A game in 4k of code?

With today's multi-gigabyte creations, it's good to see that someone else is going in the opposite direction.

Check out Java Unlimited - Not only are these games done in 4k, or less, of code, but they're done in Java.

Some of them are remakes of old-skool games, like Ladybug, but some, like Flow, are pretty original (and addictive) creations.

More on Blade Runner

According to the Themes in Blade Runner article. Deckard is a replicant. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep it is explicitly stated that Deckard is a human, however there's always been a degree of ambiguity in the movie version.

Seagate gets perpendicular

Seagate is now using perpendicular recording technology and in their Barracuda range, now have in the 7200.10 range a 750GB hard drive. (warning PDF link)

The Tech Report have a review on the drive, which features some great specs, such as a 5 year warranty, 16MB Cache, fluid dynamic bearings and, of course, a massive storage capacity.

The drive has been around for a little while, so this is hardly breaking news, however I just wanted an excuse to link to the Get Perpendicular animation again =)

Comments opened up

OK, after enough of you had a whine to me about not being able to post as an unregistered user, I've opened up the comments to all sorts of abuse.

Yep, you now no longer need to register a blogger account to comment, it's open slather. Bring it on.

(something tells me I'm going to regret this!) =)

Booting your Intel Mac to an APM-formatted drive

Here's a very handy article that explains how to boot an Intel-based Mac off an APM formatted drive.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, it's a very useful troubleshooting tool in Macintosh-land that you can boot a Mac off an external FireWire hard drive. This means that if the Mac you're looking at on your desk has a FireWire port, I can boot it off the copy of 10.4 on my external hard drive and run any and all necessary diagnostic and repair utilities to get it back up and running. I made good use of this recently when the HDD in my PowerBook crapped itself and I ran for a few days booting off a FireWire drive until the new hard drive arrived.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Once the new-fangled Intel-based Macs arrived, along with their new firmware, the Extensible Firmware Interface (aka EFI) came a new disk partition format. Not a filesystem format, but a new method of laying out the partition table at the start of the disk.

Apple never updated the firmware in PowerPC-based Macs to recognise the new GUID Partition Table (GPT) for booting off the new partition format, and the OS X installer will not let you install OS X on an Intel-based Mac if it's using an Apple Partition Map (APM). You can't have two partition table types on the one disk, so this initially looks like a bit of a problem.

Enter M. Christopher Stevens, at Other World Computing who, with the assistance of a bit too much cough syrup, has found a way around it.

The short of it is that you get a FireWire hard drive and make two partitions. Then, install a system on a PPC machine, and then clone over an existing system from an Intel machine onto the second partition. Finally, bless the system on the Intel side, just to be sure and you should be right to go.

If you want to take it one step further, it may also be possible to create a single, universal partition that will boot either system, by following the steps in this Mac OS X Hints Article.

Let me know if you get it working =)

Fractal Artwork

I've been having a bit of a browse around over on deviantART recently (great site, check out the huge variety of artwork on it) and noticed some nice artwork done with fractals. It seems that there's a Windows program, called Apophysis that generates flame type fractals. I haven't done any serious fractaling around since using Fractint (or is this the official site over here at fractint.org?) on DOS based systems, which is now up to version 20.

It is possible to create some really nice, organic looking artwork with Apophysis, that's quite different to the more "traditional" psychedelic fractals that are commonly seen.

There's also a dude who's done what is quite possibly the deepest zooming animation into the Mandlebrot set ever done - it zooms in to a factor of 1x10E89 and took 8 months to render using 2 and then 3 computers. According to the artist, at a zoom factor of around 1x10E26, the original Mandlebrot set would be expanded to the size of the known universe, so this animation is a pretty amazing achievement, zooming in that far.

Wikipedia also has some more info on Apophysis and Fractint if you're interested.

New input methods

Much better than making your PowerBook or MacBook use the Sudden Motion Sensor to make light sabre sounds, how about smacking the side of the screen to change virtual desktops? (You gotta watch the video of this, it's pretty cool!)

No Way

How fast and furious can a 2.0L, Naturally Aspirated vehicle with an auto transmission really be? $80,000 US Dollars worth? I doubt it!

Filesystem Snapshots on Mac OS X

There, that got your attention, didn't it?

Unfortunately we're still to see a real filesystem snapshot happening on Mac OS X. Using a real filesystem, such as Solaris' ZFS, you have the ability create a snapshot of how a filesystem looked at a particular point in time, without having to make a copy of that whole filesystem. You can then go back to the snapshot and access it as if there had been no changes made. NTFS has a similar capability, but at the file level, called Volume Shadow Copy, which is also very handy. When Volume Shadow Copies are set up on a server, a user can right-click on a file, and view previous versions of it - or even undelete files and folders, meaning that there is less and less need to retrieve files from backup tape for simple problems like that.

