SteveX Compiled

Apple apparently takes crash data seriously. Not only does the Mac offer to send crash data to Apple when bad things happen, but so does the iPod Touch (and, I assume, iPhone).

Last time I plugged my iPod Touch into my Mac, iTunes popped up this dialog:

Clicking "Show Details" brings up the Console app and shows me that the mediaserver process crashed:

Incident Identifier: 364AAD02-2AC2-4611-9427-0BD08AEFD7CE
CrashReporter Key:   bf96ba01b16e3d353c0403e378daea6aaac04d09
OS Version:          OS X 1.1.4 (4A102)
Date:                2008-07-08 21:40:13 -0400

15265792 bytes free
31113216 bytes wired
Memory status: 20
About to jettison: mediaserverd

Processes
 PID  RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE Command
   1   148K   276K   256K launchd
  13   376K   224K   600K CommCenter
  15  12.3M  11.2M  8.32M SpringBoard
  16   584K   352K   832K configd
  17   212K   224K   384K crashreporterd
  18   716K   516K  1.28M iapd
  19   292K   392K   600K mDNSResponder
  20   444K   628K   756K lockdownd
  21   188K   284K   276K syslogd
  22  84.0K   228K   124K update
  23   272K   224K   488K ptpd
  24  9.33M   972K  10.1M mediaserverd
  26   204K   256K   276K notifyd
 106  7.12M  7.92M  11.9M MobileMail
 269  2.21M  5.96M  3.26M MobileMusicPlaye
 291  10.1M  9.15M  8.43M Maps
 292   304K   284K   824K crashdump

**End**

Windows of course offers to end crash data to Microsoft as well (had has a great web interface for developers to use to pick up crash data in their own applications, something that I don't believe Apple does), but Windows Mobile doesn't do this, and I think it shows how seriously Apple takes the reliability of their mobile OS.

(Thanks to macosxhints.com for this tip on how to capture a Mac window without the shadow).

I have a fairly decent old system that I am repurposing to use as a main floor computer, something that will be used occasionally for playing a video for my son or maybe playing music. The computer I'm using used to be my Media Center, and so never needed to go to sleep. But in it's new role, I expect it to spend most of it's time asleep.

Vista, however, disagrees. I tell it to sleep, it goes all the way to sleep (including clicking off the power supply and fans), and then immediately wakes up.

Vista has some tools to help diagnose this sort of problem. The main one is the powercfg utility, described in this blog post by Brad Rutkowski:

POWERCFG has the answer to that question and many others, like -LASTWAKE will tell you why your machine resumed from sleep or hibernate.

For me, all this said was that "USB Root Hub" was waking up the system and I don't even have an external hub (it's the motherboard chipset that it's referring to). That's not right, so I asked it what devices were armed to wake up the computer (using "powercfg -devicequery wake_armed" as described here). That told me that my keyboard and my mouse were the only devices armed for wakeup.

Okay - so you can use the Device Manager in the Control Panel to set whether or not a device capable of waking the system is allowed to do so, by going into it's properties. It's not uncommon for a mouse to send spurious movements and wake the system up so I took away it's ability to wake the system and tested it by putting the system to sleep.

And it immediately woke up. Okay, so it must be the keyboard. I switched it so the mouse was armed for wakeup and the keyboard was not. Still no sleep.

I set it so neither of those two devices was armed for wakeup, and the system stayed asleep. Somehow, both my mouse and keyboard were immediately waking the system.

I tried a different keyboard, and a different mouse. No change. I have no idea why this system thinks the keyboard and mouse are both waking it up as soon as it goes to sleep.

Anyone else had this problem? I've seen quite a few people post about the mouse waking the system up, but I haven't seen anyone else with an immediate wakeup from both the keyboard and mouse.

(I do have ACPI 2.0 turned on in the BIOS, and set the other BIOS power related settings to things that seem to make sense.. but I'm not ruling that out as a problem).

I wonder how many geeky dads have spent early morning hours while their wives have been in labour writing contraction timing apps.

Too bad they haven't come up with any good ones.

The best one seems to be this one, but I think an Excel spreadsheet works better.

We had an old cheapie hot air popcorn maker that we bought for around $15, and it was okay. It would throw a lot of un-popped kernels out of the machine and into the bowl, and blow popped popcorn all over the place, but there was some fun novelty to popping popcorn this way compared to in the microwave or on the stove. And the popcorn it did pop was pretty good.

But then it broke.

I was at Zellers last night and they had a Beaumark Cinema Popper on sale for $44.95. It was big, and expensive, so I figured it must be good. I picked it up, brought it home, set it up, and started reading the manual.

