Syncing iPhone to iTunes 9.1

So some people have noticed that syncing an iPhone to the new iTunes 9.1 seems to result in iTunes not seeming to notice the device is connected.  My finding is that upon restarting after installation got everything working fine. YMMV.

Naked Sex!

Sorry, just running a test to see if readership went up at all with the above title.  Feel free to go about your business now.

Interesting (New?) Easter Egg in Mac OS 10.6.2 Sync Services Log

So I was browsing in System Profiler (as I often do.  Don't you?), and came across the following.  Note the highlighted text at the top (last) of the syncservices.log entries, and please excuse the smudging.  The window grab has been modified in no other way:

For those unaware, the late George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen had a schtick where, at the end of their comedy act, George would say, "Say goodnight, Gracie", and she is supposed to have replied, "Goodnight, Gracie."

She never actually did reply this way: her reply was always simply, "Goodnight."  Some other comedy troupes of the era had done this joke in the past, and apparently it stuck in the popular ethos as having been her.  And so it has, apparently, for Apple's SyncServices programmers.

Don't be too harsh on them, Apple.  The server had to report something, and this probably saves code over several more boring things it could have said.

An idea in need of an acronym ("HSDICs" doesn't seem to cover it…

So I've been riffing today on the idea of intentional communities with some stipulations of my own:

1. Why, other than the use of polluting modes of travel, can't members of such communities live separately from one another?  Why, in fact, couldn't there be an intentional community (at least in part) of tele-commuters?
2. If the intent is truly to share in the community's well-being, why can't individuals within the community swap jobs every once in a while, to try out each other's work and see who may do it best/love it most/etcetera?

I'd love to hear from some readers, and have some commentary to throw around on the possibilities.  Myself, I envision an intentional community living relatively close (walkable, bike-able, or at very most, single bus/light rail-ride-able) within a physical community (a useful example for me, being Portland's east side).  All members of a given community should live there, but not all have to work there, provided that they either:

• live close enough to where they work, that the above people-powered, or single public-transportation jaunts will suffice to get them to work and back; or
• they telecommute.

The members of this community should be willing to share with all other members what their job is, and whether they would like to leave it/are looking for one.  This information should be shared among the community before looking outside the community.  Kind of like an internal CraigsList, with the main difference being job swapping.

Not loving what you're doing at the moment?  Why not swap jobs with a friend, try their line of work for a few months and see if you like it any better/are any better at it, or if the grass was just greener.  If both people are interested in the other's line of work, it could be a growth opportunity for both.  If not, then back to their old jobs.  At worst, the confidence of former clients and colleagues may need to be restored.  At best, you may have found yourself a great new career!

Like CraigsList, I could see this idea getting popular enough to try out in several areas of the country, creating several distinct communities.  This is great for telecommuters, but what about everybody else?  Areas to work on include:

1. I'm still working on how the logistics of entering and leaving a given community (or, being a member of a geographically far-flung community while you telecommute) affect the idea as a whole.  
2. As one might expect, there have to be ways to make sure it's completely legal and doesn't fly in the face of equal opportunity employment.
3. What else occurs to you?

Please, discuss.  Suggest.  Tell me what you think, and how to better the idea.  Just give me credit, please, for the original idea: hot-swappable [in terms of jobs] distributable [in terms of locale] intentional communities.  And, as in my title, maybe that gives us an area to improve: a catchy acronym!

Not resolved: Complete Time Machine crash in 10.6.1

With any way to handle information, mistakes crop up.  Just play "telephone" (whispering a message from person to person) with any group, and you'll see that the message that reaches the last person is wildly different from the message that started out.  So it's really no surprise when backups crash.

What is surprising in this case, however, is that thus far, there seems to be no way of tracking down why it crashed, and how to repair the damage.  Spoiler alert: in the end, I simply decided that the backups going back a little over two months were not valuable enough to keep trying, and I wiped the image they were on, and started a new backup from scratch.  This does not mean the problem is solved, just that it was circumvented with losses I decided were acceptable.

