Macbook Pro overheating
It appears reinstalling Mac OS X Leopard has done something to the default fan settings on my work MBP. I've had problems today with the GPU overheating (triggered by several minutes of Spotlight indexing things). I've installed smcFanControl2 and cranked the default fan speed up to 3,000 rpm. This seems to be keeping the GPU temperature under control.
FileVault ate my home directory
Yesterday I upgraded my work Macbook Pro from OS X Tiger 10.4 to Leopad 10.5.6. It was not an entirely smooth experience. After upgrading to Leopard, it all appeared to work fine -- everything seemd intact. I ran the software updates tool, and it downloaded some updates. I needed to reboot.
I use FileVault to encrypt my home directory, to protect all the confidential data on it. When you reboot/shutdown the laptop under OS X 10.4 Tiger, it asks you whether you want it to free up space occupied by deleted files within the encrypted image. You can "Skip" or "Continue".
After installing the updates and rebooting, I elected to "Skip". When the laptop came back up, I could not log in to my account. I rebooted with the OS X 10.5 Leopard install DVD (hint: press Apple-C at start-up to boot off DVD), ran Disk Utility and tried to repair the encrypted .sparseimage in my home directory. No luck.
I ended up re-installing OS X 10.5 Leopard from scratch. Fortunately I had a backup on my Linux box (encrypted with encfs).
Couple of lessons learnt:
Set up an administrator account that does not use FileVault. All the help articles I've seen assume that you can actually log into your Mac under an admin account and run Disk Utility. I wasn't able to because my account was the only administrator account.
Don't use the "Skip" option with FileVault. NB: It appears they removed it in OS X 10.5 Leopard.
File::ExtAttr 1.09
AKA the "reduce the CPAN Testers FAIL results" release.
I also fixed a minor bug on Solaris, and documented a difference in the handling of empty attribute values on Mac OS X 10.4 vs. 10.5. See File::ExtAttr on CPAN soon.
Changelog:
1.09 2009-03-07
- (richdawe) Add note to README about needing to install
package that provides the headers <attr/attributes.h>
and <attr/xattr.h>.
- (richdawe) Fix RT #31970: "OS X: setfattr fails to set empty value".
According to the CPAN Testers results, this works
on Mac OS X 10.5.
Skip the "empty" tests on Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier.
Document issue.
- (richdawe) Fix #34394: "Test suite should skip on filesystems
with no xattr support when run non-interactively"
on Linux.
When run interactively, it will suggest what you need
to do, to get the test suite to pass.
- (richdawe) Fix RT #37889: "Crash when operating on a closed file handle
on Solaris". This was due to using an uninitialised
directory handle.
Fedora 9 vs. VMware-server 1.0.8
VMware-server 1.0.8 seems to barf on the GTK+ theme files shipped with Fedora 9. I'm using Clearlooks. You can force VMware-server to use the system GTK+ libraries:
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=no vmware &
On my F9 x86_64 install, I needed to install a few i386 packages first, before VMware start. VMware-server is an i386 program, so you need these i386 packages to be installed for it to be able to use the system GTK+ libraries:
yum -y install glib2.i386 gtk2.i386
Linksys wireless gear vs. Xbox 360
I've been trying recently to connect a wired LAN printer and my Xbox 360 to the wireless LAN in our house. This proved trickier than I expected.
First off I wanted to connect my old Linksys WRT54GS v2 wireless access point to the existing wireless network, so that I could hook my printer up to it. The wireless network is using WPA-PSK authentication. I reflash the WRT54GS with OpenWrt, version 8.09 RC1. I didn't find OpenWrt very friendly, but I managed to get it to join the wireless network. Unfortunately there seemed to be some problem with bridging -- the wired and wireless networks were not connected.
Eventually I gave up and switched to DD-WRT, which worked much better. I set it up into Client Bridged mode, and it just worked.
The next task was to connect my Xbox 360 to the wireless network. I bought the wireless adapter, but I found it would not connect to my wireless router, a Linksys WAG325N. Apparently this is a known issue. The recommended fix is to downgrade to version 1.00.06 of the firmware, which unfortunately did not work for me. I upgraded the router to the latest firmware, v1.00.12, and made sure my Xbox had the latest updates. Still no joy.
I read reports that the Xbox 360 worked fine with the WRT54GS, so I wondered if I could create a second wireless network just for my Xbox. Fortunately I discovered that DD-WRT has a repeater mode and a repeater bridge mode. In repeater bridge mode, you create a virtual wireless network with a new SSID, and then traffic is bridged between the real wireless network and your new "virtual" wireless network. The virtual wireless network is a real wireless network to all intents and purposes.
