Adventures in Kernel Panic Land

Jimmy McGill chose "Saul Goodman" as his pseudo for a new venture to sell his now useless TV commercial slots, because "it's all good, man!"
That's exactly what your Mac tells you every day. Everything works fine, and everything will work out fine tomorrow, until it doesn't, but then, it's a Mac, so you're all good.

You never know that you need a backup until you do. That's the rule. I learned it about 10 years ago, the hard way. Massive hard disk failure, no backup at all, no extra software to check/fix/save the disk. Nothing, but a big deadline 2 days away. At the time I was running an Itanium Powerbook. I had bought it second hand a while before and it was a real workhorse. I also had a greenish clamshell iBook that my wife used to work with, before her company lent her a Windows machine.

When the machine's hard disk died on me, I called the project manager. He roughly told me that I still had 2 days and that the schedule would not move an inch. I don't remember what I did to fix the mess, but I did manage to scrap most of the data from the disk, then I must have moved all that to the iBook, resumed work, delivered, celebrated, and decided to create regular backups.

In the 21st century, external drives are cheap. They are cheaper than whatever hourly rate you apply to the time spent on fixing a non-backed-up dead system. They come in all sorts of flavour, shape, colour and capacity. And if your main machine is a laptop and it's a pain to physically connect it to your backup disk every time you put it back on your desk, you even have Wifi backups.

We tried half-backed solutions for a while. I bought terabytes of external drives, ugly as crap, all Firewiry and USB-Cy, but when you want a transparent solution that just works, all this just doesn't scale. Full disclosure: I have no financial interests in Apple. But damn, Time Capsule rocks. So yes, we got ourselves a Time Capsule, just 2 TB. We had 2 iMacs and 2 notebooks at the time, we thought we'd be short with the capacity but the 3TB Capsule seemed too expensive for just one extra terabyte. But even with the "low" capacity, it's been with us since. It does everything over Wifi, no need to connect the machines, just turn them on and Time Machine does its thing, and in no time you have your incremental backup ready for when you need it. You do need to turn the Time Machine on and select Time Capsule as your backup target, but it's a one time setting, and then you can forget about it, pretty much.

When things work fine, the only time you need a thorough backup is when you upgrade your system. I don't know how many more OS upgrades this "early 2011 Macbook Pro" will be allowed (our 24" iMac could not go further than Yosemite) but I was not going to miss that High Sierra upgrade after seeing the APFS talks on internet. The rest of the icing, I was not very interested in, although I love the way Safari does a lot to keep advertisers from wasting our CPU (and brain) cycles.

What had been bothering me for a while was that the machine was getting slower and slower everywhere and after having an issue with how slow BBEdit was, the Barebones support team confirmed that it was most probably a hard disk issue. With APFS coming I was not going to replace my disk with a rotating thing again. I was done with that. I was going to go the SSD way. All flashy, all speedy, all slick electronics.

My son had done it a few months back. We bought him an MBP when he entered university, one of those new but still coming with the antiquated DVD player. In his department, he was the only freshman to use a Mac. When he came back for Christmas last year, I paid for the replacement Samsung SSD and he spent a few hours doing the thing: backup your data and follow the instructions on Youtube. Easy enough. Then he reboot the machine and everything was faster. And it was before High Sierra and APFS.

I was going to go incremental on this. First install High Sierra, then get an SSD, and last reinstall everything. But before all, the backup. Time Machine being automatic, you really don't have to do much usually. But when you want to do it "now", well, there is a menu item for that. It's called "Back Up Now". To make sure you don't forget to save a few last-minute settings, just quit all the applications you run, leaving only Finder on (although if you know how to quit it, you can too), then let Time machine prepare the backup, do the backup and clean up the backup.

Then, you can start the upgrade process itself. Go to apple.com, click on "Upgrade" and everything goes super smoothly. At one point you are presented with a dialog that asks whether you really agree with all the terms, you just click "Agree" unless you're a hard-core free software advocate, but in this case you're not running a Mac and you're not reading this page, and then files get downloaded and installed and you can go watch your favourite show in the meanwhile, or read a book.

That's what I had planned anyway. Either finish season 3 of "Better call Saul" or read "Consider Phlebas", but it did not happen that way. What happened is that after a long while and not much happening, the Mac complained that it could not be upgraded. Just like that, two thirds into the install process, when the machine had overwritten all those important parts of the disk and you know that if you don't find a solution, you're done.

Rebooting won't do it. The old OS has been blown to pieces by the newer files partially written over it and the machine is programmatically speaking a giant spaghetti mess that the CPU has no idea how to deal with. When that happens, you have a Kernel Panic, and when the kernel panics it is of the utmost importance that you don't panic. Whatever you imagine has happened. All the pics of the newborn, all the thousands of whatever currency you spent on music and movies. Everything is gone. Except that, it's on your backup, and the likeliness that your computer and your backup die on you at the exact same time is so low that it's even lower than the likeliness of you being under the atomic fire of a North Korean missile. Although, granted, the day this happens, you'll have things more important to worry about than a broken backup.

