found_drama

Because I have developed some sort of weird obsession with this particular niche product in Apple’s line-up, a couple of quick notes about the newly announced Mac mini:

1. Putting the SD card slot on the back seems… well, that seems wrong (but the ports etc. were always on the back, weren’t they?);
2. wouldn’t this be the first time that “the foot” of one of their machines is given a high-profile product shot on the landing page?;
3. thanks for putting the memory in an easy-to-reach place this time, guys;
4. built-in for-reals HDMI FTW;
5. looks overall like a nice upgrade from the last round and I would like to have one in my living room.

On a regular basis (talking “daily, all day” here), I run n tabs in an open Terminal window where n > 1 (and usually n > 4).  And so each time I open up on these tabs and cd into the directory I need, I’m hitting ⌘⇧i to set a custom title on that tab; and 99% of the time, that custom title is the last node in the pwd output.  So what I was thinking was to set up a little shell script, backed by an AppleScript to:

1. cd into a specified directory;
2. get the title I want via pwd | cut -d'/' -f5^[1];
3. and pass that as an argument to AppleScript (via osascript in the shell script) to have it set as the title of the tab.

The shell script^[2] piece ought to be easy enough:

alias mycd="cd /path/to/directory/of/interest;
    osascript ~/Library/Scripts/set-terminal-tab-title.scpt
    `pwd | cut -d'/' -f5`;"

And the AppleScript ought to look something like:

on run argv
  tell application "Terminal"
    set terms to every window in application "Terminal"
    repeat with term in terms
      if term is frontmost then
        set tTabs to every tab in term
        repeat with tTab in tTabs
          if tTab is selected then
            set cTitle to item 1 of argv
            set custom title of tTab to cTitle
          end if
        end repeat
      end if
    end repeat
  end tell
end run

…and this almost works^[3].  Almost but not quite.

First:  let’s gripe about how verbose AppleScript is.  Loop through every window to find the frontmost?  And then loop through every tab to find the selected tab?  Apparently this is what I need to do.  Now, accepting that and moving on…

The first thing that breaks down in practice is the pwd code cribbed from Stack Overflow.  Throwing that into the command line gives me what I want.  And executing that within backticks to generate the output to the osascript’s argument works.  But it doesn’t work when wrapped up in the alias^[4].  What’s frustrating though is if I pass a string literal there, the AppleScript accepts that.

Rock and roll, right?  Wrong.

Doing this for the first tab (let’s call it “interest”) seems just fine.  Start the second tab (let’s call it “interest2″) and do it there and both tabs are now named the same thing (“interest2″).  Do a third tab (“interest3″) and now they’re all “interest3″.  Well this is a drag!

Quit Terminal and start over…  What?  The new window is named “interest3″?  How can this be?  It would appear that setting the custom title on the selected tab is actually reaching into the application’s preferences and setting a custom title there and applying it app-wide and then permanently saving it as a preference.  So it seems I have two problems.

1. How do I get the standard output actually passed as the argument to the osascript?
2. How do I get it to only set the title on the tab?

Any takers?  Thoughts?  Suggestions?

UPDATED 7/7/2010: Thanks to all the helpful suggestions. Turns out however that AppleScript was not the way to go at all. Setting PS1 in my .profile turned out to be the winner:

PS1='\[\033]0;`(basename $(pwd))`\007\]\n[\t \w]\n\u@\h $ '

1. Tip o’ the hat to this thread on Stack Overflow. [↩]
2. Yes, I know that setting an alias in .profile is not technically a shell script. [↩]
3. And on that note, I’d really rather skip passing arguments into the AppleScript at all and have it take care of the pwd trickery, but that’s a separate bit of frustration… [↩]
4. It occurs to me that I should try this as a “real” shell script? [↩]

I broke down and decided to try out Google’s Chrome browser after having heard so many positive reviews of it.  It’s backed by WebKit—just like Safari, my current favorite—and so if nothing else, I know it has a tried and true and powerful engine going behind the scenes.  That said, I’ve tried out more than a few browsers over the years and almost always wind up “switching back” after a day or two (or at most: a week or two).  With that in mind, I was more than expecting to go “Meh, back to Safari…” by the end of the week.

But at the end of that week, I’m beginning to think that Chrome might stick around for quite some time as my day-to-day browsing^[1] browser^[2].

