I've been running Mac OS X Leopard for about a month now on my Macbook Pro. Since I bought a new Macbook Pro at the right time, the Snow Leopard update was ten bucks. I got it in the mail yesterday and since I have been using Time Machine against a freenas server running on a vmware slice, I figured it should be no problem to erase the disk and do a full install. Having suffered no small amount of pain with upgrad\
es gone awry on Windows and Linux, I'm skeptical about the sheer complexity of OS upgrades in general. I like to start in a pristine state.
Nevertheless, I imaged my home directory just in case using this command:
But it turns out I didn't need the image - at least not yet. I erased the drive and ins\
talled Snow Leopard. Booted fine - no problems. I then issued the following command in the terminal:
Which turns on the ability for Time Machine to show and\
connect to the previously-configured-on-Leopard Time Machine backup server running on my freenas vmware slice. I then simply brought up time machine preferences, hit select disk, and selected the freenas server. Then I went into Time Machine and voila, there were all my\
files from the Leopard backup. Clicked a directory and hit restore and boom, the files are on my hard disk. Beautiful.
They seemed to have removed the native support for my HP Color Laserjet 2600N but I'm not sure why. The driver here works great so far.
Screen recording with\
Quicktime X is a great deal. No need to buy additional software to make great screen movies with voice over. One thing I like to is that, while I'm not sure that the design was explicit, using Photo Booth allows you to get something approaching the effect of putting you\
r head and shoulders audio/video along with the screen recording without having to edit the video after the fact in iMovie or the like. This gets you at least some of the Screen Flow functionality without the cost. To be honest, I'd call it a poor man's screen flow.
I also love, love, love the new font defaults in Terminal - only change I had to mak\
e was to bump up the font size by 1 point to 12. On my 1920x1200 screen 11 is just on the edge of trivial readability when I'm leaning back in my chair.
Also, while not ostensibly related to Snow Leopard, I use VirtualBox and came across these neat appliances.
Macports seems useful, but porticus isn't there yet. In particular, it doesn't seem to know what you've done from the command line and so without a shared data spac\
e between the GUI and the command line it's mostly useless. That and some of the GUI idioms are painful, like the select checkbox in the install dialog translating to "+ universal". Wow.
I used these instructions to get psycopg2 and postgres working. Postgres is no problem. The psycopg2 builds seemed to be so jacked up that without these patches, you'll have nothing but agony.
I also came acr\
oss homebrew and given the development of Mac package managers, it's working for me better than either fink or macports.
With all of this stuff running and my 1st generation ipod nano plugged in the most significant problem that I've seen is when the aslmanager\
goes berserk and starts writing GBs of logs to /var/log/asl. At the same time /var/log/kernel.log had grown to 9.3 GB over night, both CPU cores were pegged at 100%, mount_hfs and aslmanager were eating the CPU cores, and the CPU temp was at 180 degrees Fahrenheit. All \
of the various solutions that I googled didn't stop aslmanager or syslog from writing. The ipod was in a strange state - bricked in the "Do not disconnect" state. Finder and iTunes didn't see it though it showed up in /Volumes. Unplugging it had no apparent effect. And \
so now I will reboot. So much for hoping that Apple _actually_ had better QA than M$.
There are lots of repeated blocks in /var/log/kernel.log like:
Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s3: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x6 Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s3: write_journal_header: error writing the journal h\
eader! Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: disk1s3: media is not present. Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s3: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x6 Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s3: end\
_transaction: only wrote 0 of 40960 bytes to the journal! Sep 6 10:05:13 David-Watsons-MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: disk1s3: media is not present. Sep 6 10:05:14: --- last message repeated 9 times ---
It all seems to stem from the fact that after mountin\
g the ipod nano 1st gen, the machine unmounts it for no apparent reason and the device wound up bricked in the "do not disconnect" state and had to be reset.
My name is David Watson. I'm a creative person from a small
town in Western Pennsylvania called Fallston. I went to school
in the Beaver and New Brighton school districts before graduating from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
I met my wife, Wendy teaching
at Mars High School where I taught the drum line and she taught the
color guard. After graduation, we lived in Boston and Seattle before
returning to the Pittsburgh area, where I earn my living making software.
This site chronicles my ideas, photographs, music, and
technology. I hope you find something of value here. If you'd like to collaborate, please contact me on
Linked In or at the email address above. Thanks for visiting!