Snow Leopard System Preferences Must Quit and Reopen

Snow Leopard includes many applications that are now 64-bit. System Preferences is one of them. The catch is that if you have a preference pane in the Other section which hasn't been rewritten/compiled for 64-bit, Snow Leopard informs you that you need to quit System Preferences and reopen it.

One way to avoid this for now is to force System Preferences to run in 32-bit mode by default. Right click and select "Get Info" on Applications/System Preferences. There should be a check box to force 32-bit mode all the time. It looks like all the built-in system preferences support 32-bit mode also so everything should work just fine for now. Staying tuned to see if 64-bit native 3rd party preference panes will work while System Preferences is running in 32-bit mode. Signs point to no.

Flaky Wireless Router

I purchased a new Airport Extreme wireless router the other day, and also a new networked HD tuner. I installed both at the same time which is something I usually never do to avoid ambiguity when something breaks. I noticed some flaky internet performance so thinking it was the new Airport Extreme (which gets very good review), I made changes to a bunch of settings. The performance problem was also very hard to notice because it was random flakiness. The most noticeable problem was with live video including Skype and my girlfriend's live video feed for the class she was taking.

Long story short, it turned out to be the cable modem. Why? I inserted an extra 1 to 3 coax splitter before the cable modem.

Prior to this problem I never payed any attention to the signal strength readouts on my cable modem's web page. My Motorola surfboard modem serves up a page at 192.168.1.100 on my network. Following are some snapshots from the web page with different coax splitter configurations in between the coax line entering our house and our cable modem.

1:5 coax splitter at the house + 1:3 before cable modem:


1:5 coax splitter at the house:


1:2 coax splitter at the house:


An explanation of these numbers can be found here. As you can see, with the 1:5 and 1:3 splitter my downstream power level was at -16dBmV which is out of the recommended range. With just a 1:2 splitter, the downstream power level increased to 0dBmV, SNR has increased, and our flaky internet problems are gone.

I'm still trying to make sense of the upstream power level and why it should be *lower*. My current theory is the cable company sends commands to the cable modem to increase its output power if the cable company can't hear the modem? If that was the case, then seeing a lower upstream power level would mean the upstream signal is clear with lower upstream power.

Goodbye BlueWordsLive

Here's the story. Google e-mailed and said "We're automatically renewing your domain." Since that's what I wanted, I immediately purged the topic from memory. Google had out of date credit card information and failed to inform me that they weren't successful in renewing my domain. What's worse is there is a grace period that had passed, and the domain goes in to some state (I forgot what they called it), where it can't be reclaimed until it goes back into the public pool. It would have cost me a bunch of money to retrieve it from this state before my domain was returned to the public pool.

Alternatively, GoDaddy offers a domain backordering service where they monitor domains in these states and register them for you as soon as they are released for public reregistering, so I gave that a shot. GoDaddy charged me and either failed or has a business relationship with another company.

BlueWordsLive is no owned by findyouadomain.com. Its a cheesy name anyways. Ahtilog is way cooler.

Hacked and Tethered iPhone 3G Speed Test

My friend and I just benchmarked a tethered 3G iPhone connected on the 3G network. Quite impressive throughput for a cell network. It actually felt like I was surfing on wifi. Now if they would just make this free and officially supported, I would be one happy customer and perhaps I might feel like I was getting my money's worth from my cellular phone provider. I've never felt that way before.

OSX Screen Sharing Bug

I accidentally shared my laptop's screen with my desktop and my desktop's screen with my laptop. The result was psychadelic man! Don't do it though. Both machines hosed.

Ubuntu Install: Buffer I/O Error on Device SR0

Installing Ubuntu has been a bit of a challenge due to errors reading from my optical drive.  I was able to get through some installs successfully with a CD burned with Ubuntu but in most cases it fails while trying to read from the CD before the install is finished.  I tried moving devices around on the IDE cable, burning the disc at a slower speed, verifying the disc burned correctly, making sure the ISO image checksums correctly.  It just appears that the drive I'm using to burn the disc or the media I'm using just isn't compatible with my Ubuntu machine's drive.  The one thing that did work is using DVD media instead of CD media.  If you're having the same problem, I recommend giving this a shot.

