Rubénerd!

Given previous OS X upgrade experience, I decided to hold off from upgrading to Lion until 10.7.1 was released this time around. Alas, despite doing this there are still several issues severe enough to warrant me downgrading back to Snow Leopard until they're addressed.

But that makes no sense, you're a Mac fanboi!!1!!one!

So what are they?

1. Lion has been the first release of Mac OS X where my machine has been noticeably slower since upgrading. Applications take fewer “dock bounces” to launch, but more time. Scrolling is sluggish and key repeat rates are slower. Most maddening of all though are context menus: the current record is a whopping six seconds before they appear after a mouse click. OS/2 Warp 4.5 running on my 120MHz Toshiba Libretto displays menus faster than my Mac Pro with Lion does.

2. The Finder doesn't seem to have a memory leak, but it routinely chews up 70 to 90% of a single CPU core on idle. Killing it or force quitting drastically speeds up the machine, though only temporarily.

3. I have custom icons for my mounted volumes and drives so I can see at a glance which I'm working with. Lion's Finder sidebar replaces these with uniform drive icons in the same monochrome style as iTunes 10. From a glance, individual drives are now indistinguishable.

4. While I can appreciate Apple’s intention to make automatic backups and revision control easier for people, technically proficient users already have their own tools for this, and the lack of an option to disable this is frustrating. I suspect its responsible for some of the reduced performance and greater hard drive utilisation.

5. Related to this new feature, the removal of the one-step "Save As" and replacing it with the two-step "Duplicate" then "Save" function is one of the most maddening changes I’ve ever encountered in an OS upgrade. It was driving me so crazy, I gave up using Lion’s built in applications such as Preview and TextEdit entirely, and wrote symbolic links to redirect to other applications should I accidentally launch them!

6. After Mac OS pioneered the commercial GUI with a simple resize handle in the bottom corner of windows to change their size, Lion finally caught the all-edges-resize disease. It’s visually distracting having cursors constantly changing as I move them across the screen, and it increases the chance of changing windows by accident. To me, this was more of a feature to appease Windows-switchers than something useful, though I suppose I could get used to it. In KDE I overcame it by having all my windows full screen by default ;).

7. DigitalColor Meter.app only shows decimal RGB now, not hex. Why remove this?

Cue Arnold Schwarzenegger reference

One of the good things about Apple on the desktop is they tend to listen to our concerns. When Leopard came out, they quickly headed our cries for folder icons in our stacks, and opaque menu bars. There's nothing here that can't be fixed, provided we all keep giving them feedback. Not that it helped for some of these features given we voiced our concerns before the GM, but still...

In the meantime, it's back to Snow Leopard for me until at least the performance and reliability issues are addressed. 10.7.4 perhaps?

I've been a heavy del.icio.us user since 2004, and apparently I'm the only one who hasn't suffered problems with the latest changes since AVOS bought the service. Tech pundits are practically screaming; presumably to generate some press and links. Touché.

Thanks to Murid Rahha for the awesome del.icio.us icon. One could say it's...

UPDATE: I spoke too soon, a substantial number of my tags are gone. Touché... again.

The UTS campus network started getting patchy around lunch time, and by early evening it was slow enough to be largely useless. My poor Cisco tutor instructed us in class to use "best effort" to access our online course material ;).

As of 22:00 AEST, it seems their network problems have spilled over to their internet facing site. I hope they can get it fixed soon.

Power outages do crazy things to people.

Electrical #fail

So there I was in our local coffee shop in Earlwood late this afternoon typing away on a laptop device. It helps typing on a laptop, typing on a table with no electronic interpretation going on only garners you curious stares and a trip to a squishy place in a strait-jacket. But I digress.

Getting an SMS from my sister (or "text" as Australians seem to call them), I was informed our abode was suddenly far less habitable owing to a lack of electrical power. Looking around the shop and down the road I saw plenty of other places of residence and business had ample power with their glowing lights and whatnot, so I chalked the problem up to a fuse. That's what TrueCrypt uses.

As I paid the bill and proceeded home under a rapidly approaching night sky, it suddenly struck me just how dark it really was. Having walked a block from the coffee shop, the street lamps that should have been lighting up the top of my head and the footpath in front of me were mysteriously dark. The houses along the street were no brighter. In fact, the only source of light other than the occasional motorised vehicle headlight and our natural orbiting satellite was a traffic light which bathed the whole area in a green glow. It was eerier than this:

Ruben != funny

When I finally arrived home, I was greeted by absolute darkness. Those strands of battery powered IKEA LEDs were surprisingly adept at lighting entire rooms, but I was more concerned that our broadband modem/router, refrigerator and water heater couldn't be run off them... in order of importance of course.