First, what I like:

1. The tabs. The tabbed browsing experience in Chrome is nearly perfect and without a doubt the best I’ve seen so far.  The tabs in Chrome are “on top”, which Apple tried to do in the Safari 4 beta and failed to execute properly.  What Apple did wrong in the Safari 4 beta was to try to have the tabs merge into and replace the title bar; this is wrong.  From a UI/visual hierarchy perspective, the tabs definitely belong “above” the browser controls and the address bar, etc.—but they are themselves a part of the window and as such you need adequate clearance.  Under Safari 4 beta, the tabs went all the way up to the window edge; Chrome nails it by providing a just-about-right-sized buffer between the tab’s top edge and the window’s top edge—from what I can tell, it’s about ½-⅔ the size of the title bar’s normal height.  So there’s no ambiguity with respect to what you’re going for:  you’re either going for the tab (to rearrange it or do the also well-executed tear-off behavior) or else you’re going for the title bar to move the window around.  To crib a phrase, in the platform’s UI grammar, this is correct^[3].
2. The animations. You may call it superfluous if you wish, but this kind of spit-and-polish work can be important in setting one application apart from its peers.  Most of the animations are with the tabs, so I’ll list off a few that I instantly noticed and instantly loved:  the way a tab pops up when you create a new one; the way a tab sinks when you close it; the tear-off animation; the tab rearrangement animations; how the loading circle in the tab goes anti-clockwise and much slower until it gets a server response (and then starts to load).  These are not key features, but they sure make things feel more complete.
3. Fast. It feels like a very fast browser.  Maybe I’m distracted by the animations, but it seems a little snappier to render pages and to respond to in-browser events.  I’ve read that it’s faster than any other browser; but I’ve also read that Safari has the slightest edge on it.  But then again, I’ve also read that Chrome knows how to use more than one CPU core at a time.
4. Unobtrusive UI elements. When I first noticed that Chrome didn’t have a status bar across the bottom of the browser window, I went looking for it.  I want this thing to be turned on.  But after using it for a few minutes, I noticed that it didn’t need a status bar because it just displayed status messages on an as needed basis in a little messaging space that was only as big as it needed to be.  (Win!)  And then when I downloaded a file and instead of popping up a “downloads window” it just put a “downloads bar” across the bottom…  Well, I must say I was impressed with that, too.  Unobtrusive, and only as needed.
5. Additive tabs. If you (like me) tend to open big batches of tabs all at once from a bookmark group in the bookmark bar, you’ll appreciate that Chrome just appends these to the open tabs.  Instead of replacing the ones you have open.  (Safari, I’m looking you direction.)

What I do not like:

1. The icon. Chrome’s icon blows.  It looks like a Pokémon egg.  Or a half-baked Simon-from-the-future.  If asked to rate the browser icons, it would go something like this:  Shiira, Firefox, Safari, Opera … a whole bunch of other guys … Chrome, and finally Internet Explorer.
2. I miss my “open in tabs” command. Allow me to rephrase:  I’m annoyed that I need to right-click my bookmark group and click “Open All Bookmarks”.
   
   Safari just has this at the bottom of the bookmark group.  And I use it a hundred times a day^[4].
3. Text fields do not (always) play by the rules. Folks on the Mac that “switched” from Windows machines will probably understand this one right away.  You get used to hitting “home” and “end” to go to the beginning and end of lines (respectively) and then you switch and have to learn that you now press up and down to do the same thing.  And then you get used to it.  And then you start using Chrome and this isn’t the case.  Or at least isn’t always the case.  In the browser’s address bar, up and down are bound explicitly to the history/search results/bookmarks suggestions list that appears.  And within the browser window itself, a text field may play nicely with this convention.  And sometimes it won’t.  And I haven’t figured out the pattern yet.  If there is one.  Which just makes this worse/more frustrating/more annoying.  Perhaps I’m just being hyper-vigilant to it and Safari et al. are the same way.  But I’m not so sure.  [UPDATE 1/12/10: I think this is just a matter of waiting for Chrome to catch up with me and my browsing history and habits.  It does in fact seem to prompt-and-fill-in the same way as Safari.]
4. Double-clicking the tab bar doesn’t start a new tab. This is a behavior in Safari that I use all the time.  It drives me nuts that this minimizes the Chrome window.  I hate being forced to use the little “+” icon.  [ADDED 1/12/10]

