Unibody MacBook Crashes Solved

At least with a 99.9% certainty.

It seemed that the memory upgrade I bought when I bought the MacBook is having trouble. Weird, because under Leopard it worked just fine. Snow Leopard crashes (system freeze), and sometimes even with weird flashing lines on the screen.

I guess that Snow Leopard is a bit more sensitive about the memory that's installed.

Ordered a set of Kingston KTA-MB1066K2/4G @ Informatique. Let's see if that's more stable.

The old RAM I had was OCZ So-Dimm DDR3 PC3-8500, 1066MHz (P/N: OCZ3M10664GK). Let's see if I can put it in another laptop. A less picky one.

Update on Friday, October 2, 2009 at 23:44 by Willem

It's been over a day, and no freezes or hickups whatsoever.

Damn that Apple hardware is sensitive about the hardware you throw at it.

Apple Snow Leopard and Filevault

Ran into one of the most annoying bugs in OSX evah.... The earlier versions of OSX had a problem with Filevault and remembering certain default application preferences. This issue is resolved in Snow Leopard, but I ran into another (new) feature.

Whenever I put my MacBook to sleep it closes all running programs and documents (without any save option), and logs me off....
Waking the MacBook back up leaves me with the default log in screen. After the log in, it's like I rebooted the machine...

Need to remember to save before putting it to sleep, or to wander of for a couple of minutes.......

UPDATE: I fixed it. Yesterday I saw a flash of the error reporting tool of OSX while I opened the lid of my MacBook, and before it logged me out on the fly. This meant that there might be some info in the console application.
It turned out there were two applications generating lots of errors. Namely PGP and EyeConnect (some part of EyeTV). Somehow both had come over with the data migration.

After uninstalling PGP manually (because the regular interface didn't work any more) and removing all references to the EyeConnect application everything worked as it should (so far).

UPDATE 2: Never mind the previous cheerful update. LoginWindow keeps crashing. I even reinstalled the compleet OS on a seperate disk and with virtual no apps installed it keeps crashing. So the sleep mode is essentially unusable. I've been thinking of removing the Snow from the Leopard....

Apple OS X Leopard, Nokia N95 and Dialup Networking

One of the things I forgot to backup were the setting for Dialup Networking (DUN) on my MacBook. I use a Nokia N95 with a flatfee UMTS/HSDPA subscription. Both the MacBook and Nokia N95 have Bluetooth capabilities, so it should be a match made in heaven... Well, not completely.

You need specific settings AND files for getting this to work. First of all, Apple does supply several modem scripts for several phones/providers, but not the HSDPA/N95 combination.

Thankfully, I found this blogposting providing the modem scripts (local version). Having those makes it a lot easier.

Just unzip the file and place the scripts in the following folder:

/Library/Modem Scripts/

Click to read more ...

Snow Leopard So Far

The last couple of days have been Snow Leopard only. The Windows 7 hard disk is still gathering lots of dust in the corner.
Even though my Snow Leopard version may not be the final version, it feels solid on most fronts. Finder is even more intuitive. It starts to grow on me :).

I ordered my copy today. You can pre-order Snow Leopard in the Apple Online Store (upgrade costs around 29 euro/USD). With the free shipping it's a bargain (normally you need to spend >100 euro/USD for free shipping). This offer (free shipping) expires on August 27th 2009.

Upgrading to OSX Snow Leopard

I tried to upgrade to OSX Snow Leopard today. 'Tried' is the keyword here. It seems though that the current installment of OSX (Leopard) is installed on a file system supposedly UNSUPPORTED by Apple OSX Snow Leopard.

NOTE: I have no way of knowing if the release I have is the final 'Gold Master'. So it could be that my findings are irrelevant for the actual (official) Snow Leopard OS.
I will however verify my findings when I have the actual 'Gold Master' in my possession.

When you run the installer from the OS (or by booting from the DVD) I get a error message saying that I need a GUID Partitione Table disk to install the new OS on. Somehow I use a different (and unsupported) partition scheme. And I thought that I selected all the best options during the clean install a while back......

There's no way of converting (using Disk Utility and/or Terminal commands) this to the appropriate settings without formatting your hard drive. So a normal upgrade is out of the question for me (or so it seems). And for many others I guess, since I won't be the only one with the 'wrong' partition table setup.

