Pips ‘N’ Peelings

You have a kernel panic and the big clue you are looking for in the report back to Apple (or in the console log) is:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0×001694C6): “vm_map_unwire: entry is unwired”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.5.20/osfmk/vm/vm_map.c:4110

Trawlled the internet and came up with 2 possibilities:

1. VMWare Fusion. OK, VMWare does some nifty things with memory.
2. Faulty RAM modules

The pointer for me was that booting in ’safe mode’ caused the Mac to start normally and to be happy for days on end; time for my client to copy over onto another Mac. So I think “Aha, some third-party software is lousing up!”. And the fact that one of the most often used is Fusion seems to be too good to be true.

Which it was. The Mac didn’t stop panicing on start-up no matter what bit of software I removed, what cache I cleared, which plist I dumped.

So I reluctantly move on to RAM. I take out a module. No panics. Put it back, take out the other module, no panics again, So I really strain the Mac with big photoshop files and opening every app in the dock. All fine. So I put the RAM back and restart. No Panics. So all I needed to have done was re-fit the RAM. Sometimes the temptation to be too clever is too much.

In this case the RAM looked fine, but must have made poor contact. It has worked fine since. First thing I’ll do next time. Apologies if it doesn’t work for you. Perhaps my internet trawl will be useful to you:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7517857&#7517857

http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/302019-help-random-imac-aluminum-20-crashes-boot.html

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=92754

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8418392&#8418392

This post is mainly to remind me of the procedure to follow, in that a little searching on the web will find the answers. However, when I am in front of a client’s mac I would prefer to have the answers in one place.

1) Enable Time Machine’s latent ability to back-up to other kinds of disk. Copy this into an open Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and press return.

2) Mount the network disk* that you want to back-up onto. Make sure you can see an open Finder window with its contents.
3) In Time Machine preferences choose this disk as the target for the back-up.
4) As Time Machine tries and fails to create a back-up on this target disk, watch the open Finder window; a disk image file will appear there called something like: “MacName_0016cb8c8882.sparsbundle“. As it does so, select its name and copy it. Paste the name somewhere for later. (The “MacName” will be the name of the Mac, the alphanumeric will be the hardware address of the ethernet card used for networking).
5) Time Machine will eventually complain that the back-up failed. Ah well.
6) Find where you pasted the name of the sparsebundle file Time Machine tried to create. Below it paste this code:

DISK_IMAGE_NAME=”Mac_number.sparsebundle” DISK_SIZE=110000 hdiutil create -library SPUD -megabytes $DISK_SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “$DISK_IMAGE_NAME” “$DISK_IMAGE_NAME”

7) Replace Mac_number.sparsebundle with the actual sparsebundle name saved earlier. Retain the ” ” double quotes! Determine whether a disk size of 110000 MB is enough for a back-up disk and adjust the figure accordingly. Copy and paste the revised code into a new Terminal window and press return. This will create a disk image file with the same name as the one that Time Machine failed to create. It will at first be small but grows in size as files are backed-up. Copy this new file to the networked disk.

Time Machine will now be able to back-up. The first back-up will be huge and take days, so in the Time Machine preferences, select lots of folders to omit from the back-up in the Time Machine. Then the first sync will be small. The missed folders can be activated later.

*Network disk: If the disk is being shared from another Mac you may have to fiddle with its permissions until Time Machine will see it. For me, using a firewire disk shared from a Mac running Panther, giving everyone read-write access and un-checking ignore ownership on this volume did the trick:

Credit:
http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2008/02/time-machine-wireless-backup-without.html

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=427488

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137

So version 2.2 of the iPhone OS software is here. Should I update my iPhone? I probably won’t. Despite the fact that I love the iPhone just as much as I do my Mac, this update doesn’t move me.

My iPhone 2.1 is jailbroken, and that means I have a lot of extras on it that aren’t in 2.2. I am also disappointed with the feature list in 2.2. Here’s a few reasons why:

• Google Maps: Why can’t I view the maps I have saved in my Google account? I have a map showing where my clients are based that I can view on my desktop. I would love to have this on my iPhone in an iPhone-comfortable format.
   
• Google Street View doesn’t work for UK locations (not sure that I care).
   
