Series of 10.6 bugs related to erasing (formatting) an external drive

OS X Grab is a pretty simple utility, so I was quite surprised when it hung with a spinning pizza of death (SPOD, SBOD) on saving a screen capture.

Deleting preferences didn't help. I switched to the Admin account to test there, and it hung with a blue screen.

What the heck was going on?

The source of this and several other bugs, including a lockup the night before, was I was performing a 7 layer erase and FAT format on an external drive being recycled for donation.

It appears than several Finder/File system related operations in 10.6 will hang when an external drive is being erased.

I've been using 10.6 for a few months on my newest machine. It's not bad, but it's still not as stable as 10.5.

Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter.

Buzz is up, though at the moment it's sluggish and it looks like Googel IM/SMS may have cratered along with it. Probably being hammered.

The Buzz site says it's being rolled out gradually, but I clicked the sign up button there and it seemed to add it to my Gmail. It looks like my Buzz followers include my Google Reader shared item followers (I'm following 43 people and 22 people are following me) plus my Chat correspondents.

The Buzz shared items are the sum of Chat status messages, Google reader shared items and Picasa image shares:

Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites.

"Connected sites" create posts in Buzz. Mine started out with Picasa public albums and Google Reader shared items. It's not, however, showing my Chat status messages as a "connected site" so there's something funny there. Those should really show as "connected sites". [I don't think Chat updates are doing anything at the moment].

I think that Buzz is the gathering point and Buzz posts don't go to Google Reader shared items or to Chat status, but really it's hard to tell. The site is semi-stable at the moment.

I've never had much use for Twitter, and it looks like I'll have even less use in the future - especially if Google ties this into SMS.

PS. Viewing the people I follow, I see that my "leonine" OS X 10.6 user account icon has now metastasized to be attached in Gmail's Buzz follower view to my corporate email. Where will it go next?

Update: I reviewed how these display in my Google Profile, and I decided it was a bit too much information to have publicly available there. My Google Profile is very discoverable, hence corporate. So I removed the connectivity to Reader Shared items. I'll explore this over time.

Update 2: I wonder if Google will even try to submit an iPhone Buzz app, given that Apple would almost certainly reject it.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion

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OS X Address Book: How do you show all groups for a Contact?

Once upon a time, an early version of OS X Address Book allowed one to see all the Groups to which an address belonged:

InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed - Address Book: "the group setup window should appear,"

I don't believe there's a group setup window any more. It's easy to add an address to a group, but I don't think there's away to inspect or interact with an address and find out which groups it belongs to.

I often want to do this, particularly when I deal with duplicate address book entries.

Sigh.

I doubt Apple will fix this. If they ever do crack the hood on Address Book, maybe they could also fix the "Find Duplicates" function - such as provide a "show duplicates" option. Or at least document what the merge behavior really is!

Update 2/26/2010: Per Comment by Kate: "Simple. Select the address card you want to find groups for. Press the option key. The groups the address belongs to will be highlighted." Knowing the answer I searched on this, and found only one reference in an old version of Pogue's "Mac OX X" Missing manual series. How did Kate know this?

Update 2/27/2010: It's in the "manual" (online help). Of course. It's not even hard to find. I searched on "show groups" and found:

Select a contact in the Name column.

Hold down the Option key.

Address Book highlights the groups the contact belongs to in the Groups column. If you have a lot of groups, scroll the list to see all of the highlighted groups.

Total humiliation, total fail.

Sync heck: CalDAV vs Exchange Server - a Google Apple review

Two years after writing "Synchronization is Hell" I'm pleased to report it's been only a bit heckish of late for my iPhone and our family Calendar.

Three months ago I switched my iPhone sync to

• CalDAV to multiple Google Calendars, including my wife's family calendar, my personal calendar, and various school and sport and social calendars all shared via Google. (iCal also subscribes to these. It's useful when I want to see the most data, but it's not essential.)
• MobileMe for Personal Contacts. MobileMe manages Contacts sync for me across multiple OS X machines.
• Microsoft's "Exchange" (ActiveSync) for my corporate Contacts, Calendar and email.
• Gmail for my personal mail.

