Express, Entourage, Outlook, pine, Outlook full turd, Opera, Mail.app, Thunderbird and friends, Windows Live or Whatever The Fuck It Is Called, Chatter, PowerMail, Outspring Mail, … well, the list is too long to even fit on the top of my head.

But ugh, they all suck. In different ways of course. And everybody has slightly different needs. For me, absolute minimum requirements include:

• reliable offline mode
• Japanese compatibility and UTF-8 support
• indexed search
• rule-based triggering of custom processes
• multiple identities (addresses/servers)
• SSL/TLS support

Even this short-ass list, sadly, isn’t satisfied by most existing clients.

Throw in some other requirements, like:

• good UI
• tree-display threaded view
• high performance
• custom IMAP flag support
• so-called “smart mailboxes” (i.e., canned searches)
• decent scriptability/automation support
• attachment removal (leaving the message on the server)

…and you are left with ZERO EMAIL CLIENTS. Not one client in existence satisfies all of those. For me, the one which comes closest is (sigh) Mail.app. It does most of those things, but is has some very major problems. Serious bugs. A crappy threaded view. It can handle my 60,000-message personal/business archive, but not that plus the 500,000 or so messages of archived mailing list mail (had to move those to gmail, which also sucks). With a bunch of accounts, it sometimes takes over ten minutes to quit cleanly (on an 8-core ‘09 Mac Pro), but reacts badly to being force-quit. And on and on, blah blah blah.

And this application is, on balance and IMNSHO, the best IMAP client in human history. But I yearn for something better. As far as software goes, this is probably my deepest and most long-standing wish.

So, do I want Brent’s Magical Pony IMAP.app? Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah.

But is this the rare project that The Community can actually pull off? Well… I mean, frankly I doubt it, but there’s at least some hope. Brent is a well-known and well-respected dude, so out of the gate the project has more momentum behind it than normal. As I write this, the mailing list has 171 messages posted to it, after existing for only 12 hours.

I would love to work on this, too. I mean LOVE it. Writing code, I mean. But I recently did this scary analysis where the cumulative behind-schedule-ness of all my active projects is something like four years[2]. So will I really be able to? Uhm… I uh,… I dunno. I assume most of the folks getting all hyped up about this idea are in a similar position. But I hope so.

And there it is: the reason I have a bit of hope for this project is that most of the people who actually really need a superpower IMAP client are people who can contribute something to making it real.

So will we? I guess we’ll probably know in about a year.

–

[1]: we the email power-user subset of Mac users, that is; mainly businesspeople who rely on email

[2]: Yeah, I have thirteen actives that are between two and fourteen months behind initial schedule. And that’s only work projects–I am not including personal projects like my Hasbro Baby’s First Open Source Release that I hoped to ship in 2004, or cancelled projects like the distributed native-Cocoa issue tracking app some of you wasted an hour listening to me rave about in 2008. (And, ahem, that’s not to say I am a total slacker, either; I did finish a few projects in 2009, a couple of which may have even been on time.)

Since I work in Japan, and usually use Windows via VMWare on a Mac with a U.S. English physical keyboard, this comes up for me a lot. So, for posterity, here is how to do it.

It is basically documented in a Microsoft technote about a similar (but different) problem.

The crux is, you have to find four keys in the registry, and change their values. If your physical keyboard layout is really “US” then change these settings as indicated (without the quotes (duh)):

“LayerDriver JPN” => “kbd101.dll”

“OverrideKeyboardIdentifier” => “PCAT_101KEY”

“OverrideKeyboardSubtype” => 0

“OverrideKeyboardType” -> 7

Now, quick, reboot before the fucking thing shits all over itself!

Et voila. Now you can type your squiggly Japanese glyphs, English, AND punctuation, all from the very same keyboard! Will the wonders of Windows never cease?!

(If you actually have some other kind of keyboard hardware, then refer to the tech note to see the right values to input.)

If you are running Windows on top of Mac OS X, you might also want to unify the language-select keyboard shortcut keys between environments. See my Pulitzer-prize winning exposé How to make Japanese input under Windows in VMWare Fusion on the Mac by a bilingual but predominantly English-using and multiplatform but predominantly Mac-using person less like eating a dogshit omelet for more info about that.

—–

[1]: I don’t know all the circumstances. I think it depends on what version of Windows you have (XP thru Win7, and probably other versions, all exhibit the problem), and what you selected as your keyboard layout on initial OS install (which of course some IT dude might have done three years ago when creating an install image), and on Windows 7 Ultimate it seems like it might have something to do with where in the world your install disc was purchased (regardless of subsequent language settings). Who the fuck knows?

I cannot wait to pony up some more ¥ for the Mac version, which they say is planned.

It kicks too much ass for me to even describe; I’d get tired. Just buy it if you need the best Japanese reference tool available.

You know, like for the record and shit.

–

Hey, remember like a week ago when all those fucktards were clogging the interweb tubes with moronic posts insisting that the (imo inexplicable) 1.5Gbps SATA-I 2009 MacBook Pro firmware debacle didn’t matter “in the real world”? Well, yeah, they were wrong.

These numbers are interesting enough that I wish I had time to do better tests (but I don’t). As soon as Apple released the SATA-II firmware update, I bought the new MBP 13, along with a Samsung MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB SSD unit (spec sheet claims 220MB/s read and 200MB/s writes).