What I’m undecided about:

1. The auto-completion in the address bar. Perhaps I’m just too used to how Safari auto-completes, but Chrome’s does not sit right with me.  I mentioned this immediately above w/r/t/ how the up and down keys are bound to the suggestion box; but I’m also expecting the address bar to instantly try to auto-complete my typing.  When I type “ama” I’m expecting it to instantly suggest Amazon.com.  Chrome does not always seem to do that.  Again:  it’s inconsistent.  Maybe it will learn as I go?
2. The way you close tabs. To quote the venerable and inscrutable Gruber, “It’s a grammar thing — in the Mac UI grammar, close buttons go on the left.”  But that said, Gruber writes that in response to a thoughtful missive of Chrome’s tab closing behavior by Basil Safwat at The Invisible.  The nutshell version of Safwat’s argument is that putting the tab closure icon on the right allows users to quickly close them with mouse-clicks with minimal mouse movements regardless of if they are closing from left to right or right to left.  I won’t go much further with that because you should really just read the article.  But that said, tabs in a browser are pretty wily and protean beasts by their nature, and while Safwat has some great points about tab praxis, the pedantic part of me wants desperately to reject the closure-on-the-right more/less out-of-hand because it’s a pretty fundamental violation of (there’s that phrase again!) the UI’s grammar.  Could it be that we need a corollary for the “closure on the left” rule?  Does praxis override all else in this case?  Or is there a way to accomplish this same fluidity without violating the placement assumptions?

1. As opposed to “development” browser. [↩]
2. Though Camino spent (almost?) a year or so as my day-to-day browser before it got displaced by Safari again.  So, who knows, eh? [↩]
3. Of course, they put the close button “the wrong side” w/r/t/ this platform’s UI grammar; but we’ll get to that in a bit. [↩]
4. All right, I am exaggerating.  It’s more like fifty times a day. [↩]

Following up on the September post (“advise me: enhancing storage“)—we went ahead and put a shiny new 1 TB Western Digital hard drive ^[1] into Malkovich, effectively quadrupling the storage (re this particular problem) and paving the way for a lot more life out of this ol’ iMac.

The idea for this particular upgrade owes some thanks to Arden at dtgeeks.com and Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo.  For those of you looking to do this as well, budget about an hour and make sure you’ve got a small Phillips head screwdriver and also a TORX 10 bitdriver.  Oh, and your Leopard install disk and your Time Machine back-up drive.

Now… here’s where we started:

The plan:  remove the 250GB Maxtor drive (“seemed big at the time!”) that came with the thing^[2] and replace it with the 1TB Western Digital drive that boasted all the speed benefits of SATA with some additional optimization for reduced energy consumption.  Alright… go.

First order of business is to pull the back of the iMac off.  This is easy.  There are three “lossless” screws on the bottom grill.  Lay the iMac flat and unscrew; gently lift the chassis backing off.  Well done.

OK, now we’re inside.  Do yourself a favor and blow out the dust.  Good job.  Now you see the hard drive?  It’s the green PCB in the sea of blue PCB.  Upper right.  Yeah, that’s it.  We want to get that out.

Now that we have gone in for a closer look.  Observe how the hard drive is in that bracket?  What we need to do is: (1) unscrew the bracket; (2) remove the tiny cable on the “bottom” [see photo at this link]; (3) disconnect the power etc. cables; and then remove the bracket from the drive — because we’ll need it for the new drive.

Use the Phillips to unscrew the bracket from the chassis.  Should be one screw on the bottom (by the memory modules) and two up top.

Now gently lift the drive up just a bit and use your fingernails to gently pull that tiny cable from the bottom of the drive/bracket.  It’s delicate, so be careful.  Nice job.

Lastly, pull the data and power cables from the rear of the drive with your fingers.  Now lift the whole drive out of the slot.  This is where your TORX 10 bitdriver comes in handy.

The hard drive is held into the custom-designed extra specially awesome Apple chassis by this weird little bracket.  And that’s fine — but the bracket isn’t held to the drive with your usual flathead or Phillips screwdriver.  Oh no.  They went extra fancy and used TORX screws.  Fortunately, I happened to have a toolkit that just happened to have the right size TORX head — a size 10.  Use the TORX 10 to remove the 4 TORX screws (2 on the top, 2 on the bottom) and thus remove the bracket from the old drive.  You may now commence celebrating.  This is basically the halfway point.