• Mail enhancements: These are welcome, but why can’t I attach files? Why can’t I have a landscape keyboard like in Safari? (OK, I can if I use a separate app like WritingPad or EasyWriter, but that takes a bit of forward planning). Actually these ar rhetorical questions; if you know the technical reason why not, don’t worry I probably won’t be able to follow it.
   
• Downloadable podcasts: I’m sure this is very slick in iTunes. But I am already doing this via MobileCast (jailbroken iPhone required) though I admit it is a bit flakey. It is the one new feature that really interests me.
   
• Turn on/off auto-correction. Now I’m really irritated when the auto-correct feature corrects an abbreviation I’ve used or changes a word into something else without me noticing. But on other occasions it helps me type at speed. I don’t want to turn this feature off! I want it to improve. My other smartphone* learns my vocabulary and learns what I write and actually guesses right more often as a result. That’s the feature I want.
   

Features I would miss in a non-jailbroken iPhone that Apple should have included in this update:

• Appletalk based file sharing (”netatalk”). I have awakened my iPhone, and there it is in the Devices list in the Mac’s Finder. I can mount it and send files to it just like any other Mac on my network, providing I log on with the right user name and password. Actually, I can see why Apple haven’t done this, as I could log on as “root” and happily trash my iPhone. But the facility to log on as a user and drag and drop files to and from my iPhone is so useful. There are apps that do something similar in the App Store using the WebDAV protocol, but they seem to share their files from different places in the iPhone file structure. There are also those that share via MobileMe iDisk.
   
• Eye candy. I just like having any background I choose behind the app icons, and not just on the splash screen. I want to change my icons and use different themes. Normal behaviour on any other phone.
   
• Terminal. ‘Nuff said.

 Features not in 2.2 or jailbroken iPhone.

• Cut ‘n’ Paste. Aw. That is a major omission that has inconvenienced me regularly.
   
• Some way to automatically arrange the icons like you can in the Finder on the Mac OS. There is the jailbroken app Categories, but there is nothing automatic about it.
   
• Accessory: please can we have an Apple bluetooth keyboard?. Or even one that plugs in? could have a little slot in it for extra storage cards.

 
* Sony Ericsson P990i

The new MacBook Pro (15 inch screen) comes with both integrated graphics and a graphics card for extra graphics performance. I hope this is a really good feature. For ordinary work you can use the integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor so as not to punish your battery too much. Then when you do some heavy duty graphics work you would otherwise do on a desktop machine, you can switch to the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with up to 512MB of graphics RAM. That sounds really smart. 

However they have not released the 17 inch version of the MacBook Pro yet. I am itching to know whether they will bump up the processing power further. In any case it would be great to have this feature. I own an older one and it was certainly an inspired purchase. For graphics work you need that bigger screen.

In the UK you can get the 15 inch MacBook Pro here:

DABs | Misco | Apple

Personally, I’b buy straight from Apple because I love the ease with which I can configure the purchase, but other vendors may offer better deals with RAM, AppleCare etc. If anyone does get one (I am holding off for the 17 inch version, depending on cash-flow!) please let me know how the graphics switching feature pans out in real life.

Have just installed a plug-in from bravenewcode.com that makes wordpress blogs appear a little more neatly on the iPhone screen, and allows installation of a custom button for the iPhone home screen that links directly to the blog. It was a quick and easy install.

Thanks to Joshua at Macgasm for the tip.

You can write emails in landscape format using the wider keyboard with EasyWriter. For a limited time it is free on iTunes so go get!

Anything that makes it easier to write emails is a must.

My MacBook Pro has been running out of space for some time and I have put off the inevitable tidy. It was down to its last 20 GB where it always starts to get into trouble. (That seems like a lot to me as I had older macs that didn’t have that in total).

Anyway time to lose some stuff, so I searched (cmd-space) for the usual culprits: .dmg, .ps files for instance but thought there must be a better approach. Hurrah, http://www.omnigroup.com are doing a public beta of omnidisksweeper, so a quick download gets me a scientific approach to finding large files. And so it does; finding that my Applications folder has ballooned to 70GB - big for a 200 GB disk. The real culprit it turns out are files in my vmware folder; 8 GB files ending .vmdk that contain backed up data used by vmware Fusion to snap the system configuration! These must be deleted from Fusion itself once the guest system has suspended. My new consolidated Fusion disk has returned 29GB to me. So I can continue not to be tidy!