How it happened: Well, I was using my 10.6.1 system as normal.  I was running Growl 1.2b4, which I had heard from some quarters could interact weirdly with Time Machine (old versions of Growl, with old versions of Time Machine).  At some point, I'm sure I shut down the computer in the middle of an over-the-wireless-network backup (to a .sparseimage, not on a Time Capsule, but a third-party drive connected to an Airport Extreme base station), which has never created a problem before.

But somewhere after some such shutdown in the middle of a backup (is this the cause?), the .sparseimage simply would not mount for Time Machine to backup, failing and "delaying" that backup attempt.

So I tried to open the .sparseimage in Disk Utility.  It hung for quite a bit, but finally told me I couldn't (unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to copy down the error message).  So I disconnected the drive from the Airport Extreme and connected it directly via Firewire 800.  This time, the icon changed to the same as a different user's folder, which you don't have access to (a folder icon with a red/white "no access"-style circular symbol over it).  Attempting to do anything with it just resulted in being told that I didn't have privileges to access it, but oddly didn't provide any place at all where I could have entered an admin password (possibly because the only password with access to it would have been the root password, and the OS is constructed such that the only way to enter that is via the Install DVD, if the computer has a root password set at all.  It's big juju to mess with anything that requires a root password!).

So I gave up, and trashed the apparently corrupted .sparseimage, then created a completely new Time Machine backup for the drive.  The only way in which it seems to function differently (other than only having backups starting from the new date) is that the backup name is now "Time Machine Backups", rather than the "Backup of [My computer's name]" as it had been, since Leopard.

I was sad to see the old backups go, but anything that I've needed to restore from backup (to my knowledge) has already been restored.  An added bonus is that I reclaimed quite a lot of disk space.  Still, it would have been nice never to have had to trash the old backup, and restart a new one.  Does anyone out there have similar experiences, and any suggestions I might not have tried?

There is no end to the geekiness: Printing oddness on 10.6/.1

So in the past, I had a printing difficulty on 10.5.8, which was that I got a kernel panic when printing something from an Adobe app over the network from my laptop to an iMac sharing its Epson printer. Once I started the laptop back up from its kernel panic, prints from Adobe apps continued to function normally, but anything else printed from the laptop had to be while the laptop was physically connected to the printer via USB. The job simply wouldn't send from the laptop to the printer@the iMac at all, giving me a dialog in the print queue which cited a glitch in some printer library file so deep in the innards of the system that I honestly can't remember the path.

Apple couldn't help, either on forums or via AppleCare phone line. Epson couldn't help. So I backed up, downloaded the 10.5.8 Combo updater (I had been using Delta updaters through most of Leopard*), and installed over my current system, hoping that would overwrite whatever bad juju was happening with the print library file, and clear up the troubles.

Lo and behold, it did. Printing from any app over the network to the printer@the iMac worked just fine.

So since correcting the 10.5.8 printing problem, I've installed Snow Leopard and then, 10.6.1 on the laptop. The iMac can't take Snow Leopard: it's a last-generation iSight G5 (I tell ya, I was kickin' myself a couple months after buying that, except that in retrospect, the first generation Intel Core Duos wouldn't be able to support 64-bit in Snow Leopard, either).

Somewhere along the way between 10.6 and 10.6.1 (which, from a troubleshooting perspective, is a wide swath of uselessness, but I'm just reporting how memory serves), I found that network printing from the laptop didn't work again This time, however, given the message in the print queue, the reason was apparently different (unless someone at Apple had simply chosen to re-write the cryptic dialog into something very slightly less opaque). Now the printer queue was being paused, whenever a job was sent to it. Every time, paused, repeatedly, over and over.

I seem to remember once when I was able to go to the iMac, found the job in the print queue, and resumed the print queue, successfully printing the job. This of course, required more interaction with the iMac than simply picking up the printed pages from the printer. But in those instances, it was a ham-fisted way to eventually get the same result (ie., walk downstairs to where the iMac and printer sit together, and get the print).