I wouldn’t have bought the laptop if Apple hadn’t fixed the firmware limitation, so I obviously was going to update, but before doing so I decided to run Xbench:

1. with the stock MBP out of the box with its crappy 5400 RPM archaic spinning-physical-platter data storage device
2. with the fast SSD but without updating the firmware
3. with the fast SSD and the firmware update
4. and then on my my main 2009 8-core Mac Pro, which boots from a software RAID0 array made up of 3 Samsung 1TB disks (model HE103UJ), just for a rough comparison

As you would expect, the results were: 1 dogshit-slow, 2 okay, 3 good, and 4 good.

The new firmware confers a significant performance boost, according to Xbench and subjective user opinion.

The discrepancies between the runs made me wish I had an intern or a slave or maybe an 8-year-old nerd son or some kind of person whom I could compel to do better testing. But I don’t, so this was all I had time for. Still, it’s interesting.

It is also worth noting that the Mac Pro in question couldn’t have its work interrupted for its test, so the results are real-world running 42 apps including VMWare running Ubuttnu, OpenSolaris, WinXP, and Win7 (all mostly idle). The MBP tests were done after the normal fresh-reboot-and-then-wait-a-few-minutes-for-the-Mac-to-stop-hyperventilating procedure.

Apple’s sync service (currently named “Mobile Me”) is nice when it does work. In my experience, it seems to be pretty reliable after you get it set up and working, but it does tend to shit all over itself every time I buy a new Mac or iPhone, and try to add the new device to my sync group.

Last time, it corrupted all my keychains irrecoverably, the first few times I attempted to add a new Mac Pro to my sync group. I had to restore from my backups from five minutes before, several times, until it somehow just worked. (Same steps each time.)

Today, I tried to add my new laptop to the group of Macs that syncs my stuff. Instead of syncing my calendars, it decided to:

a. not get any of the calendars onto the new MacBook Pro

b. create a bunch of random duplicate calendars, and propagate them to the other machines that do sync

So the end result was that my new Mac did not have any of my calendar data on it, but all my other Macs and iPhones now had a bunch of useless garbage magically added to them. (Wow, the power of the cloud.)

So, anyway, in the course of trying to debug what the fuck could be wrong, I decided to manually tidy up my iCal data. In the course of doing this, I saw that because:

a.) I have a mail account in Mail.app whose name (’description’) is “Mason”

and

b.) At some point, Apple decided to let us put todos and notes in our email accounts

…iCal silently fails to rename or create any calendar named “Mason”. If you have a Mail.app account named “Dick” that has any of these stupid note or todo turds lying around in it, I bet you cannot create a calendar named “Dick” in iCal. And so on.

As soon as you press Return to end editing, iCal just silently reverts the name to “Untitled” or whatever the name was before.

I personally think that the forced breeding of iCal and Mail has produced some pretty fucking ugly offspring, but that’s a discussion too boring to have. I just wanted to note for the record that I found out why iCal would not let me name my calendar with my own name.

(As a final aside, I have an email account with the name of my company, and iCal lets me make a calendar with that name. I suspect this is because that email account does not contain any note or todo turds, and so iCal has not silently reserved the name. But I won’t waste time testing this.)

KEYWORDS: iCal sucks, iCal won’t let me rename my calendar, iCal rename fails, iCal calendar name, iCal can’t rename, and iSync shits all over itself for the umpteenth time!

This gives me a headache every time I try to remember it when setting up a new Windows environment, which is unfortunately quite frequently these days.

So at first I try to type for a while without doing it, using Windows’s fucking pinkie-finger shortcuts, and that gives me another headache on top of the first one.

Finally, I grit my teeth and re-figure it out, which gives me another headache, so I am sitting here typing in Japanese on Windows on VMWare on Mac and I have THREE MOTHER FUCKING HEADACHES AT THE SAME TIME. Ugh. So, this time, I am writing it down.

The goal here is simply to have Command-Space switch between Japanese and English input in both Mac OS and your Windows guest OS in VMWare.

UPDATE: protip: Normally, you do this when setting up new Windows installation. Don’t do it before installing MS Office, though, as that will obliterate all your work when it replaces “MS IME” with “MS Office IME”.

0.) As of Snow Leopard, you need to uncheck Enable Mac OS Keyboard Shortcuts in the Keyboard and Mouse pane of VMWare Fusion’s preference window. This is apparently because Snow Leopard’s newfangled language switcher now gets invoked before VMWare gets a crack at processing the keystroke. Having to do this may or may not suck, depending on your personal taste.

1.) In VMWare Fusion’s prefs, remap your Command key to enter Control in the virtual machine environment.

Doing this has a couple of drawbacks[1][2], but it is normally more pleasant for the Mac user, so I find it beneficial overall. Cut-copy-paste muscle memory is about as strong as there is, and it’s especially helpful if you have decades of Command-Space-to-switch-languages experience.

2.) Delete your US keyboard and any other keyboards in Windows. This might cause freakatrocious behavior on a hardware PC, but seems to work fine in VMWare. You want *only* the Microsoft IME available. I forget how you find this dialog, I think you right click the language bar and choose Settings.

UPDATE: actually this step seems to be unnecessary. But since with Microsoft, somwetimes things that go away by themselves can come back by themselves, I still do this step anyway.

2.) Then select the IME entry in the above dialog (in my case Microsoft Office IME 2007) and click properties.

In this dialog, in turn, click the first of the three “Advanced…” buttons.

This takes you on a nostalgic trip to old-time Microsoftville, where the quaint inbred UI sensibilities of Windows 3.1 live on. (Who needs gay hippie shit like resizable windows or font antialiasing? Heeee haw!)

Anyway, the trick is to remap the Ctrl+Space combo to “IME ON/OFF” in all contexts. IME ON/OFF doesn’t really have anything to do with turning the IME on or off, don’t worry. What it actually does, at least if you’ve done those steps above (but maybe even if you don’t, I dunno), is to do what the Japanese hardware key normally labeled　「半角／全角｜漢字」 does under windows. This key too has a name that does not correlate to what it does.

This key is colloquially known as the “FUCKING SWITCH BETWEEN FUCKING JAPANESE AND FUCKING ENGLISH” key.

The steps above make Command-Space FUCKING SWITCH BETWEEN FUCKING JAPANESE AND FUCKING ENGLISH under Windows (at least in 7, but I think this works at least back to XP, maybe), just like it has always done on Mac, or had always done until Apple introduced that Spotlight bullshit.

So, wow, you can now type bilingually in both OSes without punching a fist-sized hole through your thirty inch monitor.

Just hit Command-Space to switch languages, like you’ve been doing since the 90s.

NOTES:

1.) Under Windows, if you FUCKING SWITCH BETWEEN FUCKING JAPANESE AND FUCKING ENGLISH while some text exist for which you have not finalized the conversion (e.g. by pressing Return), Windows helpfully deletes the text for you. There’s no way that I know to fix this.

2.) Under windows, Japanese text still generally looks like dogshit.

3.) Microsoft isn’t the only major commercial consumer OS vendor that knows how to cook a dogshit omelet. There is a lot of shit Apple should fix to make actual Japanese people (as opposed to bilingual American Mac users) comfortable typing in their native language. I would be happy to explain some of these things to Apple for a modest fee. Call me when you’re feeling better Steve, and I’ll help you guys out.

–

[1] You will lose your ability to do Windows keyboard shortcuts when you are really using a real Windows box. But so fucking what.

[2] VMWare has somehow fucked up their implementation of this feature, such that it inexplicably doesn’t work sometimes. Mostly that happens on Linux, though.

They now have a new card, the L-02A from LG, which also claims to support the Mac, but I haven’t tried that one. UPDATE: I bought one of these yesterday, and it also works great.

I’ve previously documented some of the ways that the Mac Pro I use at home sucks, but the many initial problems with it were eventually solved, so recently it’s been getting creative. First it started making this very annoying noise[1].

I really don’t mind a constant noise from my workstation, but this noise is this pulsating, oscillating low bass-tone hum, something like “ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…” (that’s my take on the spelling; one guy on Apple’s forum described it as “ehuuuuuuu, ehuuuuuu”, while another thought it was more of a “ahuuuuuuuu, ahuuuuuu”).

It is not a very loud noise, but because it varies like that it was extremely motherFUCKING IRRITATING (!!!) and difficult to tune out.

Anyway, it was a somewhat long and considerably annoying process (detailed below), but here’s how I fixed the problem:

I had been able to make the noise go away by tilting the Mac off vertical, but it would just come back. I used smcFanControl to crank up the fans, hoping to drown it out with a more constant noise, but that only sort of worked (the pulsating was still apparent).

I know now that the noise comes from the hard disk bays, but that was not obvious at first. Even when you stick your head in there, it’s hard to tell, with all the other noise going on. I thought it might be from one of the fans. Or maybe the screen-glitch generator unit on the GeForce 8800 GT was having some kind of harmonic interaction with the frame-dropper/shit-eater chip on the Radeon 2600 XT.

I googled the noise a bit but got no instant gratification, so my interim ’solution’ was just keep music on all the time when I use this piece of shit computer, or one of those rainstorm recordings when I didn’t feel like music.

But, things took a turn for the worse the other night. The computer lives in the main room (LDK) of my Japanese apartment, which is next to my bedroom. The wall is retractable, which is cool in some ways but also makes it less noise-resistant than a normal wall.

So the fucking Mac Pro decides to wake itself up in the middle of the night and start doing it’s fucking “ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…” thing. Thereby waking me up[2].

Thinking I might have simply gone to bed with it on, I padded out there, wistfully rejected the idea of giving the machine a roundhouse kick to the chassis and throwing it off the balcony, jiggled the mouse, entered my password, and put it to sleep.

Of course, I was barely back in bed when I heard the fans kick in and the “ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…” thing started up again.

Ugh. I had no idea[3] why this was happening, but it was the middle of the fucking night, so I shut the thing down and slept. But that left me motivated to fix the fucking problem. (It had actually been going on for a couple months.)

More googling finally led to this thread on Apple’s forum, wherein a guy fixed what sounded like maybe the same problem by wedging a guitar pick between his drive sled and the ceiling of the drive bay that the sled slides into.

I did roughly the same thing, folding a piece of paper a few times, such that each fold was not quite straight. I folded it until it seemed like it would be somewhat hard to wedge into the gap, and then I forced it in, as shown in the photo.

Voi-fucking-la! No more noise. The paper thing was actually just a dry run, I was planning to go buy some high-density foam if it worked. But once the “ooOOOOooo…ooOOOOooo…” disappeared, I just decided not to touch it. I did buy the foam, though, to keep around in case any late-night acoustic repairs become necessary in the future:

On balance, I am extremely pleased that I fixed this problem, because it clears the way for me to throw this piece of shit in the motherfucking trash (by which I suppose I mean give it to a computationally-challenged family member), and get a new 2009 Mac Pro to replace it.

