That not so fresh feeling

So last night I decided that I had enough of Safari crashing randomly, and dying completely when I tried to upgrade it. I knew that somewhere along the line something had gone wrong with my system, and it was time to admit that the prudent thing to do was to wipe the system and install a fresh copy of Lion.

Now I had basically been running the same OS install since 2007, which was originally a (short lived) install of Tiger, followed by Leopard once it was released that fall, then Snow Leopard and finally Lion this year. People will say "oh, well, you really should do a fresh install when a new OS comes out, so that..." and then their train of thought goes off into some cargo-cult chicken-bone-rune casting mumbo jumbo, or at least the technological equivalent thereof.

The thing is, so long as the filesystem itself isn't corrupted, there should be no difference between a freshly installed system and one that had been upgraded from a previous install, no matter how long ago that install was performed. Any deviation therein is nothing less than a failure on the part of the developers, in this case Apple's OS division. And so, to Apple's MacOS release packaging team, I have one thing to say: Son, I am disappoint.

But my disappointment runs deeper than that. You see, on windows there exists a little known utility called "SFC", which stands for "System File Checker". As the name implies, it runs a checksum over all (or most) of the important system files and can replace any that deviate from expectations. As far as I can tell, though, there's no equivalent to this on MacOS X.

The sad thing is it would be dead simple to integrate into Disk Utility. There's already a framework in place, the ever so lovely "repair permissions" routine that seems to be the first line of action in every OS X tech support script. It would, in theory, be quite simple to extend this to record and verify checksums on all the vital files, and then, at the very least, indicate which files are damaged if not replace them automatically.


In the mean time, though, I'm at least glad that nuking the drive from orbit, reinstalling, and migrating the data, apps and settings back from my time machine drive is at least a reasonably seamless process.

Please DIAF, Flash Plugin

So last night as I was settling down getting ready for bed, I decided to watch a few youtube videos to close out the day, as I often do. Additionally, as is common for these late night viewings, I hit the "full screen" button on youtube's controls.

Now, for most people, clicking a button marked "full screen" would imply some sort of desire to watch a video in full screen perhaps. Not according to Adobe, though. For them, hitting "full screen" means "crash the computer and force an instant reboot". Thanks, Adobe.

As a result of this, my root drive became unrecoverably corrupted (I'll put some of the blame on Apple's FS team for that part, journaled filesystems should never die like that). Thankfully my Time Machine backups came to the rescue and I didn't lose any data, but all the same it was a pain in the ass and kept me up well past my intended bed time.

On the bright side, when I logged in to post this I noticed that Blogger has added mobile device templates, which I took the opportunity to enable. As such, my blog should now be much easier to navigate from handheld devices. Now if only they could do something about improving the mobile posting experience...

The magic of bluetooth

I've been wanting to get a game controller for a while, so that I could more easily play emulator games on my computers, but one way or another I never really got around to it. The trouble is that the market for PC game controllers isn't very big, and is as such not very well served.

This afternoon, though, I was out shopping and decided that enough was enough: it was time to get myself a controller. Rather than get a PC game controller, though, I instead opted for a PS3 DualShock 3 controller, with the assumption that I'd be able to make it work with my computers, since it's just a bluetooth device after all.

I figured I might need to do some tinkering or scrounging for some hacked drivers or something, but much to my delight it turns out that OS X has built-in support for the DualShock 3 controller, so all I had to do was plug it in to sync/charge it, and it immediately connected via bluetooth and provided full HID capability.

This pleases me.

I haven't managed to get it connected to my Wintendo, though, as my PC currently lacks bluetooth. I've added a bluetooth dongle to my xmas list, though, so hopefully that problem won't persist forever.

Next on the shopping list

So it looks like apple came out with a new Mac Mini today. It's even better than I expected: not only does it support the 2560x1600 resolution required to run a 30" display, it can do so while also driving a second display at 1920x1200! Sweet!

It's so going on my christmas list. So many things to buy...

Xmas in November

Xmas came early this year, in the form of a new 500G Seagate HD and an external Firewire/USB case to put it in, so now my shiny little Mac Mini has a shiny little backup drive to run Time Machine on! Yay!

Pictures here.

Trading stripes for spots

So I upgraded my Mini to Leopard. I must say I'm very impressed, even though I was already using it for 2 months this summer. It does feel a bit odd now that there's some of my code in it, but I guess I'll just have to get used to the feeling.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I can't load it on my G3. Even if it had enough CPU for it, the 6 gig root drive is just too small to hold it all. It'll have to make do with Tiger, for now and forever. So sad.

And I named him... Merida

Ok, so I didn't name my mini "Mini Me". I did get it delivered yesterday, and spent the afternoon setting it up (mostly copying data from my old G3 and lugging my old Octane and monitor out of the way).

I posted a few pictures of the experience on my gallery.

There's only one thing I can really say: this computer is awesome!

Only hiccup I've found so far is that the driver for my Kensington Expert Mouse doesn't let my Mini go to sleep, but that's a Kensington problem, not a Mini problem.