OS X Time Machine Hang

I just had an awesome experience debugging a Time Machine hang. A backup was hanging indefinitely as far as I can tell. I couldn't stop it through the preferences pane, or pull down in the menu bar. Looking at the system log, I found the following:
Mar 28 22:08:50 Tornado mds[36]: (Error) Import: importer:0x85d400 Importer start failed for 89 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
Mar 28 22:09:20: --- last message repeated 7 times ---
Mar 28 22:09:22 Tornado mds[36]: (Error) Import: importer:0x85d400 Importer start failed for 89 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
Mar 28 22:09:52: --- last message repeated 7 times ---
Mar 28 22:09:54 Tornado mds[36]: (Error) Import: importer:0x85d400 Importer start failed for 89 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
Mar 28 22:10:24: --- last message repeated 7 times ---
Mar 28 22:10:26 Tornado mds[36]: (Error) Import: importer:0x85d400 Importer start failed for 89 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
Mar 28 22:10:37: --- last message repeated 2 times ---

Assuming these errors were related, I opened up Activity Monitor, and killed the mds process and was greeted with the following in the sytem log:
Mar 28 22:10:37 Tornado com.apple.launchd[97] (com.apple.Spotlight[145]): Exited abnormally: Interrupt

So it looks like mds is part of Spotlight, maybe the indexing process. Immediately after I killed the process, my Time Machine backup unfroze and reported an error.
Mar 28 22:11:33 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Indexing a file failed. Returned -1120 for: /Library/Application Support/Mozilla, /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Tornado/2009-03-22-011202.inProgress/E3158A6F-868B-4E81-82EE-7D3151A1A287/Magnus/Library/Application Support/Mozilla
Mar 28 22:11:33 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Aborting backup because indexing a file failed.
Mar 28 22:11:33 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Stopping backup.
Mar 28 22:11:33 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
Mar 28 22:11:34 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Copied 101 files (12 KB) from volume Magnus.
Mar 28 22:11:34 Tornado /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[15448]: Copy stage failed with error:11

Elsewhere on the internet people claim that their hard drives start thrashing if Time Machine is backing up at the same time Spotlight is indexing a back up volume. I didn't hear any thrashing on my backup drive. I think there is something else at work. In the above system log messages there is a line saying "Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed." That's a printout from the backupd process which I assume is part of Time Machine. I'm going to guess that Time Machine and Spotlight running at the same time with Spotlight indexing the backup drive can hit a bug that causes the two processes to dead lock.

I added my Time Machine backup database to Spotlight's privacy list so it won't index my backup drive. It doesn't prove that it's the problem, but after killing mds, and telling Spotlight to ignore the backup drive, the next Time Machine backup completed fine.

Still a Long Time Before Judgement Day

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief because it is still going to be a while before the terminators are intelligent enough to become self aware and want to murder us all. I refer you to figure 1 and figure 2 where my dirt terminator was found today precariously balanced and stuck.

Either that or he has become self aware and he wants to check out of his life as a vaccuum.

DIY Nas: Linux as a Time Machine Backup

I already got a few questions on how I did this. Here is the link to a super how-to on a really nice looking blog. A geek with creative sense!

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

DIY Nas: Up and Running!

Well, I intended to blog more about this guy as I was building. I set out with the idea that this system would be a bit more embedded than it turned out. It ended up being a full blown server with 8 hot swap raid bays. It's a Core2 based system and what is pretty fantastic is with the 2.5" system drive running and the NAS drives spun down it consumes a bit over 60 watts measured at the wall. That should improve by another 8-10 watts with some of the new efficient power supplies coming out later this year. It's running Debian and Time Machine backups of two laptops in the house are working like a charm.

Fixing Incorrect Medical Bills

What a fracking nightmare. You go to the doctor once and end up with 10 different bills from people you didn't even see. For this rant I'll let alone the topic of questionable billing amounts from the physicians to the insurance companies and how there is apparantly no verification that a bill is correct. I recently went to the same clinic, saw two different doctors for the same amount of time - both primary care doctors. The bill to the insurance company is different by more than 100 dollars. So let me ignore that for now and just say by asking the right questions, I have saved myself over $1800 of incorrect overcharges to myself from both a hospital and my insurance company. Through this, I've learned the quickest way to get these problems dealt with and am willing to share them with you for free.

When you have a bill that is obviously wrong:
- Call your insurance company. They will either accept fault or say the hospital shouldn't have billed you anything else which is in fact ILLEGAL.
- If they say the hospital/doctor shouldn't have billed anything additional, immediately request a conference call with the physicians office. Requesting this conference call saves an amazing amount of time.