I have one of the 2009s at the office, configured similarly to this shitty 2008 model (16GB RAM, 3TB internal RAID plus a 1TB backup disk), and the 2009 Nehalem one kicks ass. (At least so far.) No crashes, fastest machine I’ve ever used[4], no noise problems, no screen glitching, sleeps without losing all your open unsaved changes… the whole package. Knock on wood.

I had wanted to replace my home machine, too, but it just made me uncomfortable to say, essentially, “OK, Apple, your ‘professional’ $5000 computer I bought last year sucks so bad that I can’t stand it anymore, so I’m just gonna buy your newest version of the same thing.”

Now that I don’t feel like my 2008 Mac Pro is forcing me to get rid of it, I think I want to get rid of it ASAP, before it starts fucking up in some new way.

KEYWORDS: my mac pro sucks, my mac pro hella sucks, OMFG you won’t believe how much my fuckin mac pro fuckin sucks, pulsating, oscillating, up-and-down noise, sound, hum, buzz, hard drive noise, fan noise, boba fett, hannah montana and your mom

–

[1]: This oscillating noise torture is apparently common, but not universal, with these Mac Pros when all four disk bays are full (and sometimes even when not).

[2]: It really doesn’t seem like it is loud enough that it should actually wake me up; I suspect that the noise is so fucking irritating in the daytime that my brain now exhibits a quasi-Pavlovian response to the noise, whereby it dumps adrenaline and causes me to fly into a rage immediately upon hearing it, and that’s what really woke me up.

[3]: Although there was maybe a clue: some error messages in the log, indicating that com.google.keystone.user.agent[1338] was shitting all over itself because it couldn’t find it’s invasive background update app that it silently installs when an unwitting user (in this case, me, a while back) installs one of their crappy Mac apps, such as Picasa. Of course it can’t find that shit, because I deleted it immediately upon detecting it (along with Google’s crappy apps). But I guess I must have missed a spot. Hey, Google? I’ve been meaning to tell you: go fuck yourself.

[4]: noticeably faster than the 2008 in everyday use, not only in Xcode but even in like opening MS Word (not that you’d ever wanna do that, I’m just sayin)

But there are a few Japan-specific bits of suck:

• In the USA, AT&T kinda sucks. SoftBank, the Japanese carrier, sucks substantially more.
• The kludged-up メール “implementation” is as shitty as could possibly be designed–literally worse than nothing–and in Japan this feature is very nearly as important as the ability to place a call. Apple should have postponed the iPhone Japan launch rather than shipping without this capability[2].

Let’s take them one at a time:

The carrier, SoftBank, turns out to totally suck. I was hoping that in this small and dense country, any major carrier would work, at least in metropolitan Tokyo where I am. Not so. More often than not, I have one bar on the SoftBank iPhone, even though my Docomo phone has full signal. In 南麻布. In 後楽園. In fucking 渋谷 and 恵比寿. These aren’t exactly hicktowns in the boonies. The killer is that, where I am staying right now in downtown Tokyo, I can use the phone in the main room but the call drops if I walk into the bathroom to piss while talking (multitasking, har). Pretty fucking lame. Lame enough that I probably will have to carry a Docomo phone in my computer bag as a backup. This problem will not affect everybody, of course, but will affect a substantial number. Not a single one of the seven friends I’ve visited so far has good SoftBank receiption at home. (It does work in train stations and other metropolitan public places.)

But the carrier problem is small potatoes. The implementation of メール (mobile-to-mobile mail, extremely widely-used in Japan, kind of like SMS on steroids) is literally jaw-droppingly, staggeringly fucktarded and is the deal-breaker in Japan. No fucking wonder SoftBank has a “no-returns-even-if-it-doesn’t-work” policy here. Because it fucking doesn’t work, by any Japanese standard.

Its suck-level is such that SoftBank had to send out a text message to all iPhone users a couple days after the release, which basically said “Notice: The iPhone kludge for メール　is tremendously awful. We humbly and deeply regret this inconvenience.”

We knew in advance that it was going to kind of suck, in that the iPhone would not be able to handle the full character set used by メール. The “full character set” includes 絵文字, which are proprietary vendor-specific icon characters specific to the Japanese cell phone industry, and have only been recently even standardized across carriers. On the iPhone, these show up as black squares. Even though they are extremely widely-used, this problem is not necessarily a full-blown dealbreaker, but it is annoying. Not being able to send messages containing these weird icon-characters is a flaw I can deal with, but receiving messages like “Hey, Mason, do you want to ◆ ◆ tonight? If so, ◆ ◆ @ 8pm. ◆ ◆!!” is pretty annoying and useless.

However, it is totally fucking unheard of for a recent-generation phone to simply be unable to send メール. Okay, not quite unheard of: Motorola’s last attempt at a smartphone in Japan utterly failed in this market, precisely due to this design flaw.

But the iPhone can’t do it either, and for most people, that relegates it to PDA duty: something you carry in addition to your phone. Because even if you have an iPhone, you still need a real phone to do メール, which credible estimates suggest is actually four to ten times more common than placing an actual voice call here nowadays.

SoftBank/Apple’s “solution” is basically just to give you an extra-lame self-deleting IMAP account and rely on the fact that メール has always been able to be kludge-bridged to Internet email. You’ve always been able to send PC email to people’s phones. But, you cannot send messages to other people unless they have specifically enabled receiving mail from your address in advance. The default setup for メール here is that phone-to-phone email (メール) works, but PC-to-phone email must be specifically enabled by the receiver, on a per-domain basis.