I can't believe people pop popcorn this way:

• You have to split your butter up into 6 separate pats and place them over the 6 holes provided under the lid.
• You use vegetable oil on the hot surface, which means you need to clean it after you use it (compared to the hot air popper where you don't).
• There's no on-off switch; you plug it in and it starts heating.
• You have to un-plug it when you think the popcorn is done.
• During the last moments when you're wondering if it's done yet, the popcorn that's already popped is still on the heating surface, and likely burning, while you're waiting for the rest of it to pop.
• The lid is also the bowl, so you just turn it over and take the base off. Convenient right? Not so fast. First off, that vegetable oil you put in earlier? Now it's hot vegetable oil, and likely to pour out when you turn it over. And the base you need to pick up is hot too, so you're awkwardly holding the hot base upside down and trying not to spill oil on yourself once you've taken it off the bowl.

That last straw broke the camel's back; the thing is going back to the store.

I started looking around Amazon, which has a whole Popcorn Poppers category, and found a review of my previous hot air popper. Apparently people didn't like that one much:

"More than half the popcorn didn't pop, and I felt caught in some kind of insane popcorn crossfire while it was popping - shot popcorn all over the place, popped and unpopped. It practically only makes a handful per refill. Horrid." - Rebecca

But there is good news! One bad hot air popper does not a bad category make. The Presto 04820 PopLite Hot Air Corn Popper got 4.5 stars. I'm going to give it a chance.

And since I was paying for shipping anyway I went for some Amish Country Baby White Popcorn and some real Popcorn Salt.

Or I would have. I had it all in my shopping cart and ready to pay for, when Amazon said "sorry". They don't ship any of that stuff to Canada. What's a popcorn lover to do?

Joel posted a short article: Don't Hide or Disable Menu Items. I think it's bad advice.

Consider Paste or Undo. If you click the Edit menu, you can tell from the enabled state of the Paste item whether or not there's something on the clipboard that can be pasted. Same with Undo. If Save is disabled it means there have been no changes since the last save. The enabled state of these items conveys information.

I'd rather click Edit and see Undo greyed out, than click Edit, Undo, and have a dialog pop up telling me that there's nothing I can undo right now.

It would be nice if your Help system included a description of all the menu items, and when they are available. An lot of the documentation I've seen includes descriptions of menu items that add no information ("Undo: Undoes the last operation") and leave out valuable information like under what circumstance that item might not be available.
It's unlike Joel to post bad advice. Perhaps he need a little SEO and posting something obviously wrong would be a great way to get a lot of people to link to him with corrections?

According to Apple.com:

That site is about 740k (as of right now, I assume it was about the same when Apple tested it) so that works out to about 37k/second. If that's how fast the iPhone can download data, then to use the 400mb/month allocated in the cheapest $60/month Rogers plan, you'd have to be downloading data for 3 solid hours every day of the month.

The interesting thing here is that 38k/second is nowhere near the capacity of the 3G wireless network. Why is Apple advertising 37k/second as the iPhone's download speed?

For comparison, here are some users comparing download speeds from the 3G network using a laptop - at 241k/second, that page would have downloaded in less than 3 seconds.

A friend of mine plays World of Warcraft, and for a while, took over the market for a particular item in the Warcraft auction house.

Let's say it was Khorium Ore. Buddy logs in, buys up all the Khorium that's for sale for less than a certain amount, and then lists it for sale at the higher price.

Every day he does this, so that now he's effectively re-priced Khorium at the rate he has chosen.

The people mining Khorium are happy - someone is buying all the Khorium they can mine. Buddy's happy, because he's making a profit on every sale. It's everyone else on the server that's getting ripped off by his activites.

Now, substitute oil for Khorium, speculators for my buddy manipulating prices, and consumers for the people getting ripped off.

Is that what's going on? And, how does it end?

In Warcraft, it would eventually end because the supply would increase to the point where buddy couldn't possibly buy it all. But the supply of oil is limited, both artificially (by OPEC) and by the existing capacity to pull the stuff out of the ground.

Either the speculators know something that we don't - that supply is about to be naturally constrained by a real shortage - or they're creating a bubble, that will eventually collapse when supply outstrips their ability to buy it.

Microsoft released a tool that lets you move your content licenses from one console to another. This is a great thing for me because my 5 previous repairs (between Christmas 2005 and Christmas 2007) left me with content licensed to a mish mash of consoles, and a lot of content I purchased not tied to the console I'm using now, so I just went through the process.

Smooth, except for one part. Here are the last 3 steps of the migration process:

• Go to Xbox LIVE Marketplace and select Account Management, Download History.

• Select an item and then select Download Again.

• Repeat step 5 for each item in your download history.

Yeah, um, about that last step, repeat for each item in my download history?

That'll take a while.

Rogers Sucks.

While testing out my cable modem speeds at home (10mbps down, 1mbps up), I ran across the Global Stats page at speedtest.net. There are some eye-opening results there.

The #1 ISP in the world is giving out almost 60mbps! Even #10 in the top 10 is offering over 30mbps.

Neither Canada nor the US is in the top 10 countries by average download speed. Even Russia beats us! (North America averages 5044kbps).