So, you see the Kernel Panic thing that actually looks like a personal reboot of The Matrix on your screen and you feel all warm inside because you know it's a Mac. The idea here is that you need a handy way to get information from the Net. I don't have a phone, but I have that extra 24" iMac that's now mostly used as a Minecraft machine by the 2 little ones, but it also runs Safari (mostly used by the same little ones to check new "mods" for said Minecraft) and so I have a powerful entry point into the internets of information.

What you need to know here (and Safari is your friend if you don't) is that your Mac comes with secret programs that you can launch when you need them because they are located somewhere that doesn't get to be erased by a gigantic mess up of overwritten OS files. One such program is "Recovery Mode". You can launch it by hitting Command+R right after you restart your machine. If your system is down, like mine was, and you don't have a boot disk or USB key, then you want to enter Internet Recovery Mode, which requires an internet connection to download to your Mac all the things necessary to fix your issues (you may want to physically connect to your router/Time Capsule with anything that is faster than Wifi).

"Recovery Mode" be it local or internet based can do four things. The first one is get a Time Machine backup and restore the full machine from there. The second one is reinstall the OS from scratch. The third one is launch Safari to give you access to Apple Support for help. And the fourth one is give you access to Disk Utility so that you can diagnose/fix disk problems.

I figured that since I did not have a separate boot system my best bet was a full recovery from Time Machine. But I tried Disk Utility before that, checked the disk and since it told me everything was normal I just went on and decided to test an OS install. Depending on the key you call Recovery with, the version of the OS that's proposed to you is different. Either you have the OS your machine came installed with when you bought it, or you get the latest version that was installed, or you get the latest compatible version.

I tried High Sierra. And it did not work. I got a number of "cannot access the recovery server" or similar messages and gave up. I rebooted, again in Recovery Mode, tried again with the originally bundled version (Lion ?) and install started. And never stopped. It was late in the night when a dialog announced that the install would really not work.

This kind of moments are when you desperately need to cling to your faith in Macs (slightly backed by actually very few horror stories of messed up machines that refused to recover), and try one last thing before you go to bed. Reboot/Recovery Mode/Reinstall, it was staring to become a routine. But for some reason, this time it worked, and in the morning I had a (not so High) Sierra machine up and running, or rather ready to accept my backup data. A few hours and 250 GB later, I was running my machine, with a fresh Sierra install and all my data in place. I was basically at the exact same point I was the day before, but stronger in my faith that Macs just work and when they don't they still do.

The SSD arrived a few days later. That kind of manipulation involves a slightly higher level of wizardry. You need a few tools and an iFix video. Tools mean screws, and you really don't want to lose the screws. So here we go. Old hard disk removed, screws put in separate boxes to not mix them all, new SSD thing installed, screws back in place, power supply back on, reboot and Internet Recovery Mode launch.

Normally, an all brand new disk is not formatted to accept data copying. It is just a blank slate that the OS must put in shape for it to be of any use. But the OS still recognizes that there is a disk willing to be formatted attached to the machine. Normally.

In my case, the SSD thing was nowhere to be seen. The law of probability was plain about that: the thing itself is not at issue. Maybe an internal connection ? Would I have to open the Mac again and check everything ? I'm lazy and I prefer the Aspirin of Computer Fixing: reboot. A reboot/recovery mode later, I had the thing under my eyes. Go figure. Disk Utility was offering me to format the disk to APFS, which would also erase the data I had spent one full day reinstalling. Go for it, I thought, I'd just spend one more day going through the recovery hoops to get my machine running with the new OS.

Here again, things did not happen as planned. It took a small number of attempts to get High Sierra to be installed on the disk, and then I had to reinstall my data again from the Time Capsule backup.

I was lucky. We had a 3 day weekend here and I had decided to remove the curtains in both our room and the kids' and replace everything with wood or cloth window shades. Plus I had a lot of TV shows to watch, and all the books I brought back from France last summer just waiting to be read. Every once in a while I would check the Mac's screen, just to make sure, and this morning, eventually, I was able to contemplate the new setup, running smoothly, with a few new visible features, but mostly the new boot and launch speed (and damn, that SSD boot is faster than anything I've seen in a long while).

I know that putting a new third party disk into a box that's starting to show its age, adding the new version of the OS when it's just fresh out of master copy and using a new file system that was still in beta not so long ago is the exact opposite of hedging one's bets. And after reading a few cautionary articles after the fact I'm realizing that I may have been a little bold, but whatever happens, I have a backup that's regularly and automatically updated and I can just start from scratch any time I need... So I guess, it's all good, man!