Now, there was recently an article at AFP548 that detailed a method they used to hack snapshots into Mac OS X, but it's pretty fragile, and even they admit it's not really up for deploying in a production environment. While there are plenty of rumours about Apple looking at ZFS for Mac OS X, I'm not holding my breath, as it all sounds the same as the rumours a few years back about Apple looking at NTFS as the native filesystem for Mac OS X.

Anyway, there's another way to achieve similar functionality, and that's using rsync to make a duplicate of a filesystem, and to use hardlinks to do so.

Enter rsnapshot - "a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems."

The version of rsync included with OS X 10.4 is apparently resource fork aware, as mentioned in it's manpage with the -E or --extended-attributes options to copy extended attributes, resource forks.

There is also another port of rsync, called rsyncX that provides a GUI for rsync, so that you can set up in an easier fashion.

Once you've got it all set up, what you then can do is make a complete copy of your filesystem to an external drive. Then you can tell rsync to make another copy, but to look at what's already there, and if a file is identical to one that's about to be copied, then rsync will make a hardlink to the existing file, taking up very little space on the target disk. This allows you do make incremental backups, that each look and behave like a full backup, but without taking up anywhere near as much disk space, as the vast majority of the files will be backed up with hardlinks and only files that have changed will be copied in their entirety.

Also, due to the way that hardlinks work, you can delete old backups, and the filesystem keeps track of how many hardlinks each file has, and will only delete the file if there are no more hardlinks pointing to it. What this means is that if you do delete an old backup, you're just deleting the files that had changed for that backup, and the hardlinks to the rest of the files, leaving the contents of the files still on disk if they are being used by other hardlinks.

Now, it is worth taking into account that all backup solutions on Mac OS X, as tested by plasticsfuture, do have particular problems that need to be taken into account, and rsync at this moment in time, doesn't copy some of the metadata associated with files - the most important one it misses is ACL (Access Control List) information, however for a copy of a personal workstation, I believe that rsync will copy enough metadata to be useful to me.

A commercial alternative, which is a native Mac OS X Cocoa application, is SuperDuper! and this seems to get the double-thumbs-up rating wherever it's reviewed. It also appears to have the ability to do do a snapshot-style backup, however it is proprietary and closed source (which doesn't, in my books, automatically make it evil). The free version will do simple backups, but if you want the extended functionality, you need to pay for it. Fair enough too...

BMW Films

If you don't already know about the BMW Films (also known as The Hire) then you owe it to yourself to check them out. An excellent series of short films, with a decent budget, famous directors and actors, and Clive Owen as The Driver in each one. Unfortunately, they're not available for viewing or download from BMW's site any more, however with the popularity of YouTube the films are viewable once more. Have a look through the search results and check them out.

Two of my favourites are Beat The Devil and Star. I've got the rest of them on DVD somewhere - I must dig it out again and watch them.

They were made in 2001/2002 and done as a stealth marketing promo by BMW. The films were quite a bit more popular than BMW first envisaged, and were all over the internet for quite a while. a DVD was made, but was very hard to get your hands on.

Pirelli have recently gone in the same direction, with The Call - Once again, another good short film, but personally, I do prefer the BMW films for their variety, the storylines they weave in less than 10 minutes, and of course seeing expensive BMWs being driven the way they should be =)

I read somewhere that the jump in Star was one of the first shots for the movie and once the M3 went up in the air, and came back down, it didn't work any more. Nice start to the filming!

All's quiet on the western front...

Not much going on at the moment that's worth writing up about.

Got the Golf working, and so far there haven't been any problems with the coilpack repair. I'll keep an eye out for a MkIV coilpack on eBay, as I'm sure it's going to fail sooner or later, but for the time being, it's all good.

Got the Electroluminescent panels working with some mini 12V inverters off eBay - I've now got a soft glow coming from under the bed, so Nadia doesn't walk into the legs of the bed and wake me up, cursing at the top of her lungs ;-)



I've been playing with smartd from the smartmontools package, and while I can't get launchd to start it automatically, as it immediately forks and quits it's parent process (which launchd really doesn't like) I've got an AppleScript, from Mac OS X Hints (with thanks to geppo1982):

Open ScriptEditor and paste the following code:

set mailAddress to "youremailaddress"

set mainDisk to do shell script "mount | grep \" on / \" | cut -d \" \" -f 1"

do shell script "echo " & mainDisk & " -n standby -T permissive -s L/../../7/09 -H -l selftest -l error -f -m " & mailAddress & " | /usr/local/bin/smartd -c - -i 3600"


It appears that geppo1982 has been busy, and created an OS X Installer that installs smartmontools and configures launchd to launch it automatically, plus it will send you a test email when it's first launched. I found with the test email, the first time I ran it, it didn't work, but then the second and subsequent times it did. YMMV.