The stupid extra-limited IMAP account that SoftBank includes with the iPhone is interpreted by the system(s) as PC email. So your messages won’t get through until you call the person to whom you wish to send mail, apologize for you unusual technological limitations, and ask them to kindly take a moment to add you to their メール whitelist. (If they can figure out how.)

And you have to do that, individually for each recipient, because consensus etiquette here is that in many situations it is slightly rude and intrusive to call and interrupt somebody to convey a simple bit of info that could just as well be sent via メール.

So, am I going to keep my iPhone? Well, sure; I am currently working as a fucking professional iPhone software developer. But even I have to keep my Docomo phone. Are all those initial buyers going to keep their iPhones? Well, a lot of them will, because once you buy an iPhone there is absolutely no way out of the 2-year contract, even if 24 hours later you realize it is a gleaming, shiny, good-looking, almost-perfect steaming turd of a phone that doesn’t actually quite work here in Japan.

But are the brisk sales going to continue? I doubt it, unless Apple fixes the メール problem. Word is already spreading about the problem.

It is something that could be addressed with a clever piece of software[1]–something some friends of mine would probably even be happy to help out with. But the terms of indentured servitude that apply to all “legitimate” iPhone developers actually prevent fixing this problem–Apple has stated that third-party developers may not write email applications. So only Apple can fix this problem. Will they?

—–

[1]: Actually, it could be mostly fixed with some simple collaboration between the network operators here, too. The 絵文字 problem would remain, but if messages from the SoftBank-supplied IMAP accounts were simply considered as phone-to-phone mail by the other providers (NTT and AU), then the show-stopping aspect of the problem (your メール not getting through to the person you send it to) would be ameliorated. But I presume the other carriers, or NTT at least, probably balked at making special accommodations to help a competitor sell phones.

[2]: The Apple iPhone’s inability to send メール is fucking up the reputations of both device and company — not only with the people who bought it, and then subsequently discovered the problem (they’re shit out of luck, per SoftBank’s (lack of a) return policy) — but also with people who hadn’t even really cared about the iPhone yet. One colleague, to whom my job requires that I be able to send メール, complained “Hey, what is with you Apple otaku freaks?! You are the third person I know who bought the stupid ApplePhone, and for whom I now have to do this [add-to-whitelist] procedure! I know you guys make love to your Apples or whatever, wonderful for you, but why should I have to suffer?!” This was more friendly banter than a serious complaint, but it was clear that his first impressions of the iPhone are a.) that it sucks, and b.) people who use it are a bit annoying.

(Clarification: No, this phone has never been hacked or jailbroken. Apple’s servers just (predictably) shit all over themselves when faced with the load of the over-hyped and under-engineered launch.)

I now think Apple is actually pushing to make [Safari] a truly competitive Windows browser. Case in point: Apple fixed it so that you can resize the window by grabbing any part of the Window: top, bottom, left side, etc. When 3.0 beta came out, it behaved like the Mac version, only allowing you to resize from the bottom-right corner.

Well, that’s all fine and well for the five people who use Safari for Windows; meanwhile, I wish Apple would fix this on the Mac, and not just for Safari. Window resizing is one of those little things about the Mac that sucks in a big way. Like the one-button mouse before it, the inability to resize windows from any edge is a fucktarded travesty of design that has somehow survived over a decade too long.

As with right-clicking, I understand that it may confuse some people (e.g., the senile, the brain-damaged, etc.) to be able to resize a window without dragging the fucking mouse cursor across 30 diagonal inches of screen to click the single unambiguous resize knob at the very bottom right corner. Fine, then: make it an option.

I want to shrink my frontmost editor a little smaller so I can refer to the one directly behind it. This the default procedure: down, right, click, hold, up, left, release, up, left, click, hold, down, right, release.

To have something as fundamental to computer use as resizing windows remain dumbed down to this extent is just stupid. (There’s a corollary, which applies even if this issue seldom affects you personally. If, upon considering the user with dozens or hundreds of windows open, you are unable see the obvious utility of being able to resize and re-arrange those windows without making these incessant mouse-trips to the bottom right corner of each window, then you are stupid.)

Happily, though, just as with the Mac’s embarrassing single-button mouse debacle a decade ago, there is a cheap and reasonably good third-party solution available, if you are willing to spend a few minutes and dollars on it: MondoMouse.

MondoMouse does some other stuff that I don’t need, but the key for me is that it lets you resize windows from any edge.[1]

Combined with a decent multi-button mouse, this solution works surprisingly well.

Although MondoMouse works with any mouse (even one of Apple’s aforementioned monobutton mice for the short-bus set), in that scenario you have to hold down a key combination to invoke its features. That really isn’t a huge improvement; you end up trading one inconvenience (the useless mouse trip) for another (the need to reserve a keyboard shortcut and press it when you want to resize a window). The apps I use tend to employ lots of modifier key combinations like Command-Shift, Command-Shift-Option, and so on, so I found that annoying.

Instead, assign MondoMouse some really funky keyboard shortcut that you wouldn’t actually want to ever press with your fingers (such as Command-Control-Shift-Option-Fn).

Then, decide what button on your mouse you want to become your “Resize Window” button, and set up your mouse software so that button is assigned to Command-Control-Shift-Option-Fn-click.

Boom. Your Mac no longer completely sucks at performing the extremely basic and fundamental task of resizing windows. Allow me to demonstrate:

0. A (common) scenario: I am editing code in a large window. The cursor is presently up somewhere in the top part of the window. The need suddenly arises to refer to some other code, in the window behind it. But my window is taking up the whole left half of the screen.