As I mentioned above, we went with a 1 TB WD Caviar Green drive (pictured here, above) to effectively quadruple the storage capacity of our aging iMac.  The rest should feel easy:

Use the TORX 10 to put the bracket on the new drive.  Attach the data and power cables to the new drive.  Lower it down into the bay and attach the little “other/misc.” cable.  Screw the bracket into the chassis.  Replace chassis backing etc.  Awesome.  Hardware section complete.

Now comes the software section:  for this section, I will basically defer you to the above mentioned article by Wilson Rothman.

Start the computer with the Leopard install DVD in it and boot from the disc.

You’ll need to use Disk Utility to format/partition the drive.

Then you can restore from Time Machine.

Except it’s a little more complicated than that.  Rothman wrote it up as follows:

Once you open up the system and swap out the drives, you can set the old drive aside, hopefully never to use it again. Assuming all went well, you restart the system and insert an OS X Leopard installation DVD. You won’t need the OS installer on it, but you will need it to act as mediator between the Time Machine backup drive and the newly installed blank drive. Once it boots up (you may need to manually restart to get it to work right) follow these instructions CAREFULLY:

1. Choose your language.

2. At the main screen, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities pull-down menu.

3. Select the drive itself and click on Partition.

4. In the Partition menu, select 1 Partition and Options… where you choose GUID Partition Table. Click OK then Apply, then say “yes” to whatever warning comes up.

5. Once you have reformatted the drive, close the Disk Utility window.

6. Do Not Go Forward. Instead, when you see the main Welcome screen, click the Back button, which takes you to the language select page. It sounds silly but DO IT. This shakes the system into action.

7. Once you have reselected your language and are back on the Welcome screen, click Utilities and select Restore System From Backup…

8. The process should go smoothly from that point on. You simply select appropriate disks to copy your chosen backup data from your Time Machine drive to the new internal drive, as shown in the following sequence:

…and then a bunch of pictures.

Now note: he means it when he says to follow those instructions carefully.  Especially that “Do Not Go Forward” bit.  The installer system will lose track of the drive you just formatted/partitioned if you do that.  Do the instructions above EXACTLY as described.

Except where he says “GUID Partition Table”, I did “Apple Partition Table”.  Just pay attention to what the prompts say.  It says right in the app which partition type is for Intel vs. PowerPC systems.  Just “RTFM”^[3] and you’ll be fine.

That concludes the hour.  Then you just wait for your backup to finish restoring…:

Nine hours was a bit of a stretch though. It was really more like four or five.

FOLLOW-UP NOTES:

Spotlight is going to want to reindex itself; that will take a couple hours depending on how much data you have.  Mail is going to want to set itself up again; but if you’re fortunate enough to use IMAP, this won’t be a big deal.  iTunes is going to get confused about what computer you’re on again; you may need to re-authorize a few songs.

1. Sorry Zeb; the 1.5TB was a good deal but bit-for-byte this was going to work out plenty fine for us. [↩]
2. Only partially true: that Maxtor was already the second or third drive we’d gone through.  But let’s not digress too much. [↩]
3. Whereby “M” I mean “Screen”? [↩]

Since moving into our new home, we’ve been trying to sort out our home audio situation.  We listen to a lot of music^[1] around here.  Though we were feeling cramped, one of the nice things about our condo’s small footprint was the fact that that the music could be heard throughout the house without having to “go to 11″.  The iMac was hooked up directly to the stereo and one click in iTunes and we had music.

Though we love our new place, things are significantly more disconnected:  the iMac is in the office, the stereo is in the family room, and we spend most of our time upstairs (where there is but an old shelf system with a broken CD player but a working tape deck).  We’ve made due with the aux inputs and old iPod minis.  But it’s not quite the same.

Our preference would be to ape our previous situation as much as possible^[2] and some kind of wireless situation seems to be the way to go.  But wireless systems out there all seem either woefully inadequate or else require a svelte new lifestyle and lots of extra cash.

In that way, “oddly enough” an Apple hardware-based solution has seemed thus far to be the way to go.  Airport Express appears to be pretty close to ideal in many ways, at least for resolving the situation upstairs.  And while we’re looking into it, there is a certain appeal to the tv; that is to say it looks like it might be what we need for pushing music from the iMac, over the air, to the stereo in the family room.  And while we’re at it, it can tap into some movies^[3], and access to Flickr and our photos.  Sounds great.