The bill should be cleared up in the next few minutes unless you misunderstood the details of your own insurance plan.

Windows 7 Touch

Windows 7 Touch Video

"Oooh oooh...look everybody! We innovated! We were the first ones to support TOUCH with your PC! Take that Apple."

They could have at the very least demonstrated a usage case where someone would actually want to use a touch screen PC. Say a tablet PC, touch screen coffee table, or internet appliance in the kitchen so you can kick off a video or see news highlights of the day; not a usage case where you're holding up your extended arm for hours to edit personal photos.

I suggest a quick addition to this video which talks about the value to be had with simultaneous computer use and deltoid exercise which can't be had anywhere else.

Yoshi and Michi's Web Site

Our kitties Yoshi and Michi have been working very hard on a web site. It is finally live at http://www.ilovemybadkitty.com You can see them on the kitty cam at breakfast and dinner time or any time Michi feels like stealing food. They also maintain a blog and love responding to e-mails. Well, Michi does. Yoshi just eats kibbles.

DIY Nas: The Case

For my DIY NAS project's case, I chose the Coolermaster Centurion 590 which can be found for about $60 dollars. This sucker has nine 5.25" drive bays. Why is that good? Lots of room for 5.25" raid cages. With a four drive in three bay raid cage, you're looking at a 12 hard drive behemoth. I won't be needing that many drives for a long time, but I like to have room for growth.

AppleTV Absent from Environmental Report

Not strangely at all, the AppleTV is absent from Apple's 2008 environmental report.
Apple and the Environment

DIY Nas Project Kick Off

As you can see in my recent posts, I've been thinking about how much power electronic junk around my house consumes. The reason is because my MacPro is running out of hard drive space and consuming over 200 watts while idling as the house file, iTunes, print, and Time Machine backup server. It goes to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity, but I'm not satisfied. I want to replace the MacPro with an extremely expandable energy sipping home file and media server which could possibly double as a DVR backend with MythTV. If all goes well, the MacPro and Tivo are sold on Craigslist to the highest bidder and I'm left with a single machine consuming less than 60 watts while idle and money in my pocket.

Incredibly Efficient Power Supplies Coming

I've been researching PC equipment to build the cheapest, fastest, and most efficient DIY NAS device possible. It looks like I'm going to want to wait a while on the power supply. My system shouldn't need more than a 300 watt supply. Check out the specs on this reference design for a 250 watt supply from NXP. If you spend some time thumbing around on 80plus.org comparing efficiency curves, you'll find those are incredible numbers. Almost 93% efficient at 20% load! That is insanely good.

The application notes for building these supplies came out 8 days ago so it is probably still a few months before we see some products.

7 Watts

My sleeping MacPro with 6 gigs of fully buffered dimms, 4 hard drives, and 4 cores consumes only 7 watts of power. This is really amazing to me because it goes to sleep instantly and wakes almost instantly. It doesn't appear to be dumping ram to the hard drive so the ram is being refreshed. 7 watts? Really? That's low, low, low. An AppleTV's "sleep" mode is twice that!

How Much Power Does a Sleeping MacPro Consume?

I just measured it with a Kill A Watt. Take a guess in my poll to the right. No cheating by looking online!

Fix WinXP Search Within Files of Unknown Type

I just had the lovely experience of searching for a string with in vhdl files in a directory on Windows XP only to have it report nothing matching when there were about a dozen files matching.

I fixed it with the following Microsoft support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173

Only the last method worked for me:
"Network administrators can configure this setting by modifying the registry. To do this, set the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex"
Be careful in that registry!

Lifestyle Changes

For the first time in a few YEARS I weigh less than 220lbs. Last week I was in the ER with more gallbladder issues. Wait, I have no gallbladder. Turns out that doesn't matter. A gallstone was stuck at my Sphincter of Oddi which pissed of my pancreas and pissed off my liver. They're still angry. Chill out liver!

There is nothing better than a boatload of pain to get you to change your ways. Last week I cut out alcohol and grease - completely. This has been extremely hard for me. I've grown to love alcohol and grease. After all, what's the best thing for washing down a beer?

I don't expect my diet to prevent another gallstone from causing issues. I fully expect it to happen at which point they're going to put me under, shove some tools down my mouth, and widen up the Oddi which will relieve the traffic at the Oddi/intestine interchange.

How cool is the name Sphincter of Oddi?