Work issued me with a mid 2012 MacBook Air, one constant running issue has been rebooting on wake from sleep after a thunderbolt display has been attached or detached in previous state, with the upgrade to 10.8.3 I also started experiencing graphics glitches on wake. In the last week things took for the worse, Friday & Saturday I experienced my system going back to intial login screen on wake & after logging in having two concurrent sessions which meant some apps didn’t work correctly, Sunday night after a fresh reinstall, system failed to detect system disk but after 15 minutes everything was ok, on Monday I rebooted & the system displayed the progress bar at the boot screen as if it was flashing firmware though I’d not initiated an update.
Today I returned to my computer to find the system hung, power cycling the system produced the same flashing folder with a question mark which means unable to find system folder.
Booted of a 10.8.3 USB flash disk, disk utility reports a 33KB Sandforce SSD!
Posts Tagged ‘Mac’
My 33KB SSD
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013Rearranging the keys on Apple keyboards to the Dvorak layout
Thursday, February 9th, 2012I’ve been using the dvorak for just under 8 months now according to the date (17/6/2011) on the printout I have pinned on my wall of the US Dvorak keyboard layout from Wikipedia.
Its been ok-ish so far, I’m used to the layout now but still prone to making mistakes, my main gripe with it is the position of the W & V keys, one slip of the finger when pasting something & you lose what you’re doing because you’ve just closed the window instead, this has happened on several occasion, usually when working remotely via an SSH session. It’s ok apart from that, just need to focus on keeping my hands still on the correct keys & letting the fingers do the work rather than move my hands around the keyboard.
Scrolling through the Dvorak simplified keyboard article on wikipedia, I saw a pair photos in the Mac OS section of a cordless keyboard & iBook with rearranged keys in a Dvorak layout.
I had assumed it wasn’t do-able & not looked into it further but a quick search showed it was pretty easy as this video shows.
To remove the keys from your keyboard just pull the top of the key to unclip & slide down to release, within a couple a minutes my cordless keyboard looked like this

Putting the keys back was pretty straight forward & went seamlessly, sliding the keys up to place into position & pushing down to clip into place, within a couple of minutes my keyboard looked like this

As this was easy & quick to do, I assumed the keyboard on my Macbook Pro would also be the same, so began pulling the keys off, most of the keys on the centre 2 rows came off without any problems but then I reached the right hand side of the keyboard & found keys which took a bit more persuasion to unclip & it was downhill from there.
I managed to pull most of plastic clip out of the pin sockets which are used to levy them, this took a bit of fidding to get back in but I managed to do it without breaking anything which was good but as I was a little rough handed on couple of them, I managed to pull the rubber spring off the face plate


Fortunately, putting the keys back on again wasn’t too much hassle, the two keys which had their spring come off initially missed key strokes but seem ok now (the spring needs to reseat into a better position?)

I’d like to make this change on my ThinkPad keyboard too but the keys which fit around the TrackPoint have different shapes to the rest of the keys.
L2TP/IPsec VPN clients unable to authenticate after 10.7.3 update
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012If you’re finding users are unable to dial-in via L2TP/IPsec VPN after upgrading Lion Server to 10.7.3 then check /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log
If you’re seeing DSAuth plugin: Failed to retrieve MPPE encryption keys from the password server: errno -14484, ctxt 4 logged on dial-in attempts then you’ll need to adjust your password policy.
There is an Apple support article HT4748 which covers how to make this change.
Thanks to the user bobgeo on the Apple discussion forums for the pointer.
Running nwdiag on Mac OS X
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012nwdiag is a tool written in python for generating network diagrams from text files, rack diagrams can also be built using the bundled rackdiag utility.
nwdiag requires PIL built with freetype2 support, if this is missing you’ll receive the following error when you try to generate a diagram:
ERROR: The _imagingft C module is not installed.
Following the instructions in the README file included with PIL, once the build process completes you’ll receive a summary:
PIL 1.1.7 SETUP SUMMARY
--------------------------------------------------------------------
version 1.1.7
platform darwin 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jul 31 2011, 19:30:53)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2335.15.00)]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--- TKINTER support available
*** JPEG support not available
--- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
*** FREETYPE2 support not available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
--------------------------------------------------------------------
It appears that freetype2 support is not built by default & I wasn’t paying enough attention so I missed the notice following the summary
To add a missing option, make sure you have the required.
library, and set the corresponding ROOT variable in the
setup.py script.
After a brief search I came across this blog post which covered how to define the paths for the freetype library & header files.
Setting FREETYPE_ROOT in setup_site.py to
FREETYPE_ROOT = "/usr/X11/lib", "/usr/X11/include"
solved the problem & the summary listed --- FREETYPE2 support available when I reran the build process.
After that everything worked fine, the following config generated the image at the bottom of the page:
nwdiag {
inet [shape = cloud];
inet -- router;
router;
network office {
router;
"Mail server";
"Web server";
}
}