HOWTO: VR6 Coilpack Repair - Step-by-step

The coilpack recently failed on my 1996 Golf VR6, and I just couldn't bring myself to pay AUD$500 for a brand-new one, not after just having forked out over $300 for a new auxiliary coolant pump, so I did what any self-respecting tinkerer would do and hacked one together from broken parts =)

Here's a photo of the original one - you can see that the terminal has broken right off it, such that I can't even see any metal contacts inside that would have connected with the terminal. It seems that the inside of the coilpack is filled with expanding foam, and when the terminal broke off, the expanding foam came out and covered everything. The terminal was so loose that simply unplugging the ignition lead for cylinder #1 was enough for the whole terminal to break off!



Here are the old and new (second-hand) coilpacks side-by-side. I got the new one for $100 as it had one boot broken off. Strangely, it was also the terminal for cylinder #1 that had failed on this one - anyone else out there with a broken coilpack, let me know if it was also cylinder #1 that failed for you.

Having the broken terminal from my original coilpack, I was easily able to chip off the black epoxy leaving just the plastic boot, that I then epoxied onto the new coilpack.




You can see in picture #4 the broken boot...




Here is a picture of the broken coil area on my original coilpack. There is no visible metal, I can't see any electrical connector. I suppose the expanding foam it's filled with is so that if (when) it fails, it fails safe and covers the high-voltage areas with an insulating foam.




Here's how to take the pack apart, and put it all back together, hopefully working, and hopefully in better condition than when it was removed.
First, remove the plastic cover/cable guide on the top - it should just unclip:




Next, undo two screws on the back of the coilpack



Then, there are four locknuts that need to be undone. I can't remember the size, however they are metric, not imperial sizes. Maybe 6mm?



After undoing these nuts, it all comes apart quite easily



Here's the control module, removed from the rest of the unit:




Here's the rear of the coils:



Here it is, all in pieces, ready to be washed and reconditioned:



Before applying the JB-Weld, I washed the whole thing in hpt, soapy water, and then dried it thoroughly. Next, I wiped down the area around where the boot glues on with acetone, to remove any traces of contamination:



Here's the high-temperature silicone I used - Loctite blue:



I mixed up a batch of JB-Weld and glued the boot back on over the terminal. Even without the epoxy, it was a snug fit, and with the epoxy on there it went together very well and seemed to make a good seal:



I did some research on JB-Weld, having been told it was the stuff to use, but I wasn't too sure of the availability here in Australia. I saw an aussie place selling it online, but for something like $27 with $8 postage. I then found it in, of all places, K-Mart, for $16.95. I checked out the
FAQ on their website as I was worried that with metal particles in the epoxy, it might conduct electricity, but
apparently it's an insulator:



I then applied gentle clamping pressure for a few hours while the epoxy hardened:



Here's a closeup of the busted coil. The part has simply failed, there's nothing putting any pressure on this part in the engine bay, the ignition leads aren't under any tension, there's nothing banging into it, it just simply broke off:



After the first batch of epoxy dried overnight, I then covered all the seams where the black shiny potting compound joined onto the plastic - all around the boots and all around the edge:



Here it is, from another angle:



Then, I covered the sides with a thin layer of epoxy as there were some hairline cracks already developing (I've really got no idea how old this coilpack is) and I didn't want them to get any worse. After this had cured for a few hours, I next covered the whole thing with a thin layer of silicone - reasoning that even if the epoxy cracks slightly, the silicone should be flexible enough to keep it sealed and hopefully help it last longer. I didn't want to put too thick a layer on, as I don't want to provide any additional thermal insulation - I don't want to keep heat in the coilpack, as it is bolted quite literally right onto the side of the engine



Here's a closeup with the silicone showing a pale blue colour, over the grey of the epoxy. I won't be winning any prizes for a neat, smooth finish, but as long as it works...



Here it goes - putting it all back on. I didn't take any photos of taking it off (which was pretty easy) however if you want directions, skip to the end and work backwards, it's an identical process, just in reverse:



Tighten up four hex-head bolts - 5mm from memory:



Next, route the control cable through the channel, clip it in and plug it into the coilpack:



When replacing the plastic cover, it will be easier if you undo this wiring loom. It's pretty easy, just unscrew the connector and it easily unplugs:



Put the plastic cover back on. I was able to use a 6mm allen key to do up the bolts on it:



Don't forget this third screw at the rear - also a 6mm allen key sorted me out here:



Next up, replace the ignition leads. All the leads are cut to be just the right length, so is's pretty easy to figure out which one goes where. If you get stuck, the cylinder numbers are marked on the coilpack (hope you can see it through the silicone!) and on my leads at least, the numbers are marked near the end. These aren't OEM leads, I did have to get new ones a while back. I don't think the OEM ones are marked, but they're also all the right lengths, so will easily plug into where they're meant to go.



Here it is, all done and as good as new!



Lastly, to test it I'm running the engine and liberally wetting the area with a trigger bottle. No sparking or arcing, and no rough idle - the engine purrs like a kitten now!

Electroluminescent Panels

Thanks to a dude on eBay, I picked up four little DC->AC inverters
that run off 12VDC and supply 50-odd volts, AC, at a pretty high
frequency. One of the inverters was DOA, but at the price I can't be
bothered chasing it up ($2 each or something like that) and I've got
the panels running quite happily off a 12V wall brick.
These EL panels are pretty good, they're a pinkish colour when
they're off, and they glow a bluish-white when they're on.
I'll post pix once I've pimped my bedroom with them =)

JB Weld Availability

I really didn't think I'd have too much luck getting JB Weld in Australia, let alone find it easily. K-Mart came through with the goods in their Hardware section ($16.95) - near all the other adhesives like Araldite and super glue...

I didn't want to have to use Araldite for the coil-pack repair as I'm unsure of it's performance at higher temperatures. I'm sure they have a product that functions at high temperatures, but from what I've read, the JB Weld is tried and tested, so I went with what works.

I've taken photos as I've worked on the coilpack, so they'll all be posted once the little German Princess is up and running again =)

SirAdmin - a GUI replacement for cyradmin

Once again, AFP548 have posted a link to another very useful sysadmin utility for Mac OS X - SirAdmin

From the linked page:

 

"SirAdmin is essentially a GUI replacement for cyradm, in that it allows you to locally or remotely administer your Cyrus IMAP server. I've tested it against the Cyrus server from Mac OS X Server 10.3 and 10.4, as well as Cyrus running on RedHat."

IBM Researchers Set World Record in Magnetic Tape Data Density

The data storage wizards over at IBM have managed to cram a phenomenal amount of data onto magnetic tape.

Squeezing more than 15 times the amount of data that a current-day LTO3 tape stores, they're on track to have an LTO sized cartridge that can hold 8 Terabytes.

That is more than one gigabit per square centimetre (6.67 billion bits per square inch). Unfortunately we're going to have to wait around five years to see this come to fruition, by which time the average desktop harddrive will hold 4-6 squigabytes, and then we'll still be complaining about how little tapes actually hold when we're designing our backup schedules.

Read more at the IBM Press Release

MacBook Pro Speed Bump

And in other news today, possibly overshadowed by the release of the MacBook, the MacBook Pro has had a quick speed-bump. There's no 1.83GHz any more, the 2GHz is the entry level and the faster one is 2.16GHz.

I still can't believe that the Black MacBook commands a $200 premium over the White one, even when the White one is specced up to the same level with the 80GB HDD, but that's another story altogether.

DiskWarrior rocks my world!

No, really!

Once again, DiskWarrior comes through with the goods. Those talented people over at Alsoft produce, IMHO, the finest disk repair utility on the Macintosh platform. This is also one fantastic utility that has survived the transition from being an outstanding product on Classic Mac OS, to being every bit as good under Mac OS X.

After trying to recover just the partition with my data on it (off the dying hard drive) via a bit of dd, it just didn't work, so I then tried dd'ing the entire disk over, partition map and all.

Once this had completed, many hours later, the disk still couldn't be mounted - and fsck (well, actually, fsck_hfs) didn't want to know about it.

Enter DiskWarrior to the rescue. It's not the fastest, but that's totally irrelevant - what matters is that the 45-odd GB of music, and 7 or so GB of photos I've faithfully gathered over the years are now safe.

Time to start thinking about backup, I suppose =)

It's very difficult to get large quantities of personal data backed up. Yep, external hard drives are expensive, but the reason I want to back up my data is so it's not sitting on a hard drive in the first place. Hard drives fail. Backing up 75 or so GB to DVD-R isn't my idea of a fun afternoon's activity. 20 or so DVD-Rs should just about cover it. Hrm. Tape is simply too expensive for a home user, even low-end stuff like AIT Turbo, or even VXA. I'm also yet to see a LTO-3 drive with a FireWire interface as well =)

Looks like I'm going to have to get some cash together and build myself some form of RAID. Four 250GB RAID spec drives (rated for operation 24x7 and with a 5 year warranty) will set me back around $200 each, then all I need is a case with a RAID 5 controller and a FireWire interface. Either that, or get a RAID controller and chuck it all in Nadia's PC.

Holy Black Laptops, Batman!

Well, the rumour sites were (eventually) correct =)

Apple has just released the MacBook

Not only do you get a freakin' 2GHz Core Duo CPU and the same 667MHz Frontside Bus that you get in the MacBook Pro, but you get a luscious 13.3" widescreen display running at 1280x800. That's only 80 pixels narrower and a mere 54 pixels shorter than the display in my 15" PowerBook G4.

Oh, and you can get them in all the colours of the iPod. Yep, Black and White.

You get all the other goodies that would be expected, like Front Row and an IR Remote, built-in Wireless (Airport and Bluetooth), MagSafe Power Adapter, DVI, VGA and S-Video outputs, built-in iSight and a tough polycarbonate case.
Just have a look at this thing!

Progress Indicator while using dd

While using dd to duplicate large amounts of data, it is often nice to get some kind of progress information. If you're dd'ing to a file, then it's easy to open another terminal window and check the size of the target file on a regular basis, but if you're dd'ing to a device, then it gets a little trickier.

What I've resorted to doing is starting the dd process in one terminal window, and then open up another one. In this second one, I type:
Terminal #1

dd if=/dev/disk3 of=/dev/disk0 bs=1m conv=noerror,sync

Terminal #2

while true; do killall -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Nice and easy, and it will cause the dd process to spit out it's status every 10 seconds (change the value in sleep as required

The output from dd will be the normal output it writes, when it finishes, like:

43957+0 records in
43957+0 records out
46092255232 bytes transferred in 9797.445767 secs (4704518 bytes/sec)


Tips n Tricks for Mac OS X

As my hard drive has failed, I was able to eventually read the whole thing with dd, but I'm not too sure what I'm not going to do with that image unless I can get an 80GB drive to dd it back onto.
I'm now going to be doing a lot of things to get a clean install of OS X up and usable, and as I come across handy hints, I'll be posting them.



First cab off the rank (after actually installing OS X and applying all Software Updates) is disabling the Dashboard.
This is pretty easy to do, and easy to undo as well. It saves me from accidentally activating the dashboard and then having all the widgets unnecessarily use up valuable RAM.
To disable dashboard:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

To undo it, simply type:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock

Easy!

Damn, what a weekend

Well, first I find out that the Coil Pack in the Golf is on the way out - which is no huge surprise, as it appears to be a failure-prone part and I've got over 100,000km on it. I'm going to try and fix it up with some high-temperature silicone sealant and see if I can get a few thousand more km out of it. Otherwise, it's not cheap to replace, and the replacement part is built to the same standard as the original one, so it will eventually fail again.

There are a couple of options for replacement. There's the OEM with plug-n-play goodness, and a price tag to match - probably around $400+

The other option is to go the DIY. With a ~$100 Ford coil pack, and crimp some different plugs on the end of the ignition leads. Even if I have to get one brand new from the States, rather than getting one off eBay it will set me back less than half the price of the OEM one.



Now, to make matters worse, my hard drive has gone the way of the coil pack. The SMART status on it finally said it was going to fail - all of about 5 minutes before I could no longer mount the disk on the desktop. Yeah, thanks for the warning!

Now, I'm having to resort to something along these lines:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s3 | gzip > harddrive-image.gz

340MB (of 80-odd GB) and it's only gotten a bit stuck once at around the 250MB mark. Unfortunately Disk Utility is scared off too easily by I/O errors, and aborts creating an image, whereas good ol' dd should sort me out. Wish me luck.

Gotta get a new hard drive

It might be time for me to spring for one of those shiny, new 7200RPM drives I've been eyeing off for a little while now. Plus, I'm starting to struggle with 80GB, it's not quite enough!

After leaving the lappie off overnight, and the drive's cooled down to 15 degrees (as opposed to the 44 degrees it was running at last night) I've been able to successfully copy my FileVault image off the drive with zero problems. After trying last night, the SMART error log now contains 46 entries - all seemingly general I/O errors - DMA Read and Writes, Flushing the Cache and reading the SMART status.
Whatever is up with the drive, it doesn't seem to be happy, and while it's not coming up with bad sectors, the SMART logs have reported that there have been sectors remapped, and these general I/O errors are a bit of a concern as well.
It is strange that Disk Utility still thinks it's all OK. Even since last night, there were 291 reallocated events counted in the log, and this morning there are now 313. There were 695 reallocated sectors, now it's at 745 - so this is hard evidence (to me at least) that the SMART status reported in Disk Utility is not to be trusted.