Yes, it's rather complicated. Life would be easier if the iPhone could handle multiple ActiveSync accounts - then I could also sync to Google using ActiveSync. I lost access to my Google Contacts when I switched my single iPhone ActiveSync client to the corporate server. I think I'm now ready to retry Spanning Sync, which I gave up on about a year ago and take another stab and "Project Contacts".

Despite the Contacts loss and some quirks, it's been a miracle to finally have work and personal and other calendars all in one place. I have a fairly full and complicated life, and being able to coordinate calendars this way has been genuine progress.

There are a few limitations with this I never see mentioned elsewhere -- so here's the exclusive list:

1. On my iPhone I can't move an appointment between calendars after I've created it
2. Exception handling is quirky. I can set an appointment in Google to workweek only, but it may not stay that way on my iPhone.
3. I can't invite people to appointments created on the iPhone CalDAV account, even though Google supports invitations. I can do invites with the ActiveSync account.

See also:

• iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
• Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.
• Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
• Address book sharing with OS X and MobileMe
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
• MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts

Update 4/14/2010: Currently my iPhone can't edit CalDAV synced appointments that have invitations. Really annoying. iPhone OS 4 will support multiple Exchange connections so I'll try using ActiveSync instead when that's out. I don't know if this is a CalDAV, Apple or Google issue.

Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7

Between Dell machines shipping with motherboard disconnected SATA cables, a Clampi Trojan on my Windows 2003 server, a mysteriously vanished backup [1], Windows 2003 blue screening on a new Dell workstation, a failed Acronis disk image and the horror of 64 bit Windows 7 it's been another fun week in tech.

Today was a bit better. I installed VMWare Player on a 64bit Windows machine and created a 32 bit Windows 2003 VM - giving it all four cores and 3GB of memory. After VMWare tools installed and I enabled hardware graphics acceleration it felt faster than on the prior 3 yo workstation lost to the wretched corporate refresh cycle.

Mostly easy, until I dealt with the second drive in the box. Even after I used shared folders to map to drive E:, and the ancient DOS subst command to assign a drive letter to the shared folder, I still couldn't write to the new shared folder. I could read, but I couldn't delete anything. If I tried, I got an "access denied" message.

Worse, it seemed I could write to the drive, but the data wasn't there. VMWare showed files as having been copied, but in Win 7 they weren't there. On restart the VM didn't see them either.

The fix was to right click the drive letter in Windows 7, choose properties then security, and allow "EVERYONE" full control of the E: Drive. Then Windows 2003 in the VM could read and write.

I suspect there's a less severe fix. After I left work it occurred to me that I should study the read/write permissions on the C: drive. I suspect the vmware_user (__vmware_user__) group has special privileges on that drive, I just need to study them and replicate them for the E: and F: drives.

I'll update this post with what I find.

PS. It's unnerving that my Google searches really didn't turn up anything useful on this topic!

[1] Retrospect Pro backup on external drive. It vanished! Dir *.* and Attrib *.* showed nothing with 325 GB used. Retrospect could find the files though -- it restored from the backup drive.

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Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup

Time Machine, among its other significant weaknesses, is ill suited to offsite backup – especially when it is used with Time Capsule.

If you attach an external drive to Time Capsule there is an “archive feature” that will shut down TC access and safely transfer the data to an external drive. Problem is, neither the drive nor the backup are encrypted.

Carrying around non-encrypted backups is not a good idea.

There’s a similar problem with a standard Time Machine external drive. If you swap them, you run into the same encryption problem.

The answer for an external drive is to use an encrypted disk image and mount that for TM backups. That doesn’t, however, work with standard Time Capsule archive behavior. I suspect one might be able to disconnect all clients and use the finder to copy the disk images to an encrypted disk image, but I’ve not tested that.