Click to read more ...

OS X Calulator and Internet Access

This Little Snitch pop-up appeared after I launched the default Calculator application on Apple OS X.

Calculator Surfs the InterwebsWhy on earth would Calculator need Internet access? Looking for floating point error updates? Anyone else has any conspiracy ideas?

Apple Favors Own Products, or FileVaults Screws Up

Apple FileVaultSomething everyone would do I guess (the favoring part at least :) ). But Apple is doing this in a very peculiar way. When you run OSX with a ton of third-party applications you won't notice things, since everything runs as it should. But when you're going to use FileVault, things change. A lot....

FileVault is the way Apple secures your data. When turned on the OS creates a sparse iage of your userdata. So everything stored within your user directory is encrypted using AES-128.

The use of FileVault screws up certain system files. One of those is (or several for that matter) is used to store the default applications. Like FireFox for Internet instead of Safari. Every time you reboot your system the default application settings are read.
This weekend I also found out that at least one handy program also disagrees with FileVault. Little Snitch won't properly save it's registration info when you're using FileVault.

You know what the worst thing is? This BUG is present since Panther (OSX 10.3). I wonder if this is going to be fixed in Snow Leopard. To be honest, I doubt it. If they can't figure it out in 4 years, they probably never will.

As a security savvy nerd I want to use FileVault on my MacBook, but the problems with FileVault made me decide to uninstall this feature. Too bad that there are no other real alternatives. Truecrypt (or PGP) is nice, but it can't encrypt your hard disk (from which you boot) or even your user directory. Check Point seems to have software, but there's no way of buying it easily. So it seems that's it's mainly reserved for corporate environments.

UPDATE: w00t... They solved this annoying 'feature' Apple OS X 10.6 a.k.a. Snow Leopard. Way to go Apple. Although it being several OS releases/years too late!!!!

Dilemma Gigantica

Oké. At the moment I run a server at home. This server runs several services which I need (at the moment). These services include:

• File sharing
• Web server (mostly for testing and development, since this website is hosted @ Dreamhost.com SquareSpace.com)
• *cough*Download station*cough*
• Mail Server (serving several personal domains)
• SSH Server
• Local onsite backups

All this runs on an old (especially in IT terms) PC with Windows. The CPU and other peripherals sucks in electricity like you've never seen before (it's an old AMD Thunderbird CPU from the early overclocking days -> 2000/2001). Apart from being old, it's also responsible for about 70% of my energy bill (a 'rough' estimation). Besides that, it's also responsible for permanent subtropic temperatures in my study.

Click to read more ...

Apple Releases Safari 4.0.2

Apple released Safari v4.0.2. Besides the regular security fixes they also fixed the bug which made Rabobank Internet Banking 'go haywire'. So I could in theory move from Firefox to Safari.... In theory I said :).

Apple Releases Safari 4.....

and breaks the functionality @ Dutch Rabobank Internet Banking.

I got the Safari 4 update this morning, and with most Apple updates I just install them. After the update I launched it and was (at first) surprised at the Interface. It opened with 'Top Sites'. An overview of Websites along with thumnails... Nice.

Since I had a web browser open, I launched the Rabobank Internet bankieren website. Since Apple boasts with the fact that Safari 4 passes like a gazillion Acid tests (and Microsoft like only 1)

Safari 4 ACIS tests results (according to Apple)From another source:

On February 24 2009, Safari 4 was the first fully functional build browser to pass Acid3.[22]
On 08 June 2009, Safari 4 was the first official release version of a desktop browser to display a score of 100/100 and pass the Acid3 test.

The main page worked fine, but transferring funds leaves you with empty screens etc. There is no way of managing your money with Safari 4.
I haven't search for workarounds, since I don't want to search through knowledge bases, or sniffing through settings within Safari (or OSX). A browser should work.

So they might be perfect in a lab environment, but I'd rather have a less perfect browser which enables me to manage my money.

So, to summarize:

Safari 4: 100% ACID 3 proof, and a 100% failure rating in displaying websites
(since I only tried one website)

Anyway, back to FireFox for me.

B.t.w. I have tried the same with Internet Explorer 8 on a worklaptop (since it got pushed through my throat), and that one works fine. Even when it's not in its compatibility view mode (for displaying non-standard websites). Must the one of the few times that Internet Explorer seems to work....