There’s just one important (to us) question:

When I play a song via tv is it going to increment that song’s play count in iTunes (like an iPod syncing back to the mothership)? or is it going to give me the audio but that’s all (like iTunes sharing over WiFi)?

Thus far I haven’t found a straight answer to this^[4].  And as I look further into this, and as the answer to my question starts to look more and more like a “no” then the chief advantage of the tv seems to have gone out the window.

Without that synchronization of the play counts, ratings, etc., then there is effectively nothing that the tv can give me (at “just $229″ USD, MSRP) that I cannot get from a shared-over-WiFi iTunes library and the MacBook (and/or Pro) we already have in the house.  And if we want to add video, a mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter is just $6.40^[5].  And on further consideration, this may actually be a superior option:  the tv offers no integration with Netflix (for example) which otherwise streams just fine via WiFi to the laptop.  So in that case, it sounds like there are really no advantages^[6]…

1. I dare say we constantly have tunes going. [↩]
2. I.e., and push all the music from iTunes, incrementing the play counts for each song, etc. [↩]
3. Alas, for an extra charge that I’d rather not get into. [↩]
4. Which I find super-hard to believe.  But maybe that ought to tell me something.  If it isn’t hyped in the marketing literature then it must not do it. [↩]
5. Though I could go to $70 if I wanted to get fancy and push the audio over HDMI as well. [↩]
6. Except maybe (just maybe) the small sleek footprint? [↩]

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is here, and that’s plenty exciting. All the refinements—in the UI and under the good—are getting their due play^[1]. One of those refinements: all of Java’s roads lead to 64-bit Java SE 6^[2].

If you’re not panicking (or at least a little alarmed) then don’t bother reading onward.

If (however) you’re asking about giving priority to the 32-bit version and/or if you’re looking for J2SE 5.0, you may find this article on the OneSwarm wiki to be helpful.

1. If all you need to do is give priority to the 32-bit mode, try launching the Java Preferences app (in /Applications/Utilities) and re-ordering the preferred modes.
2. If you need J2SE 5.0, try downloading and untarring the 1.5 version that shipped with Leopard (OS X 10.5).  The instructions from OneSwarm:

   cd /tmp/
   wget http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/isdal/snow_leopard_workaround/java.1.5.0-leopard.tar.gz
   tar -xvzf java.1.5.0-leopard.tar.gz
   sudo mv 1.5.0 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0-leopard
   cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
   sudo rm 1.5.0
   sudo ln -s 1.5.0-leopard 1.5.0
   	

3. And if all else fails, don’t forget to check where your ${JAVA_HOME} is pointed.

1. Either in the marketing literature or in blog posts circulating “discovered” improvements. [↩]
2. Which is to say, when you see 1.5.0 in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions, you’re just seeing a symlink to 1.6.0. [↩]

While I wouldn’t say that I spoke to soon (re: “Poor Malkovich“), perhaps the situation bears some additional prudence to fully explore the options for remedy and repair.  After all, it should not be necessary to replace that iMac G5.  So let’s put all the cards out there.  Firstly — what the hell is going on?

Malkovich^[1] has been shutting down at random intervals over the past week or so.  It’s a troubling trend because (a) there is no warning when the shutdown is about to happen and (b) it then takes several minutes before the iMac will turn on again (i.e., respond to someone pressing the power button) during which time (c) there is a whole lot of anxiety about whether it will turn on ever again^[2].  Thus far, no pattern has emerged.  Some days pass with no shutdowns whatsoever, others have one or two; we’ve been lucky in as much as no single 24-hour period has been marked by greater than two of these random shutdowns^[3].  So we’ve been digging through system logs and trying to cross-reference the symptoms with those described in forum posts and the Apple support site’s knowledge base articles.  From this research, three theories^[4] have emerged:

1. Over-heating; and/or
2. a failing power supply; and/or
3. a failing logic board.

Over-heating. If you’ve worked with an iMac before, you can see how this might easily be the case.  All the components are crammed into a thin, tight chassis that has little in the way of ventilation and cooling systems.  Over-heating seems to be a pretty common malady for iMacs (see also: here, here, and here).  From what I’ve found so far, unless you want to take drastic measures, there isn’t much you can do about the heating problem except periodically clean the dust out, keep the vents clear, and try to keep the room A/C-ified if you can.