According to smartctl, a Reallocated Event is related to Old Age, whereas an actual Reallocated Sector is a Prefail indicator, so why isn't Disk Utility picking this up?
Time to log something at the Apple Bug Reporter.

SMART monitoring on Mac OS X

Unfortunately, I've recently had reason to want to check the SMART status of my PowerBook's internal disk.

Apple's Disk Utility will tell you a simple pass/fail summary of the SMART status of the disk, but it won't go into any detail, show you logs, or details of particular errors. What's more, I believe that it only looks at certain classes of errors to determing the Verified of Failing status, and so if the drive is experiencing errors, such as it's firmware silently remapping sectors, it's still shown as A-OK.

I decided to go hunting for some more useful utilities, and firstly discovered SMARTReporter which displays an icon in the menu bar showing you a visual status of the disk. This utility, however, appears to use the same criteria as Disk Utility for determining as simple pass/fail status, so in this particular case isn't that useful to me. It is handy in a more general sense as it can monitor multiple disks, and upon a SMART failure it can do any combination of: pop up an alert dialog, execute another program or send emails to multiple addresses.

So, digging a bit deeper, I then found the smartmontools which consists of smartctl and smartd that together will report on a whole lot of low-level SMART information, including showing the drive's error log, and other useful information.

It shows me that although Disk Utility et al think that my disk is OK, it's actually logged 2732 errors over it's lifetime and also reports on thresholds the drive is recording, as shown below:

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 096 096 050 Pre-fail Always - 0
2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 100 100 001 Pre-fail Always - 1356
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 2361
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 695
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 089 089 000 Old_age Always - 4727
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 147 100 030 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 2268
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 9
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 055 055 000 Old_age Always - 456326
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 44 (Lifetime Min/Max 11/55)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 291
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 14
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
220 Disk_Shift 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8343
222 Loaded_Hours 0x0032 094 094 000 Old_age Always - 2636
223 Load_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
224 Load_Friction 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
226 Load-in_Time 0x0026 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 222
240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0001 100 100 001 Pre-fail Offline - 0

It also shows the most recent five errors, one of which looks like:

Error 32 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 4727 hours (196 days + 23 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
10 51 f0 b8 bd 81 46 Error: IDNF 240 sectors at LBA = 0x0681bdb8 = 109166008

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
25 00 f8 b0 bb 81 40 00 09:40:17.577 READ DMA EXT
35 00 50 e3 27 04 40 00 09:40:17.577 WRITE DMA EXT
35 00 08 b8 c5 8f 40 00 09:40:16.283 WRITE DMA EXT
35 00 08 98 0d 90 40 00 09:40:16.283 WRITE DMA EXT
25 00 08 80 16 8a 40 00 09:40:14.891 READ DMA EXT


So, even though my hard drive is actually logging read/write errors, Disk Utility thinks it's all peachy. The drive has been playing up a little bit this arvo - running OS X just all of a sudden got very s-l-o-w. CPU usage was minimal, there weren't hundreds of threads in the run queue, VM usage was acceptable, even disk I/Os were reporting low numbers, but anything that was disk-related (so just about everything) was crawling along. Switching tasks was quick, scrolling through windows was fine, but even at the terminal, whenever you entered a command, there was a big pause before it ran, and then afterwards again as it had to reload the shell, another huge pause.

I'm now trying to copy my home folder off the drive (as a 5GB FileVault sparse image) and then I will attempt recovery of other files, but it seems that the drive is on it's way out.

Once I've got my FileVault image off, I'm going to shut the PowerBook down for the night, and give it a break, and then try and make a diskimage of the whole drive tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

xBack

Yeah, I know you can do this by playing around in the terminal, but as a polished little utility, xBack is pretty good. All it does is enable you to run a Mac OS X Screensaver as your desktop picture. It's quite relaxing to have, say, the beach slideshow with all the tropical beaches and oceans smoothly doing the Ken Burns thing all behind your desktop icons.

Pangea Software: Enigmo 2

I played the first version of this game, in 2D, and it was great fun. Here's Enigmo 2, which although they say it's 3D, it appears that all the action is still 2D. After playing the original Enigmo for too many hours in a row, that night as I was drifting off to sleep, all I could see was drops of water and fire gracefully bouncing all over the place. Highly addictive.

RAID Monitor

Spotted via AFP548 today, here's a great little utility called RAID Monitor from Maza Digital that monitors a RAID set under OS X and will tell you, via email, the status of your RAID volumes. It runs in the background and checks the RAID set on a user-defined schedule and then will email a customisable list of addresses a status report either once every 24 hours saying that everything's A-OK, or upon discovering an error, it will email you immediately.