Deciding we'd rather not spend our time sitting in absolute darkness, my sister and I packed up provisions which consisted of overcoats, scarves, laptops, laptop power supplies, laptop power supply extension cables and CityRail tickets. It didn't occur to us that the electric trains may not have been running either, though we were assured by a friendly chap on The Twitters that they operate on separate grids. A relief, no doubt.

Having sat here in UTS for a while now using their surprisingly zippy internet connection and charging our phones, it's probably time for us now to head off into the night to take the train home, and to see whether our street has had power restored. If it hasn't, the students in my early class tomorrow morning will be resting their eyes on a cranky, handsome individual. I'll also be there, and I won't be too pleased either.

The last documented power failure to affect the proprietor of Rubenerd.com was in Singapore in 2008.

Two machines I've installed the Xfce spin of Fedora 15 on hang after logging in with GDM after the second boot. I haven't the foggiest idea why, but creating a new account fixes it.

In a nutshell, after logging in with GDM on the second boot, the Xfce desktop loads including the panels, but then the system freezes. The cursor can still be moved, but all clicks are ignored.

On a hunch, I...

1. used the classic CTRL+ALT+F2 just before GDM starts to bypass xorg
2. logged in as root
3. created a new account separate from the one created during installation
4. rebooted and logged in with the new account in GDM

Multiple restarts later, and Xfce is working just fine.

This leads me to believe that for some reason on my hardware (a homebrew MSI system and a ThinkPad X40) the Xfce preference files are somehow corrupted when being installed. By creating a new account those files are necessarily recreated when Xfce is started from that account, and those files are free of the bugs. I have no proof of this, but its all I can think of right now.

I use FreeBSD and Arch Linux on some systems because I like building things from scratch, but for getting up and running with full drive encryption, SELinux and [generally] graphics hardware, nothing gets up and running quicker than Fedora, from my experience. Of course by seeding design decisions to someone else, it also means tracking down the reason for bugs like this is harder, though I suppose one could level the same arguments against Mac OS X or Windows even more so.

If you haven't seen yet, VMware just updated Fusion to 3.1.3. I can't see amongst the list improvements any mention of fixes for VMware Tools for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation that I half-jokingly blogged about, but installing just in case.

My previous attempts to install the VMware Tools in NT 4.0 resulted in BSoDs immediently after rebooting, but for some reason on my forth attempt it generated the same error in a modal dialogue box immediently before restarting.

Still no word on my forum post on the topic either. Guess the adage applies... you get what you pay for. Hey wait, I did pay for this!

Do you get this unhelpful error sometimes when using Image Capture.app? The only solution I've found is to choose a different destination directory for the imported files, then try again.

Even if your chosen destination folder is on a recognised, writable drive with enough space, this error still crops up sometimes. Another bug that's lingered around since 10.4 Tiger, so Apple's developers either aren't in the mood to fix it, or don't consider it a priority.

Latest WordPress problem: it has decided to ignore page templates. If I go to edit a page, change the template under "Page Attributes" and click Update, it reverts back to "Default Template" each time. As such, my tags, archive and links pages are useless.

I have assignments to do so I can't waste time messing around trying to fix this, but letting you know its on my do to list. This may be another occasion where I have to bypass the web UI and fix it in phpMyAdmin.

In 2005 I decided to move to WordPress and I reaffirmed my decision in 2009 because I couldn't justify the time to port stuff over. I'm hoping I didn't bet on the wrong horse.

SegPub really outdid themselves this evening; my sites were (and still are) on average taking six minutes to load, and that was only when their domains decided to resolve at all.

I give up SegPub, I'm moving. You don't answer your support tickets, messages I send to your mailing lists are rejected and your service is getting laughably bad. My GeoCities page on dialup was faster.

I'm just glad I don't have any assignments for the next few weeks. SegPub have already cost me one high distinction when a demo site failed to load and I was failed for that part of it. Thanks guys :(

As my old man would say... bummaire

The Problem

This morning Rubénerd suffered yet another SegPub problem, this time the software couldn't connect to the database not because of an authenticate error but because it claimed it didn't exist. After roughly 15 minutes, the entire site went down.

Everything seems to be back to normal again as of 12:39 Sydney time. Including this one, this is the eighth SegPub problem I've documented since 2009.

I tell you what, RootBSD.net is looking better and better. I need a cup of coffee.

The Update

I just received an official communiqué from SegPub this afternoon. I like the word communiqué, it makes me sound cultured. Does that mean I'm a yogurt?

Hi Ruben,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Earlier today we suffered an outage in one of our internal DNS caches, that caused some internal DNS resolution issues, including being able to connect to our database cluster. The issues were fixed once we were aware of the problem and you shouldn't be seeing any more database problems.

I appreciated their timely response, but I still would have appreciated a heads up email when they knew something was going wrong instead of having to ask. Oh well, life goes on.