If the problem turns out to be over-heating, I imagine I could try to just suck it up for a year or so.  But aside from my suspicions, there isn’t much to support the over-heating theory.  According to the discussion threads on the Apple site, if the shutdowns were due to over-heating then I should see something like this in system.log:

localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -110

Instead, there are no lines matching “thermal” or “temperature” or “heat” and the only line matching AppleSMU or shutdown is:

localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = 1

…and seriously, WTF is that?

Failing power supply. I suspect that this is our most likely culprit, if only because Malkovich is already on its third power supply^[5].  In my research to date, I have been unable to identify specific steps to help diagnose a failing power supply.  As a Mac “civilian”, I’m left to some guess work.

That being said, I turn (naïvely or otherwise) to Apple’s support site to peruse the knowledge base articles looking for clues.  The most applicable kb article I’ve been able to find is this one:  iMac G5: Troubleshooting when your computer won’t turn on

If you care about semantics (like I do) then you’ve instantly picked up on the same quirk that I have:  my issue is not that the iMac has trouble turning on but that it randomly turns off.  Just the same, I did get a little value out of the article, namely (a) that I’m resetting the SMU every time that I unplug the iMac and that this should offer some relief from some of the symptoms and/but also (b) that I can in fact pull the cover off and do some diagnostic work, watching the flickering of some LEDs to get a sense of whether the issue lies with the power supply or (gasp) the logic board.

Failing logic board. I’m sad to say that with this scenario my optimism is reflected in the fact that I’m only throwing out the faulty logic board theory as a worst case scenario.  Based on the Apple kb article (re: reading LEDs and validating power supply vs. logic board issues; vide supra), it’s beginning to sound like the issue is that this third power supply is on its way out.  If the issue were with the logic board, the situation should be more dire.  Granted, I have yet to pull the cover off and examine the flicking of those little LEDs.  But at this stage, I think it’s still safe to make some guesses.

Not that I’m saying that a faulty logic board wouldn’t explain these random shutdowns or that they don’t explain them — I’m merely saying that there is not a stronger case to be made for the logic board explanation than the power supply explanation.  The system.log file really doesn’t show any messages that indicate a problem. What I’ve concluded from this (so far) is that whatever the issue is, it’s occurring in the hardware layer somewhere and that when it fails, it fails suddenly and totally and gives the software no opportunity to leave any trace evidence. Perhaps that sudden and total failure is happening in the labyrinthine circuitry of the logic board; or perhaps the power supply simply chokes on its own volts.

Again, as a Mac “civilian”, I’m left only with guesswork for now.

So what’s next? I’d really like to get to the bottom of this if I can. While I’d love a bright new shiny toy, I’d also love to solve this problem and stick to my original plans. I’m going to pop the hood and clean out Malkovich as a starter; it’s probably due to have the dust blown out anyway. That said, as I’ve already expressed my doubts about the over-heating theory, I don’t expect that this will get us terribly far.

That leaves the failing power supply vs. logic board theories to duke it out. I don’t expect that the diagnostic LEDs are really going to tell me much. I keep looking at “Step 12″ in that Apple kb article and shaking my head: the path to “logic board failure” is predicated on a computer that gets power but doesn’t turn on. Again, “turning on” isn’t my problem — randomly turning itself off is my problem. If it is in fact a faulty power supply…

Well, I admit that I’ll be disappointed. Even the PCs I had before this didn’t burn through power supplies this quickly. (This would make 4 power supplies in 4 years!)

Comparatively speaking, replacing the power supply is a cheap fix ($110 vs. $860 for the logic board^[6]) that could buy another year or two of useful life for this machine.  But then again…  ”Another year or two”?  Sounds like we’re expecting that power supply to fail after another 10-14 months just like its predecessors.  O! the conundrum…  The questions then become:  are we really being that rough on these power supplies?  (And if so, what’s the baseline level of activity or “abuse” that’s reasonable to expect of them?)  And is there anyone out there that has had a nice “good long run” with their iMac?  Or any other theories?

