President Barack Hussein Obama.

AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

I think Green Mars might be the best of the three.

One big reason is by the time you read Green, you are already seven or eight hundred pages in, so if one of the colonists decides to take a rover out in the desert for some geological surveying and deep introspective thinking for a couple weeks (and twenty uninterrupted pages), as the reader you are by now used to that kind of thing happening from time to time, and it’s no longer so jarring to be separated from the other parallel plot threads for so long.

The other reason is simply that by the time you slog through to the end of Blue, you’ve been reading this story for so fucking incredibly loooong…

But all three of these books are great.

(BTW, I hope it’s obvious that the above list is not in any kind of order.)

We’ll know soon, in any event. UPDATE: It’s Biden.

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.)

Matthews! Brokaw! Even uber-cynic Olbermann! They look like the junior high school girls volleyball team arriving for practice one morning to find Bubbles the bunny rabbit mascot dead in his cage.

OK, finally here’s Russert. As usual, he’s saying blaaah blah blah blah blaaaaah. But not crying. Oh, and here’s Maddow. Definitely not crying. Okay. Maybe that quavering sound was just interference from a solar flare, or something.

Well, I’m not crying either; I am shooting my gun straight up in the air and shouting FUCK YEAH FUCK YEAH OBAMA OH EIGHT I TOLD Y’ALL BITCHES YEE HAW over the P.A. system. Fuck yeah.

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.

But today I finally asked the oracle, and inside of ten seconds had my answer. The NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod default seems to work in most Cocoa apps, Xcode included, and the value seems to be in milliseconds. So a simple:

Mac-Pro:~ mason$ defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod 187

…and voila! No more sllloooooow hypnoooootic bliiiiiiinkiiiiiing…

Okay, sure, the fucking whore radio host was wrong to call the fucking whore candidate a "fucking whore" on the air. Whatever, dude. But the increasingly common assumption he makes — that the reason that people are anti-Clinton must be because they are pro-Obama — is bogus.

Many of us would strongly dislike Hillary Clinton whether or not Barack Obama had entered the presidential race.

Many of us would strongly support Barack Obama for president even if Hillary Clinton were a genuine and honest public servant worthy of our respect (as opposed to the calculating and disingenuous personification of everything wrong with American politics that she actually is).

So get it straight. Sure, we would vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain. But that would just be another case of choosing the shitburger over the double shitburger. (In other words, just like every other presidential election I’ve been alive for.)

We didn’t just recently start to hate shitburgers now that the new 2008 menu finally features a fresh healthy salad.

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.

WELL, AT LEAST GREY ICE. OKAY, KINDA SHIT-LOOKING BROWN ICE. BUT STILL…

Holy fucking shit! That’s interesting… I mean, these are some fucking dicks, no doubt. But who exactly are these dicks? Nobody knows… but *then* it was blamed on the anti-scientology-cult entity known as “Anonymous”. Oooh. Wait wait, *then* the rumor was that no no no it is actually *scientologists* doing it, but trying to frame the anti-scintologists as being some fucking dicks who would hack-attack epileptics on the intermatrix.

And then, as interesting as it was, I just simply lost interest, and had to get some work done.

But for the record, if I was on the jury in the trial of the epileptic who had killed the scientologist griefer, I think I would probably have to hang it…

This book is definitely going to be over the heads of some readers; there aren’t many cheap thrills or forced cliffhanger moments. Instead, it satisfies on a deeper level, keeping the reader engaged in a long-term relationship with several different characters—some of them deeply unlovable—and in the ultimate fate of Mars as a world inhabited by people.

It’s a very ambitious book, and it succeeds.

Mired in an unwinnable idiot war, with an ignorant citizenry trading away its constitutional freedoms for security theater, 2008 finds our nation in steep decline, led by the worst president in living memory and a gaggle of other dysfunctional cowards.

Yeah, so what else is new, right? Well, there is one thing: it’s probably only because things have gotten so bad, but this time our political system has improbably managed to produce an intelligent and thoughtful candidate who not only reflects America’s better attributes, and eschews most of the idiotic trappings of our broken two-party system, but who also somehow still has a real shot at winning.

Unfortunately, this has sent the Clinton team into a desperate and disgraceful race-baiting frenzy, and they must be stopped.

I have prepared an exhaustive report how this can be accomplished and what you must do to help. (Like most rigorous scientific analyses, it is presented in comic book form.) Read, and then act: