Category: Computing

I picked up a copy of the new Macintosh OS X, Leopard, and installed it last night on my PowerBook. It was rather more troublesome than I expected, and there are definitely a few rough edges. Here are the main points (including a strong warning).

• Obviously I prepared for this by doing a full backup. I wanted the backup to be bootable, in case my HD became unusable, so I carved out a partition on an external FireWire drive that was exactly the same size as my (80GB) internal disk. I used the Disk Utility “Restore” function to make an exact copy of my internal disk. One consequence of this was that the backup partition got the same name as the internal disk, “Macintosh HD”. This is probably significant – I had two mounted partitions with the same name.
• I started the upgrade by inserting the DVD and running the installer. What this does is to set the boot drive to the DVD, and then reboot. After rebooting, and accepting the license, the installation program asked me to pick the drive for the installation. It showed the partitions on my FireWire drive, but not my internal HD.
• What was going on? I checked with Disk Utility (available through the installer), but it couldn’t see any mountable partitions on my HD. I tried to eject the DVD, but I couldn’t. I rebooted off the (bootable) partition on the FireWire drive, but I still couldn’t see/mount my internal HD. I was, however, able to eject the DVD.
• Finally I decided to zap the PRAM in the PowerBook, by power-cycling and holding down Cmd-Opt-P-R. This allowed me to reboot the PowerBook from the internal HD. Check the disk… OK. Time to start over.
• I unplugged all external devices from my PowerBook, rebooted, inserted the DVD, ran the installer, allowed it to reboot, accepted the license, and was asked to pick from… no disks at all. My internal HD was still invisible. I ran Disk Utility, checked the logs, brought up a terminal, poked around, closed the terminal… and then, quite suddenly, my “Macintosh HD” appeared in the list. I have no idea what was going on. Was it checking the file system? If so, why was there no feedback… and what hadn’t it done the same with my FireWire drives?
• Relieved, I allowed the upgrade to run to completion. It took about 90 minutes.

So my advice: unplug all external devices before upgrading, and be prepared to wait for a while without feedback. (Others have reported similar issues on the Apple Support Forums.)
There have been a few other glitches. If you’re upgrading an existing Mail configuration, you should run Mail to allow it to update the mailstore, and then go through every preference option to make sure it’s configured correctly. Quite a few things have changed. I have been using the GPGMail plugin to manage gpg-encrypted email; the plugin no longer works, and Mail disables it.
I’m also having Wifi (Airport) problems. Every so often, I’ll see the icon grey out and I’ll lose the connection to my Airport Express; when I do, the system log contains messages of the form:

Oct 27 13:24:36 silk mDNSResponder[47]: Note: Frequent transitions for interface en1 (192.168.1.2); network traffic reduction measures in effect
Oct 27 13:24:36 silk mDNSResponder[47]: Note: Frequent transitions for interface en1 (FE80:0000:0000:0000:0211:24FF:FEA3:0C42); network traffic reduction measures in effect
Oct 27 13:24:36 silk mDNSResponder[47]: Note: Frequent transitions for interface en1 (192.168.1.2); network traffic reduction measures in effect
Oct 27 13:24:40 silk mDNSResponder[47]: Note: Frequent transitions for interface en1 (192.168.1.2); network traffic reduction measures in effect

This is probably a symptom of an Airport driver which is cycling the interface up and down inappropriately. I’ve also had /usr/lib/airportd crash with a SIGSEGV; I’m going to file the bug with Apple in just a minute. ((There’s an active thread over in the Apple forums on this topic. Looks like a major issue for a lot of people.))
One other oddity: the DVD includes a folder for “Optional Installs”. This includes the developer tools (as usual), but there is also an installer for a bunch of random stuff: obvious things, like various localization files, fonts, and printer drivers, but also various applications, some of which are part of the base OS. There’s no indication anywhere as to what you’re supposed to do with this stuff. ((OK, I take that back. Apparently you can choose not to install certain applications during the main installation, in which case you can add them later on. That makes some sort of sense – but I wouldn’t expect Safari to be on that list!)) I wound up installing everything except the unnecessary localizations and printer drivers.
Overall Leopard is very nice. The look and feel is much more consistent than before; Time Machine is gorgeous. Everything feels a bit more responsive, and Safari gives me far fewer “beachballs”. The controllable grid spacing in Finder is a great improvement. I haven’t tried Spaces yet, since I use multiple screens already.
More as I learn…
UPDATE: Apple has just released Login & Keychain Update 1.0 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which seems to fix the WiFi problem. Of course, in order to for you to be able to install it, your WiFi will have to stay up long enough for Software Update to download the fix…
UPDATE: Several comments here have useful links; in addition you might want to check out Eric’s blog.

From Boing Boing: Microsoft WGA servers down; all XP and Vista installs being marked as counterfeit

DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today.
The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in.

UPDATE: Apparently this was not a joke ((Well, not intentionally!)): MS has acknowledged (and fixed) the problem. Of course, this points up the deep problem with DRM schemes of all kinds. A simple screw-up by Microsoft can cripple millions of PCs. Now it is true, of course, that a screw-up by Apple – e.g. a bug in a Software Update – could cause millions of Macs to stop working. I think that the difference is that experience with Microsoft’s WGA program has made it clear that Microsoft regards the customer as “guilty until proven innocent”: there is code in Windows to deliberately cripple your PC. ((Speaking of which, it appears that Sony has once again released CDs with rootkit software. Will they never learn?))

From Xconomy: “Mitsubishi Electric Company of Japan has quietly disbanded the long-term research wing of its most famous international outpost, the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, MA” When I was working in Sun Labs in Burlington, we interacted with MERL all the time. One example: we organized joint programs for interns working at the various research labs in the Boston area. Both of our labs were working on software agent technology; theirs was called COLLAGEN. You can look it up on the web, but be warned: most of the links to merl.com seem to be dead. Sic transit…

Never forget:

The worst person to write documentation is the implementer, and the worst time to write documentation is after implementation. Doing so greatly increases the chance that interface, implementation, and documentation will all have problems.

Michi Henning: API Design Matters in ACM Queue

Tim drew my attention to the Web of Services for Enterprise Computing Workshop Report that was recently published by the W3C. As he put it, “I thought the pungent smells of failure on one side and optimism on the other mixed oddly, but still worth reading.”
Setting the scene:

The discussion at the workshop tended to revolve around two main streams of thought, which are not as well coordinated as they could or should be. One is that existing Web technologies can be adapted for enterprise use. In this stream of discussion it was proposed that additional standardization is not required, but this view did not garner widespread support.
While post-Web businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, and others have successfully adapted Web technologies for enterprise usage patterns, they appear to have done so using a lot of custom code and minimal off the shelf software or standards-based approaches to integration.

To which I guess the obvious replies are, “Yes”, “They would say that, wouldn’t they” and “Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this.” And reading the following passage is like getting a rheumatic twinge in an old sports injury:

At the Web Services workshop in 2001, the approach of having a stack of solutions was appealing and we decided to spin up lots of groups to build these specifications. We were to build a foundation of protocols that work within the context of the Web, with the goal of making lots of things talk to lots of other things. In addition, we wanted to create a system to support dynamic composability to meet problems as these arose and to build the corresponding tooling to make all this happen. After six years, we are half way through the spec stack, and interoperability has remained elusive.

Sigh…

There’s a thought-provoking piece over at DevChix entitled » Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. ((Hat tip to Tim.)) I strongly support these ideas, and I detest the hate-filled speech that passes for “robust open discussion” in many testosterone-fuelled online forums. And for those in denial about the level of misogyny, think again: ((My emphasis.))

When it was illegal for women to publish writing during various times in history throughout various countries, women published their work under male pseudonyms. Today, many tech women still use male pseudonyms when posting to lists or publishing tech articles. The reasons are to have their work read without bias, and to avoid misogynistic ‘hyper-scrutiny’ of their work. I have experimented with this myself using a male pseudonym to post articles, and being told that the articles are informative, useful, great. Six months later I republish the exact same article, using a different title and a female pseudonym, and suddenly the article is horrible, technically incorrect, useless. It’s a fascinating study. I would love to see some prominent male techs publish under female pseudonyms, and watch the responses.

Back in February of 2006 I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and posted a few photographs to my gallery. Time to make way for the professionals: Scoble is reporting that a beautiful coffee-table book of photographs from the museum has just been published: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers. What’s more, Scoble’s included links to several video clips: an interview with the book’s photographer, Mark Richards, and an earlier tour of the Museum with the legendary Gordon Bell (here and here). ((Note that I’ve had problems with the Gordon Bell clips on my Mac; I think Flip4Mac and VLC are getting in each other’s way, trying to handle this weird Windows Media stuff.))
Conveniently, I have a coffee table of exactly the right size….

The whitney music box. Plug in your headphones, and enjoy. I think my favourite variation is no.16.
[From Megan at Andrew Sullivan’s place.]

Here’s one for crypto-geeks, courtesy Boing Boing:

I just ordered a XXL t-shirt, and also the “Knuth is my homeboy” shirt How could I resist?

My friend Charlie just drew my attention to a wonderful website: Courses for the B.A. in Computer Science at Maharishi University of Management. Some examples of the Truly Wondrous courses that they offer:

Algorithms: The Dynamics of Intelligence — The Relationship of Structure and Dynamics as the Basis for Efficient and Practical Software Development (CS 435)
Compiler Construction: Connecting Name and Form — The Source of All Programming Languages in Grammar and Semantics (CS 440)
Computer Communication Networks: Connecting the Parts and Whole — Frictionless Flow of Information (CS 450)
Software Technologies: Advanced Principles of Natural Law in Software Systems (CS 455)

Beautiful stuff. Who knew that LALR(1) could have such cosmic significance? But the detailed course descriptions are even stranger. For example:

Nature’s Cosmic Computing: Harnessing the Organizing Power of Knowledge (CS 101)
This course investigates the most fundamental knowledge at the basis of all computing and modern computer technology, and how it is connected to principles of the Science of Creative Intelligence and Vedic Science. We will look at the structure of computing itself, of computer science, and of the wide range of computing applications that are primary to all areas of professions and life today. (4 units)

And if that isn’t enough, you can add a minor in World Peace. Cloud-cuckoo-land, through and through.