1. I move the cursor down. I click on the bottom right corner of the window, on the resize widget. Continuing to hold the mouse button, I drag upwards and to the right, to make the window smaller. That’s progress but the window is still in the way.

2. Next, I drag the mouse back up the screen, click the title bar to grasp it, continue holding the mouse button down and drag down and right to move the window to the more useful position, where I can still edit its contents, but also see the window behind it.

Holy shit! Now I’m practically exhausted from all that effort; I need a beer and don’t even remember why I wanted to look at the rear window.

Now, let’s look at the MondoMouse way:

0: Same scenario.

1. I click my designated Resize Mouse button, continue holding the mouse button down, and drag diagonally down and left until the window is as small as I want. That is: click, hold, down, right, release.

2. Next I… well, next I don’t do shit, because I am fucking done, AND NOT WASTING EVEN A FRACTION OF A SECOND MORE ON THIS MINDLESS AND REPETITIVE TASK THAT I DO THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER MONTH ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGH

Ahem. Uh anyway, that was better. Thanks, MondoMouse!

Like many third party band-aids for some of Mac OS X’s mindblowing design flaws limitations, MondoMouse leverages the power of the Accessibility API for assistive devices, so that has to be enabled to use it.

That seems to me to be an entirely legitimate use of the Mac’s Universal Access capabilities, albeit a little backwards: in this case, it’s the computer that’s crippled, not the user.

Still, it is a kind of a hack; in some apps (including the one I am using to type this post) you can resize the window down smaller than its minimum size, which can cause some interesting visual glitches.

But to paraphrase Ted Kennedy telling the Clintons to fuck off earlier this year[2], let no one dispute this truth: MondoMouse is the best kind of hack, one that stretches the Mac’s window resizing just a little bit beyond what is was designed to do, but in a way that makes the end result a lot better than it was originally.

—– NOTES: —–

[1]: Actually, it goes one better than letting you just drag from any edge; you can drag from any point within the window at all, and it resizes from the corner nearest that point.

[2]: Yes, even this only-a-nerd-could-still-be-reading-it article about computer window resizing behavior can be linked to the election. Ahem: like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the Mac’s window resizing mechanism is a dated relic of the last century, rooted in the dysfunctional methodologies of the past; it’s time for change.

I think he’s probably trying to apologize for all the trouble he’s given me since I got him. You know, kind of like those cute disemboweled-and-decapitated-gopher gifts that your cat leaves on your doorstep to prove her love.

So, from my Mac(s) to yours, here’s the second way I have found to hard crash a Mac from a userland application this week. Introducing bug number 5842835. Judging from the kernel panic, the hoodlums from the loathsome “NVIDIA Drivers” gang just might be at it again!

Basically to make this crash happen, just set your Terminal font size preferences to 1004-point size. (Yes, yes, that would be a little hard to read, I agree. It was a typo.

Bug report as submitted to Apple:

Summary:

Editing the font size in the preferences of Terminal.app to a very large value (which can be an easy typo if using the numeric keypad) locks up the OS, freezing the entire GUI and requiring a hard reboot.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open Terminal.app. Open a terminal window and then open the Settings window (choose the “Preferences” menu item.

2. Click the “Basic” theme in the left sidebar to edit it. Ensure that “Antialias text” is checked, and then press the “Change…” button to change the font.

3. When the Font panel appears, Select the Monaco font, and then in the Size column, instead of selecting a size using the slider or list, enter “1004″ as the font size.

Expected Results:

I expect the text in the Terminal window to become insanely huge. Or, perhaps a message to appear indicating that 1004-point text is just really too large.

Actual Results:

BOOM! The Mac is now crashed. It is not possible to switch applications or save any open documents. It is possible to SSH into the Mac, if that is enabled. But the GUI no longer responds to mouse or keyboard input.

Regression:

- Mac Pro, both NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT and ATI Radeon HD 2600 displays (ASP report attached), running Mac OS X 10.5.2 with all current updates as of today.
- MacBook Pro 17″ High-Resolution Late 2007 model, 10.5.2 with all current updates.

Notes:

I am using the term “system crash” because the entire GUI is hung and there is no apparent means to recover. However it is probably noteworthy that it is possible to SSH into the hung Macs. So only the GUI layer is crashed, and the command line environment is still working.

This issue seems related to bug 5830772 that I filed, which hangs the entire GUI and logs similar stuff around the time of the system crash. (That bug can be triggered by launching the Folding@home demo app.)

Junk was spewed into the log around the time of the crash that looks like this:
-----
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 0000000c
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00100000 00005039 00000470 00000000
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00000484 00000328 00000000 00000003
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00000000 00000000 00000000
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 0000000c
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00100000 00005039 00000470 00000000
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00000484 00000328 00000000 00000003
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 00000000 00000000 00000000
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:23 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:35 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:35 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:35 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:47 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:47 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:47 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:59 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:59 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:55:59 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:11 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:11 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:11 AM Debug 0000000b
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:23 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:23 AM Debug NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
kernel kern 4/4/08 8:56:23 AM Debug 0000000b -----

There seem to be many, many similar ways to crash Mac O X 10.5, if you read the Internet forums (as I have done recently in troubleshooting such crashes). Many folks are complaining about various crashes with the NVChannel log stuff.

(the end)

…and, a kernel panic
I am not sure about this kernel panic, though. Since the whole GUI was locked up, the first time I saw this crash I connected via SSH and tried to kill off some apps and see if I could make things more gentle on some of the stuff that was running. So this kernel panic might have happened at that time, rather than when the GUI locked up.

