Notice you're not getting any voice mail messages on your iPhone?

Turns out AT&T's visual voice mail is out of order for many users -- and they haven't mentioned anything ...

AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

... the most recent AT&T failure is completely inexcusable. Its visual voicemail system — which is the only way to be notified of voicemails on the iPhone — has been down for many users for days, if not weeks. And AT&T apparently didn’t bother to tell anyone...

I just tested, it's working in Minneapolis St Paul. In general though our AT&T network is not as lousy as many other cities.

Note this article was written before the Google Voice iPhone app debacle.

Fixed: My iMac was losing net access – but only for one account …

Some days, I feel like the aging Sheriff in a bad western. The bad bugs been walkin’ into my town for years, and I’ve been shooting ‘em down.

‘Cept I’m not as fast on the draw as I used to be, and the bugs are getting meaner. Sooner or later the bad guys are gonna take this town – unless a new Sheriff comes along.

Not today though. I dropped the latest bastard. It took a few shots though. Not a clean kill.

I’ll tell the story, but first some background. I’ve been weeding my network for months, dealing with a slew of problems that seemed to be software related but were probably more hardware.

I’ve replaced the NIC on my old XP box and an ancient AirPort Extreme. I worked my way through way too many AirPort Time Capsule issues with cobbling together 802.11b,n,g across multiple devices, but it seemed I had things fairly stable.

Wrong. I’d be working away happily, and my browser sessions would hang. Sort of. Well, actually, Safari would first give me weird error messages about being unable to obtain a secure connection “Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server...”. Firefox said something similar, though sometimes it would work when Safari wouldn’t.

A little bit later though, I’d lose all browser access.

At first I wanted to blame my DSL provider (Qwest), but I’d given them a hard time when the truth was my AirPort was dying. So I decided to be a bit methodical. It took a while but I found …

• Other machines were fine.
• Other accounts on my iMac were fine.
• I could ping things, I could do email, I just couldn’t use my browser.
• When Safari died completely, no other browser worked (Firefox, Camino).
  
• Sometimes logging out and in again would fix things, sometimes restarting the machine, sometimes restarting the Time Capsule …

So it was something to do with my user account and maybe with Time Capsule. My next step was to enable logging on the Time Capsule and to learn to use the OS X Console (equivalent of XP Event Viewer).

That was a revelation. There were lots of little system problems showing up in Console. As it turned out, I had to clean them out before I could find the real problem. So I fixed a MobileMe related bug, removed 2-3 Widgets [2] and learned about MenuCracker and cleaning that out [1], but I was still getting locked out.

Once I’d cleaned up the other Console messages though, I found the sweet one ..

7/22/09 10:50:13 PM com.apple.familycontrols 7470 failed to send kill to 7714. Err:3 No such process

Ahh, yes. Parental Controls, the bane of Apple. Of course my standard user account shouldn’t have Parental Controls, but this made sense. I use Parental Controls and the kids machine and I know how they work, they could cut off my browser access – though there’s supposed to be a UI notice.

I checked the PreferencePane for the problem account from my Admin account, but there seemed to be no Parental Controls set. On the other hand, when I viewed the Parental Controls Preference Pane I wasn’t seeing the big yellow icon and the notice that “Parental controls are turned off for this account”.

So here’s where things get even more obscure. Let’s say you have a User Account and you want to remove Parental Controls. Just enabling everything isn’t enough, there’s another mysterious step.

Here’s what you do

1. Log out of all accounts.
2. Go to an Admin account
3. Go to Parental Controls
4. Click on the (problem) User Name.
5. Look carefully for a small gear icon above the lock icon, window bottom\
6. Click on the gear and choose “Disable Parental Controls …”

It’s been several days now without browser failure, so it looks like I got another bad guy.

If only I knew this one was the last …

---

[1] It’s a hack that allows apps to put an icon in the Finder title bar; it’s not a separate app, it’s a “.menu” resource in the Application Package. If you decide you want to get rid of it, you have to find and uninstall every app that uses it, such as, in my case, MenuMeter. I don’t think MenuCracker was causing me serious problems, but it was producing Console error messages and it has caused grief to some in the past. I not only removed it, I removed Perian and a “Better Finder” Preference Pane. Trying to get simple …

[2] I was surprised by this. Looks like non-Apple widgets are problem prone, I’m sticking the Apple ones – don’t really use them anyway. In particular, I was surprised how many were active in the background – putting error messages on the Console …

iPhoto feature: drag folder create event or album

I've back on iPhoto 2008, but I suspect this is still true.

If you drag a desktop folder of images to an empty area on the iPhoto album list you get an album named after the folder.

If you drag the same desktop folder to the iPhoto Library:Photos icon you get an Event named after the folder.

I used to do the former, lately I prefer the latter.

iPhone development - an overview for the curious

via DF: Matt Legend Gemmell – iPhone Development Emergency Guide.

I'm not an iPhone developer, but I still enjoyed this. It's a great way to understand more about how the iPhone is put together.

Great article.

Time Capsule's nearly Fatal Flaw

Apple customers need more spine. This fanboy isn't nearly ballistic enough (emphases mine)...