See also:

• Time Machine - Unable to Complete Backup bug on Time Capsule
• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule
• Time Machine- Fail first, then flaw discovered
• Time Capsule 10.5 Backup volume could not be mounted bug

Time Machine - Unable to Complete Backup bug on Time Capsule

I'm not a fan of Time Machine. I run into more TM bugs than I ever saw with cranky old Retrospect -- and I get less notification of problems.

Today I found a critical laptop hadn't been completing it's TM backup for about 2 days. It was showing a common, unhelpful, error message "time machine an error occurred while creating the backup folder".

David Alison's Blog has the answer for a standalone time machine. Turn off TM on the affected machine. Then navigate to your TM backup folders and look for something like "2010-02-01-134046.inProgress". Delete the "inProgress" file.

This doesn't work for Time Capsule though. TC won't let you delete the inProgress file. I couldn't find any report of a fix, save dragging the actual machine specific TC sparse disk image to the trash and starting over. (The official response to all similar problems, by the way, is to wipe the entire TC disk and redo ALL machine backups).

What worked for me was to turn off Time Machine on all the TC clients. Then I restarted the AirPort and then turned TM back on for the troubled machine. The backup chugged away for a while, and then it resumed.

See also:

• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule
• Fixing the Time Machine / Time Capsule 10.5 "Backup volume could not be mounted" bug

Windows 7 is OS X Warp(ed)

One of my work machines now runs Win 7. It’s the first time I’ve had to do more than play with it.

It helps to know OS X, but it also hurts. There’s a lot of stuff in Win 7 that’s a tasteless and ugly version of OS X. Take the desktop themes (please).

Hard to say if it’s really an aesthetic improvement even over XP. The XP interface feels light, sharp and clear by comparison.

Update: For example - "Program Files (x86)". Thousands of Google hits puzzling over that one. WTF were they thinking?

Update 2/4/10: OS X managed a smooth migration to 64 bit. I've had a few days of experience with the Win 7 mix of 32 and 64 bit ODBC, Oracle, Java, Microsoft Office, SQL Developer, etc. It's a train wreck. It brings back memories of early DOS experiences. This 2007 tech doc tells one part of the dreadful story.

Computing keeps getting more bizarre

At home I’ve retired my six+ year old XP machine. It lives on in a cloned Fusion VM [1] on my iMac. The dead hulk of the machine waits for anyone who might make use of it, but it’s most likely headed to recycling.

It’s a relief to be done with it. It worked well enough to the very end, but it was a flaming security hole (no antiviral software – that cure is worse than the disease) and it howled like a demented banshee.

At home the four Macs and three iPhones are quiet. So quiet I now notice the ever running fan on my G5 iMac, a fan I never heard when the XP box lived. OS X is kind to me. It all just works.

At work though, I still live with XP. Not just XP, but XP layered with monitors, automated maintenance systems, encryption software, automated backup software that isn’t useful, misguided and aborted security layers and only Satan knows what else. At work, computing is bizarre. I don’t think my workplace is atypical; I suspect this is true of many large publicly traded companies.

Consider this.

I reboot a Windows 2003 box after a failed disk cloning attempt to discover the boot disk is hosed. [2]. So I take a look at my personal backups (since the corporate backups are effectively useless) and find the disk has no files.

Nothing.

But Retrospect Professional (Windows) shows the backups have been working.

Nothing will show any files. Chkdsk reports no errors. But 325 of 350GB are in use.

So I try a restore from Retrospect – and it works.

The files are there, but invisible to cmd.exe. (No, not marked as hidden, truly invisible).

I suspect some side-effect of an cryptic corporate attempt to secure/encrypt USB peripherals. It’s not worth trying to debug this – I don’t have enough control over the pieces.

I have to assume we’re reaching some nadir of corporate computing – that things will improve somewhat with a migration to windows 7. It is ever more clear, however, that those of us who are cognitively dependent on our computers will need to have our own computers and network access at the workplace.

Which is good news for the iPad.

[1] Which is periodically slow and awkward on my quad core 10.6 machine compared to Fusion 2 on an older MacBook. Fusion 3 on 10.6 quad core needs work.