Still, I think it is noteworthy because you can see NVIDIA’s grimy fingerprints on it, which makes you wonder if those bastards are involved somehow…

Fri Apr 4 09:01:35 2008
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x001A8C8A): Kernel trap at 0x924c70bb, type 14=page fault, registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x7a1f238c, CR3: 0x00d10000, CR4: 0x00000660
EAX: 0x7a1f2380, EBX: 0x00000001, ECX: 0x00000007, EDX: 0x00000001
CR2: 0x7a1f238c, EBP: 0x79153ef8, ESI: 0x1cd32e00, EDI: 0x7088b000
EFL: 0x00010202, EIP: 0x924c70bb, CS: 0x00000008, DS: 0x16af0010
Error code: 0x00000000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacPro3,1 (Mac-F42C88C8)


But this Mac, I don’t love. Because it crashes. The entire system crashes, in various ways, on a regular basis. And in the year 2008, that is simply not okay.

The problem is compound: this particular model turns out to be a bug-ridden piece of shit, and the particular unit I have turns out to be especially defective.

Some problems, everybody has
In the first few days of having this thing, I had the problem whereby instead of waking from sleep, the Mac would just nuke everything in RAM and abruptly hard reboot itself. Well, that wasn’t optimal behavior, but since everybody and their mother had the same problem, I ignored all the idiots on the interwebs claiming their PRAM-zapping and permissions-fixing had cured the issue, and just turned off the sleep feature and waited for apple to deliver a firmware fix (which they apparently have now done).

Other problems, apparently only I have
But then, since my Mac wasn’t sleeping any more, it would run for hours and hours. I sure as hell don’t normally shut down my main workstation, so it now had to run overnight. Apparently, that was a little too much to expect this Mac to do without acting out. Its first tantrums came in the form of the displays glitching out with all kinds of ugly video artifacts. Looked like this:

Okay, that doesn’t corrupt my hard disks or kick me in the face, but it is annoying. A reboot would usually clear up the problem, but it would just reoccur. After a few days of this, I decided to grit my teeth and do all the idiot monkey work to prep for a call to Apple Support (unplug all non-Apple stuff, zap PRAM, remove third party RAM, reproduce problem), and then told the rep that I had already done each of those things when he suggested them to me. So finally, he put me on hold for a few minutes and then came back with the news that he was overnighting me a new GeForce 8800 GT video card.

Bad problems, worse problems
OK, shit happens, I told myself. Deal with it. I’ve purchased dozens of Macs over the course of my long and tortured computing life, and about half of them have been defective in some way. The 17″ MacBook Pro I bought for my trip in late 2007 seems to work perfectly; it was probably just too much to hope for two in a row. So I installed the new video card (carefully, at my anti-static workstation) and I was back in business, right?

Wrong, obviously, or I wouldn’t be fucking writing this.

The graphical glitches were happily gone, but when I got back from the gym the next day, I saw this:

That kind of looks like a bunch of weird shit is moving around the screen and exploding, but nothing was moving. The screen was not only glitched out even worse than before, but the Mac was now also completely frozen.

My, my, how retro! The entire GUI was crashed, and although the command line was still somewhat alive and I could SSH in, the GUI apps which were running were unresponsive, and after "/sbin/shutdown -r now" failed, there was no recourse but to hold the power button down to perform a nuke-reboot.

Agh agh agh
Even thinking about the next few days gives me a headache, so I won’t write much about them. The Mac continued to crash sporadically, and although I wanted to give up and send it back, it was too late for that unless I went all nuclear on the phone with them, plus I had invested in all these FB-DIMMs and SATA disks, and anyway what I really wanted was for the fucking thing to work, because it is really fucking fast, and I have a lot of fucking things to have it fucking do for me. So. I wanted to figure it out and fix it.

There was a clue: each time it crashed, it left behind some turds in the system.log:

Trying to figure out the problems
Hmm, GL like “OpenGL” maybe? NVChannel like “NVIDIA-fucking-sucks-Channel” perhaps? These were just guesses. But eventually, I learned that the Mac seemed to crash when doing OpenGL stuff (including the built-in screensavers). I could reproduce the crash by leaving the screen saver going for a few hours, but that wasn’t very convenient.

I wanted a way to trigger the issue reliably, so that I could methodically try to figure out which configurations exhibited the trouble. For example:

• Does the issue really occur with both video cards? They could both be defective, I suppose, but that seems somewhat unlikely.
• Does the issue occur whichever slot the video card is installed in? There are 2 16x PCIe slots. If it is the motherboard and not the video cards causing the issue, then it may happen only when the card is installed in one particular slot.
• Does the issue happen only when I boot from my normal RAID array, which has a couple unavoidable kernel extensions? I keep kexts to a minimum, precisely because I fucking hate system crashes like this, but I do need to run Steermouse, VMWare, and EyeTV. I have a clone of the virgin boot disk that this Mac shipped with, so I can test with that as well, to rule out the possibility that it’s a software problem with some nonstandard extension.

But it’s just not realistic to test all these scenarios unless I can make the crash happen on demand.

So I scoured the forums and found a huge number of people with similar-but-different problems, along with an even huger number of people polluting all the threads with jibberjabber bullshit like “Zap the PRAM!” “Repair permissions!” and, of course, “Hey OMG my Mac also crashed, although in a totally different and unrelated way, what should I do what should I do???”