After some poking around the DD-WRT GUI, I had it all configured and it works! (Note: I skipped the nvram set wl_ssid="" step -- you don't need that for Repeater Bridged mode.) The path for traffic from my Xbox to the internet is now something like this:
Xbox <--> WLAN 2 <--> WRT54GS Access-Point <--> WLAN 1 <--> WAG325N router <--> internet
DD-WRT is pretty sweet. I've only scratched the surface of its features.
Thanks to Linux desktop developers
I've just caught up with 2 years' worth of Linux desktop developments (NetworkManager works, user switching, built-in volume controls working on my laptop). I like. Thanks for all the hard work, Linux desktop developers!
PS: Turning on "subpixel aliasing" has made text much more readable.
Occasional lock-ups due to Parallels & FileVault?
I've been running a Windows VM under Parallels on my work Mac. I have my home directory encrypted using FileVault. I've had ~5 lock-ups in the past 6 months where my Mac has just locked hard. It always seems to happen when I'm using a Windows VM. I've allocated 768 MB of RAM to the Windows VM. The Mac has 2 GB of physical RAM. The disk image is pre-allocated, to avoid performance problems with it being resized on the encrypted volume.
I've wondered if the box has locked up because FileVault cannot allocate memory for some reason. This doesn't seem to happen in normal usage. Maybe the Windows VM is pushing memory usage over the edge.
Today I've switched to hosting the Windows VM disk outside the encrypted partition, and using NTFS encryption for the data I need to protect. Hopefully that will work better.
Interesting essay on "Misunderstandings of Privacy"
I found the article "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy " by Daniel J. Solove interesting. Specifically how he tried to categorise privacy into different categories based on the kinds of problems encountered, and his discussions on privacy and the relationships between individuals and society.
3 mobile broadband on Mac
I got some mobile broadband from 3 to cope with a two-week gap in my wired broadband provision. I had some pain getting it to work on my work Macbook Pro (which is a US one) running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x).
The software gave me an obscure error -- "internal error 5370" or similar -- when running the 3 Connection Manager software. According to a techie in the 3 store I went to, I needed to download the latest drivers from the 3 website. That was pretty hard to find. It turned out to be on the support page for the Huawei E160G on Mac OS X 10.4. (I don't recall how I found that page.)
I uninstalled the old software, deleted the "3Connect" folder from applications, installed the new software and fired up the "MobileConnect" application. That detected the 3 network, but crashed when I tried to connect. This thread on the Huawei forum suggested that I could create a profile in the Network panel of the computer settings:
Firstly, run the “Mobile Connect” Make sure under “settings” there is a profile: I called mine “3 USB Modem”, with Access Point name of 3internet and Telephone number of *99#. You only need to do this once.
Secondly, go into System Preferences. In the Network pane, select the HUAWEI mobile device in the left pane. Now, in the right pane, under Configuration, select “Add Configuration”. I caled mine “Three”. Add *99# as the telephone number, make sure “Show modem status in menu bar” is ticked (for convenience) and you’re all set.
I had to enable a profile called "HuaweiMOBILE" first. Once I edited that as instructed above, I found that the MobileConnect application could connect.
Actually, it failed to connect the first time due to some authentication error. But it's worked every time since. Perhaps the auth error was a signal strength issue.
Knowing what rpms you've just built
One idiom I've found myself repeating in various projects is a build-all script that builds multiple rpm packages in a certain order. This isn't very sophisticated -- each time I've ordered the packages being built manually.
But how do you know what rpms you will get, when you run rpmbuild? You need to know this, so you can install the rpms. Here is a solution:
specfile=project.spec
RPMDIR=$(rpm --eval '%{_rpmdir}')
# What format does rpm use for built binary rpms?
# %{ARCH}/%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}.rpm
BUILD_NAME_FMT=`rpm --eval '%{_build_name_fmt}'`
rpms=$(rpm -q --specfile $specfile --queryformat "$BUILD_NAME_FMT ")
pushd $RPMDIR
rpm -ivh $rpms
popd
This works as follows: get the rpm root directory into $RPMDIR; find the format rpmbuild uses for built binary rpms; query the rpm specfile for packages and format the results using the build rpm filename format; finally, go into the rpm root and install all the binary rpms.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!