[2] Could be a side-effect of the Acronis disk cloning, but I doubt it. I suspect it would have been hosted on any reboot – that machine hasn’t been restarted for weeks.

Online backup – the security problem (it’s not the encryption)

Here’s how you lose everything.

First, someone gets control of your email account. It might be a security vulnerability, or a password attack (note: “tigger”, “angel” and “soccer” are not wise choices), or a password reset, or an inside job.

They then sell your email to someone who takes a look, and finds a backup report from, say, CrashPlan. They then reset your CrashPlan password:

Please submit your email address. Afterward you will receive an email with a link that will reset your password and securely display the new password to you. The provided link will only work for one hour.

Now they have access to everything you’ve backed up.

CrashPlan talks about their 128-bit Blowfish encryption (standard) or 448-bit CrashPlan+ encryption and how robust that is. As Schneier used to point out before he was overwhelmed by the boredom of it, this is rather besides the point. Their use of the industry standard “password reset by email” process means they’ve built a solid steel door on a house made of rice paper.

It’s not just CrashPlan of course. Google is little better. This reset problem is just one aspect of how broken passwords are (don’t get me started on “security questions”. Please.)

CrashPlan also offers a “data password” that encrypts at the client side. So even if someone gets control of your online backup they can’t actually do anything with the data.

Except … Well, CrashPlan’s FAQ dodges around this, but since the encryption is client side they can’t make any changes to whatever you’ve already backed up. So if you want to add, or change, your data password you have to wipe your online backup and start over. If you change it, but don’t start over, you better keep your old and new password since data may be encrypted with one or the other. In my home a full family CrashPlan offline backup takes about 4 weeks, so this is not a trivial change.

Note that I’m using CrashPlan as my example here because they’re the best in the offline consumer backup business, and they are the only offline backup plan I’ve considered. They just have the usual problem with their password reset procedure.

How could CrashPlan make the best of a bad situation? Well, in the unlikely event that they read this, they can research higher quality reset procedures (not #$!$!$ security questions). Those reset procedures often involve two factor authentication procedures, such as the procedure myOpenID almost got right. They involve more expense, so it would be reasonable to for CrashPlan to charge extra for a higher quality security service. They really don’t need more encryption, they need better reset controls.

In the meanwhile this problem has tipped me away, for now, from using offline backup. I’ll continue to rely on physical drive rotation for offline security and I may make use of CrashPlan’s (free, unfortunately – I distrust the longevity of free things) ‘backup to friend plan.

Update 2/4/10: For more on CrashPlan.

Update 5/17/10: Matthew Dornquast of ChrashPlan replies in comments.

EXIF orientation tag bug returns in Snow Leopard - sideways pictures

Almost five years ago Image Capture would corrupt the EXIF image orientation tag on import:

Gordon's Tech: Image Capture Rotate per EXIF iPhoto 5 = Nasty problems

Image Capture has had a bug for several years -- with my Canon camera it duplicates the EXIF orientation tag when it auto-rotates on import. This confuses iPhoto 5.04 -- iPhoto re-rotates portrait images a second time (interestingly the thumb nail is upright) and so the image ends up rotated 180 degrees. I was sure this bug must have been fixed in Tiger. Wrong."

The problem went away with 10.5, but it's back in some form with Snow Leopard. The slide show shows some of my old images sideways. This didn't happen in Leopard.

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The Blogger in Draft line spacing bug - illustrated

In a kind rebuttal of my claim that Blogger is troubled, Rick Klau, a Google Product Manager, wrote:

… There is a new text editor available on www.blogger.com (available under settings) which is the default on Blogger in Draft. It significantly improves the authoring interface, addresses a number of the issues you referred to, and opens up a number of integration opportunities for us with other Google properties - we're doing QA on the next batch of integrations right now…

When I described the longstanding troubles I’ve had with the Blogger in Draft rich text editor Rick responded;

… Odd to hear about formatting problems with Draft's editor - it's pretty rock solid. Please ping me with any indications of what you're seeing - that's almost certainly a bug that we'll want to fix if it persist…

So I’m pleased to say I have a good example of the bug. I believe it’s related to the old CR/LF, CR, LF problems in DOS/Windows, MacOS and Unix – augmented by the transition to the unicode standard. (I’ve read recently that all of Google’s new tools require translation to unicode).