Sad state of affairs in American voting

It's quite tragic when in the land of the free they monitor and control Las Vegas slot machines a hell of a lore more closely than the electronic voting machines used for elections. Money talks.

Helios UB on Sun CoolThreads servers vs AMD64

I'm a few days behind on this, but Helios are reporting on the performance of a Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server and a Sun Fire X4200 x64 server and it seems that while the T2000 performs very well as a general file and print server, having it perform complex image manipulations and transformations, as done by the Helios ImageServer, really brings it to it's knees. Such image processing tasks are heavy on both fixed-point and floating-point operations, tasks for which Sun have stated that the CoolThreads architecture is not designed for, and it shows with a reported 8x performance margin for the x64 machine over the UltraSPARC T1

The good news to come out of this is that Helios has been ported to Solaris x86, which means that the Helios UB suite of PDF workflow applications can be run on cost-effective server hardware, with the benefits of Solaris as the underlying OS, rather than having to use Linux.

Read more about it in the Helios Press Release.

Quicksilver

I've blogged about Quicksilver before, but it's such a fantastic piece of software that I feel it needs another mention.

It's become so ingrained into the way I use my Mac, and it's so much faster to get around OS X with it, that I feel lost on a Mac without it. On the flip side, it's so unobtrusive that if anyone else needs to use my Mac, it doesn't get in the way at all.

I've only scratched the surface when it comes to utilising the vast feature set of this useful utility, but even so, these few core features that I do use, get used on a very regular basis and make life a whole heap easier.

There's an overview of what Quicksilver does, and some excellent tutorials up on the blacktree website.

I've got Quicksilver bound to a single press of the Command key, now this doesn't interfere with any keyboard shortcuts, and if I ever need a Cmd on it's own, I hold down the key. Quicksilver ignores it as well - it will only respond to a quick tap on the Cmd key. If I do this by mistake, then another tap and away it goes.

For the features I use the most, number one would be simply application launching.

Hit the hotkey, start typing in the application name, or parts of it - for instance, I can type "mw" for Microsoft Word - and if the app you want isn't at the top of the list, the more you use it, the higher in the list it will rise, until it becomes the default.

I also use it for contact information - it can look in Address Book and pull out details, and then (this is something that wows people) it can display the relevant information, such as a phone number, as large type on my screen, in a translucent bezel. It can also look into the keychain, and bring up passwords for me, ready to paste in websites or applications.

Apple - Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads

Well, Apple sure aren't holding back with the whole PC/Mac thing in their latest round of TV Ads.

Portraying the Mac as the cool, hip dude and the PC as an overweight guy in a suit, who has a thing for sneezing and pausing whatever he's doing.

And, if you've got a faster computer than I do, you can watch them in HD quality =)

Mac OS X Server 10.4.6: Changes in server hostname discovery

Brought to my attention via the excellent blog at AFP548.com, Apple have made some changes with the way that OS X Server determines it's hostname under OS X Server 10.4.6. Read all about it in the Apple Knowledge Base article.

Basically, it makes the discovery of a hostname more robust, and has tastier log reporting, that will tell you things like the forward and reverse DNS entries don't match, which is known to cause all sorts of problems on an OS X Server.

iMacs now with Extended Desktops

According to Apple, the new iMacs (for the first time ever) support extended desktops (or display spanning) across two monitors, rather than the display mirroring that they used to support. Granted, there have in the past been methods to do this, either by running some software, or making changes in OpenFirmware manually, but this has all been a bit of a hack and, of course, 100% unsupported by Apple.

To quote Apple:

"For the first time ever, iMac lets you use a second display in extended desktop mode, in addition to simply mirroring the first. The mini-DVI port lets you connect to DVI displays, VGA monitors and projectors, and S-Video and Composite connectors, with the appropriate adapter (sold separately). iMac graphics supports up to 23-inch Apple Cinema Display."

Excellent, it seems that the engineering department won out over the marketing department in this case, and it's the first time a consumer-level "i" product has had the ability to do this.

How to find your DHCP Server Address under Mac OS X


ipconfig getpacket en0 | grep server_identifier

or

ipconfig getoption en0 server_identifier

You can also do more with ipconfig, things like determine the router
address for an interface:

ipconfig getoption en0 router

this is sure easier than what I used to do:

netstat -nr | grep default | awk '{print $2}';

this method, however, returns the system-wide default router whereas the ipconfig method returns the router for an individual interface.

replace en0 for en1 if using AirPort...

easy!