But at least since installing 10.6.1 (another instance of "I'm not sure when," which throws things off), the job never even seems to show up in the iMac's print queue, and resuming the laptop's print queue simply makes it immediately pause it again.

I tried deleting and re-installing the laptop's print queue. Other than changing the printer icon back from the generic icon Snow Leopard gave me on original install, to the one specific to the printer's make/model, this didn't accomplish anything: still no network printing due to an immediate and persistent pause to the queue when jobs were sent to, or present in, the queue.

So I did a Google search with the non-quoted (because including the quotes will make Google think you want the words in that specific order), "printer paused 10.6". I came up with this page, which provided various things to try. The first "Answer" is the one which worked for me, but a caveat: it will delete all your current print queues!

Basically, go to the Print & Fax pane in System Preferences, option-click on the list of print queues, and select "Restart printing system" from the contextual menu which pops up. If you can deal with the caveat above, and losing your pretty printer-specific icon in favor of the generic one Snow Leopard gives you, then you may be in network printing business! I know I am (for now).

Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on your specific printing symptoms and the root cause (correctly communicated to you by the system in a dialog box, or not). If you're still not in business after trying this solution, you may wish to try others on the page to which I link above. If none of those work, you may even want to try the semi-drastic† approach of downloading the Snow Leopard Combo update (though as a write this, there is no such thing, because only the 10.6.1 update has been released, and there is no difference between a Combo or a Delta update for the first one after a major release), and re-install that.

* For those who may be unaware, a "Delta" update simply updates your system from whatever it is, to the next iteration (which in Mac OS X, is like 10.x.1 to 10.x.2, or 10.x.2 to 10.x.3, etc., but never 10.5 to 10.6, because you do need to purchase a DVD for that, which cheap as it may be this time around, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish). By contrast, a "Combo" update brings together ALL of the updates from 10.x.0 through whatever version you're at (in the above example, the Leopard Combo updater re-installed all the most current updates for 10.5, through 10.5.8). A Combo update is a bigger download because it has more data over several versions to update, and you have to find and select the Combo updater for download manually from here, but it's also a better way to squash bugs which might have cropped up from one Delta update to the next.

† As in, not fully drastic, which is wiping your system and re-installing it all from scratch, avoiding even using as much of your old user data as possible, as some of it might again corrupt the printing system. I would recommend avoiding this fully drastic approach if you at all possibly can, because even though you have backups (you do, don't you?), accessing and using those backups from a former user will always be a convoluted system for whatever you're doing, at best. If nothing else besides this option lets you function how you want to, then I urge you to weigh the hassle of having to find another printing solution (like connecting directly via USB, if that still works) versus having to kludge a way to get back to the data in your old user account whenever you need it (not covered here; do-able, but a pain in the tuckus).

In any event, good luck, and I hope my solutions help others, either directly or by educating!

Geekiness galore: Same startup behavior on 10.6.1

Testing using the same steps on 10.6.1 yields the same result as discussed in my 9/4/09 post (including the fact that the workaround to boot from 10.5.8 functions correctly).

Just riffin' here, but could the fact that Rosetta isn't installed by default in Snow Leopard have anything to do with the legacy QuickDraw imaging that the Hardware Diagnostic uses? Probably not, as QuickDraw is a legacy OS9 technology (originally designed for 680x0 & PowerPC chips, though a ROM or firmware kludge obviously makes it run on Intel for the Hardware Diagnostic, at least when booting from a 10.5.x volume), whereas Rosetta is a run-time PowerPC to Intel interpreter. But just a thought.

In any event, I haven't tested by installing Rosetta (no need to have extra code on the HD or in RAM/using processor cycles when I have no other PowerPC apps I really need to run). But if anyone would like to test with Rosetta, I'd love to hear the result.

So Apple didn't address no Hardware Diagnostic in 10.6.1. Maybe in 10.6.2?