UPDATE: Since writing this there has not been another random shutdown.  So that’s good, though not exactly encouraging or mind-changing.  I popped the cover on Malkovich and went to town on the dust with a Giotto’s Rocket Blaster; the LED diagnostics were (predictably) inconclusive which lends evidence to the bogus power supply theory, if you ask me.  But at least it’s clean in there now.  —F_D (5/2/2009)

1. Malkovich is the hostname for our 20″ iMac (2.0 GHz G5 with ambient light sensor). [↩]
2. You can imagine how frustrating this is, especially when a copy of Barry Lyndon is trapped inside with 10 minutes left to go in the film. [↩]
3. This is not particularly comforting; poor ol’ BenNevis (my previous MacBook Pro) started off the same with its random shutdowns (a.k.a., b0rk!) — one or two at a time, one or two per day.  But over the course of a month or so that grew to approximately one per hour until it seemingly spiked at one per CPU clock cycle and stayed there. [↩]
4. A fourth theory developed when I saw this in system.log:

   Malkovich [0x0-0xf00f].com.apple.iTunes[121]: 2009-04-27 19:42:14.644 osascript[255:613] *** _NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x130d30 of class NSCFData autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking

   …but wouldn’t a memory leak just cause the system to get sluggish? and/or maybe just lock up?  I haven’t found any literature to support my theory that the memory leak is causing the shutdowns, so I’ve tossed it.  For now. [↩]

5. The first failed in April 2006 and was replaced by the good folks at Ormsby’s; that power supply then failed on July 4th 2008, two months after the AppleCare ran out (and just days after H. was born), and was replaced by the kindly folks at Small Dog Electronics.  This is not even to mention the hard drive issues we had in 2005. [↩]
6. For $860 you’re halfway to a 24″ iMac, or else maxing out a Mac mini. [↩]

Recently it became apparent that our trusty iMac G5 (a.k.a., “Malkovich”) may not be long in its continued operation.  The iMac seems to have shut itself off randomly on at least two occasions over the past week or so — one minute it’s chugging along, playing music and/or exporting photos from Aperture and the next minute it’s just… off.

Malkovich is coming up on its four year anniversary and has probably logged well over 25,000 hours of discontinuous uptime^[1] and it is probably reasonable to expect that it’s nearing the end of its useful life cycle.  I was hoping to get 4-5 years of total useful life out of this iMac during which time it would serve as the main computer in the home.  So we’re not too far off our target if we’re working from that estimate.  But I was really hoping to get through to next year before this came up.  These random shutdowns cast a pall on Malkovich though and I have more than a few doubts that we’ll make it to ’10.  As such, we’re trying to figure out what computer will take its place.

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1. Though it’s probably more like 7,000 hours of “active use” — i.e., playing music from iTunes, novel-writing, or processing pictures in iPhoto or Aperture. [↩]

Recently, I downloaded the OmniGraphSketcher public beta to give it a quick and dirty trial.  As you may have noticed, I can be a bit of a graph/visualization nerd.  The first screencast^[1] of OmniGraphSketcher made it look super easy to use and the output was (visually) very appealing.

In my first trial run, I decided that I wanted to re-create the graphs from my 2009 Q1 goals results.  I had some fun screwing around, drawing lines onto the graph stage, moving the axes around… generally following the lead of the gentleman in the screencast.  I played some trial-and-error games with the tools (which weren’t always intuitive to me) and then some more games with the controls in the palettes (which were^[2]).  I let myself go a little crazy.

Then I reeled myself back in.  Accuracy! I want these data represented with some high fidelity.  I don’t want approximations of how many times I went climbing from January to March — I want to know exactly.  Drawing my columns gave me a lot of scientific precision as OmniGraphSketcher guessed what I meant from those drawings.  Then I tapped into the palettes to round off those floats to the integers that they rightfully are.  But this was tedious.  And for as much as a pain in the ass as Excel can be sometimes, I’d at least gotten the rhythm down.

So I decided to put it back on the shelf for a bit.  Verdict:  ”Some cool output, and a lot of potential but not quite there yet.”

Of course, then I see the second screencast^[3] about getting data in to OmniGraphSketcher and I’m eager to give it another chance.  (Now for a project…)

1. 22MB HD video link. [↩]
2. But the palettes made a bit more sense to me because they follow the same pattern as those from OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner.  So (you know) in a way, they’re familiar. [↩]
3. 20MB HD video link. [↩]