Here’s a recent post of mine, authored using Windows Live Writer (Windows only) as it renders in Chrome 4.0.249.78 after posting (it shows the same way in WLW):

Here’s how it looks in Blogger Classic using Chrome:

And here is how it renders in Blogger In Draft using Chrome:

Yes, the line spacing is wrecked. From past experience, this is messy to fix up. When you fix the line spacing here, it comes out double-spaced on publishing.

I’ll point Rick to this post. Hope it helps!

Update 1/29/10: Based on Rick's comment below, Google is looking into this one.

Update 2/1/2010: There's a similar bug with Safari on OS X. When you quote a block of text everything double spaces.

Update 3/10/2010: I just had blogger in draft completely screw up a post composed 100% in Chrome on XP. It's far from ready.

Fixing off-screen XP windows in the big display world

This is an ancient tip, probably well known to many, but I’ve had to rediscover it a few times.

Big monitors break the display model used by XP apps. I presume this was fixed in Windows 7 and I don’t think it was ever broken in OS X, but I run into it quite a bit. The usual symptom is that I’ve moved my laptop between displays, especially big displays like my 27” i5 iMac (used with my Dell laptop as a display), and app windows are partly off-screen. In particular, the control surfaces (top bar, bottom bar) may be inaccessible, so I can’t resize or move the window.

All kinds of apps are prone to this, including Office 2007.

I’m sure there’s a utility to fix this [1], but there are two things that usually work for me:

• If the app supports multiple windows (Office 2007), then open another window. Then, right click the app name the Taskbar and choose “tile”. This brings all the windows into view. (Note that you need more than one app window before you can tile.)
• Change the display resolution transiently to 1024x768. The open windows usually move back into the screen. Resize them, then change back.

[1] Long ago there were many sources for good XP utilities like this. Now those sources seem to have been swamped by spam sites, and the security risks are very high. These utility distribution sites never had much of a business model unfortunately. It’s interesting to compare this to the Apple App Store distribution model.

The Google Voice web app on my iPhone

It's not a true substitute for the iPhone app that Apple killed at the start of the Google-Apple wars, or even for the third party GV apps we've lost, but it's a long delayed good replacement for the initial GV web app (see also):

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice for iPhone and Palm WebOS

Today we are launching a new Google Voice mobile web app for iPhone OS 3.0 and higher and Palm Web OS devices, harnessing the power of HTML5...

In addition to letting you access a streamlined version of your Google Voice inbox, the new web app also lets you display your Google Voice number as the outbound caller ID (so return calls come back to your Google Voice number), send and receive text messages for free, and place international calls at Google Voice's low rates.

To get started, visit m.google.com/voice in your mobile browser. For quick access, don't forget to create a shortcut to this URL on your home screen or Palm Launcher...

There are many limitations of this web app, such as:

1. startup lag: I hope it's less laggy than the current web app, but still can have long delays compared to a phone app.
2. authentication: The web apps don't store my google credentials. Every couple of weeks Google makes me re-enter them -- typically while I'm very busy doing something else. This sucks. My Google password is not trivial to enter.
3. I'm not sure whether displaying my GV number as outbound caller ID is a feature or a bug. I think it's a feature. The way the phone makes calls differs from the old web app.
4. no call or SMS notifications: You can't really use this for incoming calls or SMS because there's no notification function if the web app isn't running. This isn't so bad for me since I don't use GV this way, but I might use the number more if I could receive incoming calls! I'd love to use it for SMS and get rid of my SMS bill!
5. no integration with phone contacts. There's also no way I can see to edit my Google contacts information on the phone.
6. you can't specify which start screen to use
7. The configuration UI for "caller ID" is unclear whether this is for outbound or inbound calls.