But in one of these forum posts, I found a seeming gem: an OpenGL app that would trigger the problem immediately. I tried it. Boom! Launching the Folding@home demo application, version “6.10beta2″, instantly crashed my Mac. Since this process emitted the same log messages, and caused the Mac to freeze in the same way, I assumed this was a shortcut to triggering my crash. But I was wrong about this and thereby wasted several hours of my time using this false positive result to troubleshoot my Mac Pro’s specific problem.

Folding@home test: bogus results
Using this method of triggering the crash, I alternated boot disks, video cards, and which PCIe slot was used. I came up with the following results:


RAID boot, card 1 in slot 1: FOLDING@HOME TEST CRASH
virg boot, card 1 in slot 2: FOLDING@HOME TEST CRASH
RAID boot, card 2 in slot 1: FOLDING@HOME TEST CRASH
virg boot, card 2 in slot 2: FOLDING@HOME TEST CRASH


Huh, so it always crashes, whichever video card or slot is used? So… maybe the Mac itself is faulty, and not the video cards. It could be that Mac OS X itself has a bad software bug, but that seems unlikely; it would mean that everybody who left their 2008 Mac Pro with a GeForce 8800 GT card running the built-in screen saver would suffer a full system crash. You couldn’t say this was impossible—after all, hordes of users were up in arms about the extremely widespread sleep-crash bug—but I judged it more likely that my particular Mac was at fault rather than the OS.

To bolster that theory, I made sure the Folding@Home crash didn’t happen on my other Macs, and… ah, shit.

It turns out, launching this particular app is just another generic way to hard-crash Mac OS X 10.5 (including 10.5.2, the latest version as of this writing). This is not specific to my Mac Pro, or even the Mac Pro in general. I later reproduced this system crash on my MacBook Pro. It happens on some Mac models and not others (perhaps only those with certain video cards).

But it was natural for me to think this was the same problem: it spewed the same “NVChannel” log messages just before crashing the entire Mac GUI but leaving the command line environment alive.

So, fuck. All those times I hauled my hulking Mac into the workshop, swapped the two video cards in and out, put them in different slots, and wrote down the results… it was the wrong results.

Fish test
After a couple more days of trying to get work done, but having the Mac crash out from under me about once per day, I finally found another way to trigger the crash reliably: the fish test. I downloaded this free OpenGL fish tank simulation program. Using it, I made a fish tank full of little OpenGL fish that swim around very fast. Running this, my Mac crashed reliably within 5 minutes. NVChannel log turds, glitched out display, the whole nine.

So, after making sure that this procedure didn’t crash any of the other Macs I have here, I set about testing again.

Results
RAID boot, card 2 in slot 1: FISH TEST CRASH
virg boot, card 2 in slot 1: FISH TEST CRASH
RAID boot, card 1 in slot 1: FISH TEST OK, GLITCHES @ 16+ HRS
virg boot, card 1 in slot 2: FISH TEST OK, GLITCHES @ 8+ HRS
RAID boot, both cards installed: KERNEL PANIC
virg boot, both cards installed: BOOT FAILURE (HANG)


OK, what does that tell me? It tells me that video card 2, the replacement GeForce 8800 GT that Apple shipped, always causes a system crash when doing OpenGL. On the other hand the original card never causes a system crash, but does start exhibiting visual glitching after 0-72 hours of use.

In other words… (drum roll)… I am right the fuck back where I started. My Mac doesn’t work right and I don’t really know why, nor do I have an easy way to methodically troubleshoot the problem.

Conclusions
I thought I was “safe” buying the early 2008 model Mac Pro because it was effectively the second revision of the Mac Pro. Seemed more evolutionary than revolutionary; more Rev B than Rev A. (I had the 2007 Mac Pro quad-core, and it was a good machine. )

But I was wrong. Generally speaking, this Mac sucks. That is, it has many problem that prevent it from working correctly. The fact that there are multiple design flaws that cause these machines, without hardware defects, to suffer whole-system crashes is pretty lame. Even lamer is that this makes it so much more annoying to troubleshoot actual hardware issues. So this Mac kind of sucks out of the box, even when nothing is actually broken, hardware-wise.

Second, the Mac Pro that Apple sent me is broken. Either the included video card, or perhaps the motherboard, is faulty. This problem causes visual glitches to occur after several hours of use.

Third, the replacement video card that Apple provided is even more broken. It also causes visual glitches to occur, but in the case of this card, the glitches are accompanied by system crashes. These system crashes, fortunately, are easily reproducible and don’t occur without this particular card installed.

So, now what?
I don’t even know what to say to Apple when I call them next. Send me yet another GeForce 8800? Send me some other video card? Take my computer back and try to fix it? I guess I will just lay it all out for them and ask them what the fuck they should do for me.

Since I am trying to get actual work done, though, I ordered a different video card from the Apple store (the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT). I will install it and see if it seems to work without issues. If so, then maybe I will just throw this nVidia shit in the trash and write it off.

The $350 or whatever it’s worth just isn’t worth this level of hassle. I mean, I’ve spent hours and hours on this… easily over a thousand bucks worth if those were billable hours. Although it is true that many of the hours were spent with me in a drunken rage, interspersing the various hardware tests with stress-relieving HD playstation carnage. So maybe I need to account for them at a discount rate.

I do hope the ATI card works, because when this Mac does work, it is far more powerful than any laptop or iMac, and it’s much better suited to office work than an Xserve.

But there does seem to be a hefty productivity price involved in actually getting it to work correctly. I hope that things get resolved, the OS bugs get fixes, my hardware issues get addressed, and I get a year of crash-free high-performance work out of this Mac.

But even if I do, I know in my heart that I won’t ever love it.