Mac 301: Time Machine backups after your Mac's brain surgery

... Replacing the logic board is essentially like getting a whole new Mac; though all the data on the hard drive is identical, the new logic board will have different hardware identifiers (specifically, the MAC address) that will tell your Time Capsule, "This is a new Mac that's never been backed up before. Please treat it as such." The Time Capsule, doing as it's told, will fumble along and create a new Time Machine backup while ignoring the old backups completely.

Your options then are these:

1. Scrap your old Time Machine backups and start fresh. There may be an allure to this, but it's almost certainly unnecessary, and you can lose months of perfectly good backups. Plus, you then have to deal with the incredibly long first Time Machine backup all over again.

2. Hack your Time Machine backup using the following procedure, which will allow you to resume Time Machine backups as though your logic board was never replaced.

So you send your machine to Apple to get fixed, confident that you're fully backed up with Time Capsule.

Your machine returns in great shape with a wiped drive. No problem, you think, you've got Time Capsule ...

Oops. Your backup is worthless unless you can hack the backup image...

Excuse me, I need to breathe into a paper bag now.

Ok, I'm back.

Apple's forums have lots of threads on the topic, like this one. It seems poorly documented, but if you have the Time Machine icon in the menu bar (set via Time Machine preferences) and you option-click on it you get a "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" option.

I found one kb article with some information for Time Machine and another for Time Capsule ...

Restoring an existing Time Capsule backup to a new Mac
When your new Mac starts up for the first time, you are asked if you want to transfer information from another Mac or volume (in the "Do You Already Own a Mac?" window).
Click "From a Time Machine backup or other disk."...
... Time Capsule appears as a Backup Volume. Select it, then click Continue to proceed.
Enter the password for your Time Capsule...

Except that doesn't make sense. What if there are multiple machine backups on the Time Capsule?

I suspect there are workarounds, but it confirms my feeling that Time Capsule is half-baked.

BTW, there are interesting issues with FileVault such as ...

Note: If you use FileVault, your Home folder is backed up only when you are logged out.... If you use FileVault, you cannot browse for individual items in your Home folder. However, you can restore all files and folders by using the Restore System from Backup feature of the Mac OS X Installer

iPhone encryption is 3GS only – and how the data disappears

I read of iPhone 3 encryption at launch time, then heard no more of it.

I wondered where it had gone.

Turns out it's 3GS only dedicated hardware encryption, and it's invisible to the user ...

TidBITS Safe Computing: iPhone 3GS Offers Enterprise-Class Security for Everyone:

... According to Apple, all data on the iPhone 3GS is encrypted by default...

Great feature, though I'd like to see the ability of 3rd party apps to use it app-specific longer pass-phrases.

Update 7/21/09: I think Gruber pointed out that remote wiping doesn't require removing all the data, just the unique decryption key. So the data is still there, but it might as well be on the far side of the moon (unless there's a backdoor or a big math breakthrough ...). A NYT article on ‘vanishing’ data is relevant – the way to make data “vanish” is to require access to a centralized decryption key that can itself disappear. See also – DRM and the case of the vanishing Orwell.

MobileMe (.mac) and the OS X Console - bug and the console dock bounce

I've been trying to track down an odd 10.5.7 software bug.

Every 1-3 days, my user session browsers hang. I can ping the net and browse the LAN, but Safari and Firefox are unable to get secure sessions or access the net (I need next time to check if email works).

Weird.

Anyway, to investigate this I launched the OS X Console app (called ... "Console) and studied the output. I didn't see that much about the browsers, but I saw a series of recurrent ".mac" sync requests that were failing. I looked into my MobileMe PreferencePane (new name for .mac) and I still had the credentials of a MobileMe account I was trying. I'd canceled the trial account, but the OS was still trying to sync it. I clicked 'log out' (or equivalent) and the problem went away.

So there's a 10.5.7 bug with discontinued MobileMe accounts. If you discontinue your MobileMe account, be sure to "log out" of the old account in the MobileMe PreferencePane

The Console's an interesting place to look for odd problems, in much the same way as in XP one checks the admin event monitors. It does, however, have issues of its own. It transiently uses 100% of my G5 CPU, and it has a very obnoxious bounce behavior. Every time a line is written to the Console it bounces in the dock to get my attention. I admit, I can't ignore the bounce.

I'm sure there's a way to kill the Console dock bounce, but a Google search didn't turn it up. (You can, however, toggle all bounces via the terminal).

Now back to that networking/browser/http bug ...

Update: I have to laugh. There's a Console.app preference for "when an open log is updated" that toggles the bounce. My expectations were too low; I didn't even look.

Update 7/20/09: The weird bug struck again. I tried to hit an https resource and both Firefox and Safari couldn't get a secure session -

Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server...

In the past the next step is losing all http access. It's as though something were consuming a finite http related resource ...

I switch users and there's no problem, so it's a resource in my user session.

Then I check Console and find this ...

7/20/09 1:56:21 PM DashboardClient[23283] (ca.aquabox.widget.twidget) file:///Users/jfaughnan/Library/Widgets/Twidget.wdgt/Scripts/prototype.js: SyntaxError: Badly formed JSON string ... Twitter is over capacity

Huh?!

Yes, sure enough, I once installed a Twitter Dashboard client, Twidget, -- then forgot about it. It's making http requests in the background - constantly.

I wonder if it's consuming some resource ...

I've deleted it. Never occurred to me that the Dashboard client was sucking cycles -- I rarely run the db.

Update 7/25/09: Fixed. Turns out it was a Parental Controls bug.