The good news is

1. In many operations it feels a lot faster than the previous web app.
2. If you view a contact and save the web page shortcut to the phone screen you get a quick way to call that person, saving several screen refreshes.
3. There might be a way to use this to reduce my SMS costs. I'll report back on this.

It's enough of an improvement that I may have to go back and look again at a way to integrate my Google Contacts with iPhone/OS X Address Book.

See also:

• Calling from Montreal to St. Paul using Google Voice
• Google GrandCentral (Voice) has been saving me $80 a month
• No Google Voice for iPhone? AT&T’s deal with the Devil …
• The Apple-Google War: The Battle of Google Voice
• iPhone trouble: Apple rejects Google Latitude, possibly Google Voice
• My Google Voice experience: mobile interface a bit raw
• The (historic) Battle of Google Voice - Enter the FCC
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone
• Project Contacts: iPhone 3.0 means I hack away at Google Contacts, and discover another rough spot

Update 1/26/10: Uh-oh. I'm getting SMS notifications on my phone for every SMS message sent to Google Voice -- and I pay 20 cents apiece for those!! No, it's SMS notifications for voice mails, even though I had that disabled in my Google Voice settings. It's a bug, but probably not new. There's no way to report this bug to Google, their support service problem classification doesn't include "other" and this isn't one they've classified.
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iMac G5 capacitor repairs - via Macintouch

I recently reworked our home network, and our almost- 5 yo G5 iMac is doing quite a nice job as the (yech) Parental Controlled homework/learning workstation. The transition has been educational for me as well, my kids taught me that educational videos will play quite well if one is careful to close CPU-sucking pages running (ugh) Flash animations.

During the transition I had to reset the SMU to deal with one of many causes of the G5 non-stop fan problem (CPU sure was cool though - 60 C). I also popped the case to blow massive amount of dust off the fan and vent. I love the user-serviceable plastic case design; it was a high point of Apple customer-friendliness.

When I popped the case I checked the capacitors. In one of the many sordid bits of Apple hardware history they shipped a bazillion iMacs with flawed capacitors. Many of those failed under warranty, but Macintouch tells us they continue to die over time. A lot of iMac buyers lost some loot there. (I wonder if the iMac's original fan/heat problems contributed to this.)

I just checked mine and I didn't see any bulging, but it's worth noting that there's now a small G5 iMac capacitor repair/replacement industry ...

Macintouch - iMac G5

... Late last year one of the other guys at work started repairing iMacs on the side, replacing the swollen caps. He gave me a full set (since I had given him the idea in the first place when mine failed, I think) and said "give it a try" with a few pointers. I replaced all the caps over a weekend and now I have a fully functional iMac G5 in my workshop to replace the 8500 and 7300 that were there... Check around locally for smaller tech shops. In South East Wisconsin, MacCetera does the repair for a flat rate of $200 + tax, including parts.

... My iMac G5 suffered a swollen-capacitor death two years ago. Once they were replaced it has been running smoothly 24/7 as a database/Web server and Skype phone.

... The owner of www.badcaps.net performs motherboard capacitor replacements on G5s. It'll run you less than $75 for a premium capacitor rework.It's worth checking out the site if you're considering getting a 3rd party to perform this repair. They also have a knowledgeable tech forum that has discussed many G5 hardware issues.

See also*:

• iMac G5 fan noise: another cause (before Apple's software fix worked)
• iMac G5: fans running more often
• Bad fan design is the bane of the iMac G5 and Silencing the G5 whine: I think this was fixed by my version - iMac G5 rev 2: a lot cooler?
• Fix for 10.4.3 fan problems: unplug and restart and resetting the SMU (PMU?)
• iMac heating problems and the curse of the Canon printer driver and (one of my most popular posts) My MacBook fan was roaring. Why? - evil OS X drivers.

* When I do these reviews of old posts, it strikes me that before the wonders of Google Custom Search I tended to discover and forget things -- and I was younger then!

Update 12/18/2011: "Cordwainer" (Karen Cotton) has written an extensive comment on the story of the capacitor failure. Worth a read. I still use that G5, and the capacitors still work.