More on EL Panels

Reading over the EL Wire FAQ, and I'd assume the basic principals would apply to panels as well, they've got some useful technical information:

Technical Information

Electroluminescent Wire (aka EL wire, rope, cable, string, fiber, etc. ) consists of a concentric series of layers, each performing a different function. In the center is a solid copper conductor. The copper conductor is coated with an electroluminescent phosphor. Two very fine wires are wrapped around the phosphor. A clear or colored plastic sheath comes next, and a second plastic sheath surrounds the first.

The functions of each of these layers are as follows: The center copper conductor and the two fine wires together supply power. The copper conductor also provides a small amount of mechanical rigidity, and is used as a substrate upon which to deposit the phosphor. The phosphor is the key element of el wire; it emits light when subjected to an AC field. The inner plastic sheath protects the phosphor and in some cases is used to filter the light produced by the phosphor, emphasizing certain colors. The outer plastic sheath provides further protection. Many phosphors are highly sensitive to moisture; the two sheaths together provide good protection against infiltration.

EL neon wire can be driven by any AC source. Power is applied between the inner conductor and the two outer wires (which are tied together). This applies an AC field across the phosphor, causing it to glow. A high voltage in the range of 100V is required to make the wire glow brightly. It can be produced from an inverter, from the mains (e.g. a wall outlet), from an audio amplifier, from a signal generator, etc. If the voltage is not high enough (as in the case of a medium power audio amplifier), it can be stepped up with a transformer. When the wire is connected to a high current source like the AC mains, a fuse and/or current limiting resistor is used for safety due to the danger of a short circuit.

From other sources, it seems that panels can handle higher voltages, and I probably want to be aiming at around 500 - 600Hz. If I underdrive the panel with a lower voltage and/or frequency, that should extend the life of the panel as well.

Electroluminescent Panels

I bought a batch of Electroluminescent Panels off eBay recently. I
only wanted one or two, but they came in a lot of 10, so now I've got
ten of the suckers!
They're a faint pink-coloured panel that emits a blue/white light.
They didn't come with inverters, so now I need to track one down. Has
anyone out there had experience with running an inverter for EL
panels? They can supposedly run on higher voltages (110, possibly
more) but I'm told they're brighter with 9 or 12 volts and personally
I'm a lot more comfortable playing with 12V than 110 or 240. I will
need to step down mains voltage to 9-12V, and bump up the frequency
form 50Hz to something a bit higher. I think they will run at 50Hz,
but will be brighter at higher frequencies - 1kHz would be what I'm
aiming for at first...

It's Alive!

Don't ask me how, but my AirPort Express is back from the dead. I've now got AirTunes happening in the lounge room, where it has been sorely missed all week, meaning I can stream some fantastic radio stations through iTunes.

If you want some recommendations, point your favourite music player at OEM Radio (listen to the OEM Radio stream - 128kbs)

Some other favourites are the Dub Beautiful Collective (tune in to the stream) along with most of the streams broadcast from Soma FM (Groove Salad and Beat Blender being two great streams) and the dublab with their dubstream.

Now, some of the music listed above can be habit forming, so for the sake of your internet bandwidth bills, please listen responsibly. =) 

Unprotecting Password Protected PDF Documents

I recently had to extract an image from a PDF, but the file was
password protected - it didn't allow editing or even copying and
pasting of text.
There are items of software that I've seen that can remove such
passwords, but either they're time-consuming to run, they don't work,
or they're PC only...
Using InDesign and Illustrator, I've been able to convert a PDF to a
fully editable version, with little trouble. This method will work on
multi-page PDFs, however will be a bit tedious.

Here are the steps:

1. Create a new, blank document in InDesign
2. Place the PDF (Cmd+D) in the document, and scale if necessary
3. Export (Cmd+E) the document, as a PDF
4. Open the resulting PDF in Illustrator, or your favourite PDF
editing application.

Easy!

A Scanner Darkly

I've been keeping an eye out and watching the trailers for A Scanner Darkly which is (yet another) movie based on a Philip K Dick story.

I've long been a fan of PKD's work, and think that he's quite an under-appreciated author. He's written a vast amount of short stories, and they tend to lend themselves very well to the movie treatment, as there's not too much that needs to be cut out or changed to fit the time constraints of a 100 minute movie slot.

Some more movies you might have seen that are based on his stories are:

Most famously is Blade Runner from the early 80's (and still looks great today, with the exception of a couple of the hair styles) which is based on 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Another popular one was Total Recall, based on We Can Remember It for You Wholesale except with the plot smoothed over a bit to fit within a movie.

Paycheck was also based (rather loosely) on a PKD novel, as was Minority Report with some rather significant changes to the way the story went...

You can find out more about him at Wikipedia