Copy - Paste (not Cut) files

After last week's post I tried using the Finder's copy & paste functions to move files around.

One thing the struck me is that there is not cut function. Well, there is the delete function but you can't copy files and simultaneously delete them from their location.

I discovered the reason this morning...

When you copy a file in Finder, OSX does not seem to burden itself to load all the data in memory. It only seems to register the file location.

So, if you copy the files, delete them now because you could as well do it now instead of having to come back here later, and then try to paste them somewhere, OSX will complain that the files are missing. Indeed, there are in the Trash...

The correct order is thus to copy the files, paste them in their new location, go back to the original location and delete them...

It would seem to me that the smarter way to implement that would be to not remember their actual path, but to put a flag on the files, similar to an alias, so as to track the files if they move or are removed, before being pasted to their new location...

Update

I just found this hint on MaoOSX Hints: Use Quicksilver for Finder cut and paste .

Spaces in 10.5.3

You must be aware that Leopard's latest update, 10.5.3, has been released a few days ago. There are many comments and analysis on the web among which you can find how the bug fixes amount to new features implementation... One of the apps that greatly benefited from such bugfixes is Spaces.

In terms of productivity, Space was one of the features from which power users expected a lot. But it was not fully useable until the 10.5.3 release as John Gruber of DaringFireball writes.

OSX in Arabic !

I was wondering how much news I'd get from reading the Mac related French sites and until now I've only been disappointed by seeing only translation of the English news.

This morning, something that was not reported in the English sites made its way to my RSS page... The Arabic localization of OSX ! The site is Mac Génération and reported on the release of an Arabic kit for OSX.

The release is available for OSX 10.5.2 as a .dmg package. Looking at the release page, one can see an Intel 10.4.10 localization package is also available.

Very good news for the Arabic OSX users!

ZFS for OSX

Update

A very interesting article at Ars Technica tells us why file systems matter. And it tells us a lot about Macs too !

From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems

---

ZFS was the new file system that was rummored to be behind Leopard's Time Machine. ZFS has been developped by SUN Microsystem for their Solaris operating system.

Quote from the ZFS Open Solaris Page:

ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

Key word here: data integrity... For flawless backups etc...

Well, to tell you the truth, the above quote was from the ZFS Open Solaris Page via the ZFS on OS X page on MacForge, the provider of many a Free Software project for the Mac.

Which also means that YES! ZFS is available for the Mac !!!

To know more about it, go to Welcome to ZFS on OS X.

"Open With" too many applications...

All this started a few weeks ago, and it is most probably related to Leopard's Time Machine. It may be related to other things too but then I have no idea what they are. The result is that you end up with duplicates of all your applications popping up here and there, first in the SpotLight result window, then in Mail, when you right-click on an attachment, in Finder too...

Sometimes you launch the backup instead of the original, and you realize when the backup disks starts to scramble like crazy...

Eventually, I found a solution. A little drastic, and maybe it was not all necessary, but it also contributed to rationalize my backup procedures.

Before:

1) Time Machine copied _all_ my disk to an external backup disk
2) I had Sync!Sync!Sync! do an extra daily backup of my whole home hierarchy (including all the "user space" applications)
3) I had Spotlight index everything

What I wanted was Spotlight indexing everything _but_ the applications.

The problem was that the Privacy setting of SpotLight did not allow for the selection of a subfolder in the Time Machine backup (like Applications, for ex).

Now:

1) Time Machine copies everything but the system Application folder, the user Application folder, the whole Developer folder and the Download folder.
2) Sync!Sync!Sync! does an extra daily backup of my whole home hierarchy, including the user space Application folder
3) Sync!Sync!Sync! does also a daily backup of the system's Application folder
4) I have Spotlight index everything (including the TimeMachine backup, of course) but the Sync!Sync!Sync! backups where all the Application duplicates are now.

I have also reindexed Spotlight using the following command in Terminal:

 $ sudo mdutil -Es / /Volumes/backup_disk_name/

And I have rebuilt the LaunchServices database, the one that contains all the "knowledge" about which application is supposed to launch which file, with the following command, also in Terminal:

 $ /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/\
Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/\
Versions/A/Support/lsregister\
 -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

SInce the whole "recipe" is based on saving applications outside Time Machine, I also had to erase all the data Time Machine had accumulated for a month... Setting Time Machine to not save /Applications from any day does not remove /Applications from the previous days backup sets... There may be smarter ways to do that, but I thought that with my already existing extra daily backup I was on the safe side.

Now, I have much saner "Open With" drop down lists when I right-click a file with my mouse...

NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 5 and 6, OSX Security Update (and its own update), more QuickLook sites

NeoOffice 2.2.2 patch 5, then 6

The patch fixes a regression introduced in the previous patch and expands Asian text input and layout enhancements to include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean punctuation.

Update

It seems patch 5 introduced regressions in the layout enhancements for CJK punctuation and path 6 specifically removed all the new code introduced by patch 5.

OSX Security Update 2007-009

For OSX 10.5.1 and 10.4.11.
Available from Software Update (under the Apple menu) or from the Apple Donwload page.

Details are here.

Update

Apple released an update to that security update a few days later. It seems the first update introduced a number of new crashes in Safari...

QuickLook

Two sites dedicated to QuickLook plugins.

It looks like the number of domain names that include "quick", "look", and "plugin" is decreasing...

http://www.quicklookplugins.com/ and http://www.qlplugins.com/.

I have a preference for the second in terms of visibility and design.

Apples and Windows...

Just like with oranges, apples and windows do not compare.

Still, if you really need to have both on the same machine, there are ways to do that.

As a minimal introduction, check Bill Clementson's article on the subject.

Then, if you really need to stay on the Mac with the occasional Windows application, you may want to take a look at a few recent threads on the MacLingua forum (subscription required), where a few CAT tools are discussed in the context of Windows on Mac.

Now, if you want to dream a little, check this article on Ars Technica or this thread (for geeks) on the Wine HQ mailing lists...

By the way, Wine is yet another means to get Windows on your Mac. From the site:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

OSX 10.5.1, Safari 3.0, TextEdit...

It took Apple three weeks to address the most problematic bugs in Leopard. Good job ! The security contents of the update are detailed here. See also the relevant TidBits link in the feed box below.

Update: Heise Security's opinion on the fixes.

Safari 3.0, shipped in 10.5, includes a WebKit update that will certainly improve our Web experience. The Ars Technica article gives an interesting perspective on the WebKit market and WebKit.org gives a technical review that highlights the main new features. This new version of the WebKit is available in Leopard and in the latest Tiger update (10.4.11) released yesterday.

If you make a search in TextEdit now, you'll see that the search results are highlighted as they are in Safari. Much easier to see the searched string !

Bento, NeoOffice, OSX 10.4.11

Bento is "the new personal database from FileMaker that's as easy to use as a Mac".

Daringfireball's analysis is quite interesting and convinced me to take a new look at Numbers for my simple database needs...

NeoOffice has just release the second patch for NeoOffice 2.2.

And Apple has also released a point update: OSX 10.4.11, that contains Safari 3.0 and ships a number of other items and fixes.

What I like in OSX 10.5

Apple advertises over 300 new features in OSX 10.5. A lot of them have no immediate use for the translator but some of them really rock. 300+ New Features

Here is my current and most immediate pick. The list will grow as I use them in real life.

Spotlight

I never really used Spotlight, even on my relatively fast MacBook. Instead I had Butler as an application launcher and the standard Finder for file searches (even though the Finder used Spotlight technology).

Now, Spotlight is all this and more.

• it displays applications first, so that you can really use it as an application launcher. Even though it is not as sophisticated as Butler, it does the job very properly.
  
• searches are faster than on Tiger.
  
• it calculates as you type a formula. I used PlainCalc for that before, and even though PlainCalc is much more powerful than Spotlight, the later is currently just what I need most of the time.
  
• it acts as a (English) dictionary by showing you the first line of the definition of the word you type, clicking on the result will bring you to the Dictionary application.
  

Spotlight on Apple's "New features" page.

Dictionary

Dictionary now has a set of 3 Japanese dictionaries (Shogakukan) and also accesses Wikipedia in the main available languages. It is faster than launching Safari to find a reference online. The only drawback, when compared to Safari, is that Dictionary does not display the language versions links of the article you are reading which does not allow the user to jump to the target language in which the reference is sought.

Dictionary on Apple's "New features" page.

Automator

Automator now has a "Record" function that allows it to remember mouse activity on any application's menus. That allows for quick "macro" recording in applications that are not well integrated with OSX and/or that do not support AppleScript. Java applications for translators come to mind !

Automator on Apple's New features" page.

What I miss in OSX 10.5

The ability to have a different input system per window

This setting was present in Tiger under "International > Input Menu" at the bottom of the window, the same location in Leopard only indicates the keyboard shortcut to change of input method.

Use case: you translate from a language that requests a different input system from the language you translate to. When you need to type a word in a dictionary to check its meaning, you change of window, change of input system, type, get the results, go back to the original window, go back to the original input system and type. Having the OS remember which input systems goes with which application is quite a time an annoyance saver...

Clear visual clues to identify folders in the Dock

John Siracusa has a full page about that on Ars Technica, with plenty of nice screenshots:

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review: The Dock By John Siracusa | Published: October 28, 2007 - 11:36PM CT