When your external disks are not willing to go to bed...

We've had problems with our iMacs bed time in the office pretty much since we started using them.

At night, they seem to refuse to fall asleep.

We've tried all the possible settings provided by the OSX interface. But nothing worked. Until I realized that the problems seemed to be related to the external back-up disks attached to them.

We use a LaCie and a Western Digital, both with a 1TB capacity, respectively connected to a first generation 24" Intel iMac and to a before-the-latest generation 27" iMac.

1. Sleep settings don't work for the hard disks
   
2. Manually unmounting the disks seems to solve the issue, but mounting them back is not trivial
   
3. OSX seems to unmount the disks when I log out from the Apple menu but when I log back in I have to restart all my applications
   

I have found a solution that requires the use of the "Fast user switch menu". The settings are as follows:

1. Go to System Preferences > Accounts
   
2. Check "Show fast user switch menu as" and choose the option you prefer
   
3. Make sure the "Show the Restart, Sleep, and Shut Down buttons" box is checked
   

Now, when you want to put the whole system to sleep, the solution is:

1. Click on the Fast user switch menu (top right of your screen)
   
2. Call the "Login Window..."
   
3. Press "Sleep"
   

Et voilà !

My guess is that the sleep option from the login window actually unmounts the hard disks and leaves them inactive until you enter your account again.

As a side note, those sleep problems also had a disturbing side effect: when I'd simply put the system to sleep the "old" way (either by calling "Sleep" from the Apple menu or by using the automation settings in "Energy Saver"), and tried to wake it up in the morning I'd have what looked like system freezes that sounded (yes, actually "sounded") related to the external hard disk activity. With the new system, I've had only one case of "freeze" in a few weeks of time, and it still kind of looks related to the external disk behavior.

In any case, this system seems to be allowing our Macs to spend their whole night sleeping and not struggling with hectic external disks... I'll need to check further what is the cause of the disks' inability to sleep, and also what is the cause of my freezes (not happening on the 24"), but that's for another post...

Java is not so dead after all...

The announcement came from Oracle, a few weeks after Apple's declaration (see Java is dead! Long live Java?).

Basically all of Apple's Java efforts will be handled by Oracle, within the OpenJDK project and Oracle will release Java for Apple machines, not Apple anymore.

If you are interested in declarations, check this link: OpenJDK News, Nov. 12.

Before OpenJDK took charge of the OSX version of Java, there were a number of projects that attempted to use the FreeBSD version of OpenJDK to create something that would run under OSX.

Now, OSX has its own development project at OpenJDK and things are slowly progressing, which is a very good thing...

The project goals are:

• Pass all appropriate certification tests for Java SE 7
  
• Include a complete, native Cocoa-based UI Toolkit
  
• Provide excellent performance
  

Which basically translates into: what Apple has been providing us with since the beginning of OSX, but by the people who are behind Java (and hopefully with simultaneous Windows/Linux/OSX releases).

If you want to build Java on OSX, you can. Follow the instructions on this page: Mac OS X Port. I have built Java 1.7 on my machine and it worked well with OmegaT. The only problem is that the UI toolkit still depends on X11, which means that your favorite Java application will not look like a native citizen of OSX. But that will happen!

If you want to see how the project advances and check the discussions (and participate in case you have a problem building the thing for example) check the following links:

• Mac OS X Port Project Status
  
• macosx-port-dev -- Technical discussion about the Mac OS X Port Project
  

The questions that remain unanswered are the following:

1. Will Java 1.7 on OSX be available at the time OSX 10.7 Lion is released next summer?
   
2. If not, will OSX 10.7 Lion include the current Apple released Java 1.6 by default an all new machines?
   
3. Once Java 1.7 is released by Oracle, will Apple include it in OSX bundles or will users have to go fetch it from Oracle's site ?
   

My take is that Java 1.7 will not be finished by the time Lion is released, and for the rest, I have no idea.
I'd like to say "yes" for a default Java 1.6 in Lion and "possible" for inclusion of Oracle's Java in further releases (after all OSX bundles plenty of third party development tools). We'll see.

But the future is definitely much brighter than it was back in October.