The project is still in its infancy and there are features missing for implementing common elements from a cisco discipline (like representing etherchannel) but it’s promising as you can put a simple diagram together very quickly.
Connecting to shared calendars on ical server using the Lightning extension for Thunderbird
Thursday, January 19th, 2012To access a shared resource/location calendar on a iCal server from the Lightning extension for you’ll need the GUID for the calendar you wish to access, see my previous post on how to obtain it.
Once you’ve obtained the GUID, construct a url using the following convention (assuming you’re connecting to the server via SSL)
https://yourserver.somewhere.local:8443/calendars/__uids__/your-shared-cal-guid/calendar/
Switch to Thunderbird, go to File > New > Calendar…
Select “On the Network” from the wizard & press continue
Select “CalDAV” as the format & for the location specify the URL you constructed using the convention above & press continue.
Once you’ve specify a name for the shared calendar & pressed continue you should have access to the shared calendar.
Connecting to shared calendars on ical server using an iPhone
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012To access the shared resource/location calendar on a iCal server from an iPhone via the caldav protocol you’ll need the GUID of the shared calendar.
First, find the GUID of calendar on the server using the calendarserver_manage_principals command, eg
sudo calendarserver_manage_principals --search shared
1 matches found:
your shared cal (Resource)
GUID: 6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686
Record name(s): 6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686
Then on the iPhone (assuming the device is unmanaged), create a new CalDAV calendar account & fill in the correct server, username & password field & hit next.
Assuming everything went ok, you should be back on the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” page, select the new calendar you just created & advanced settings.
Edit the “Account URL”, replacing the UID on the end of the url with the GUID of the shared calendar you noted down on the first step.
eg:
https://username@yourserver.somewhere.local:8443/principals/__uids__/6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686
CUPS generates “Internal server error” when visiting administration page
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012It seems that Mac OS Lion server (10.7.0) may have been released with a broken CUPS configuration. Visiting http://localhost:631/admin would generate an “Internal server error”, this seems to be addressed in newer builds (my Macbook Pro which was install from a 10.7.2 image does not exhibit the problem yet a customers server which came bundled with 10.7.0 (upgraded to 10.7.1 > 10.7.2) does).
To resolve the issue sudo cupsctl --debug-logging
Then switch off the debug logging with sudo cupsctl --no-debug-logging
I suspect the problem is due to a missing directory because comparing the default, previous & current revisions of the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf did not show anything that could cause problems.
I’d also go far as to say that you don’t need to turn on debug logging in-order to resolve this issue, it can be any of the options that can be set via cupsctl as it checks the configuration of the system, this is just a theory as I was unable to dig further because I was on a production system. Resetting the printing system did not solve the issue when attempted previously.
Improving the speed of a SawTooth G4 PowerMac
Monday, September 18th, 2006Disable the onboard Broadcom chipset network card & stick a Intel i82558B chipset network card in the system, I used a Compaq NC3121 which can be picked up off ebay for next to nothing. The card doesn’t specifically have to be i82558B based, I think OS X supports the entire range of the Intel chipsets supported under the *BSD fxp driver.
Booting straight to the console on Mac OS X
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006The guide on O’reilly Network covering howto bypass the OS X GUI doesn’t seem to work on 10.4.x (I haven’t verified it on previous versions yet), as the guide mentions you need to uncomment the first console entry & comment out the second entry in /etc/ttys
You then need to goto /etc/mach_init.d/ & remove WindowsServer.plist
I highly recommend that you move the file into somewhere else instead (I moved mine into /etc as it’s alot easier to roll back).
Once you’ve rebooted & logged in you should find that the system stays at the shell instead of jumping to a blank blue screen with a cursor.
Surprise, More Benchmark results
Monday, March 20th, 2006This time from a £300 Dell Dimension 3000 running OS X 10.4.4 with a 16MB TNT2 m64 PCI graphics card installed as the onboard card is not supported.
compare results here
Results 47.91
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4.4 (8G1171)
Physical RAM 512 MB
Model ADP2,1
Drive Type SAMSUNG SP0401N
CPU Test 50.12
GCD Loop 71.35 3.76 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 68.36 1.62 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 29.68 978.99 Mflop/sec
Floating Point Library 57.23 9.97 Mops/sec
Thread Test 95.33
Computation 70.31 1.42 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 147.98 6.37 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 69.75
System 60.54
Allocate 45.84 168.33 Kalloc/sec
Fill 83.04 4037.70 MB/sec
Copy 63.72 1316.09 MB/sec
Stream 82.27
Copy 79.54 1642.87 MB/sec
Scale 79.94 1651.63 MB/sec
Add 85.41 1819.49 MB/sec
Triad 84.52 1808.05 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 36.45
Line 33.85 2.25 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 23.61 7.05 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 25.20 2.05 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 66.73 1.68 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 94.28 5.90 Kchars/sec
User Interface Test 36.60
Elements 36.60 167.97 refresh/sec
Disk Test 38.91
Sequential 71.79
Uncached Write 44.16 27.11 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 91.29 51.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 78.80 23.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 106.13 53.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.69
Uncached Write 8.84 0.94 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 68.24 21.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.52 0.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 115.52 21.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
More Benchmark Results
Monday, March 20th, 2006XBench results from my G4 PowerMac with SATA disks installed
compare results here
Results 19.38
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4 (8A428)
Physical RAM 640 MB
Model PowerMac3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 450 MHz
Version 7400 (Max) v2.8
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 225 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,R350
Drive Type WDC WD1200JS-55NCB1
CPU Test 20.67
GCD Loop 43.58 2.30 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 14.04 333.48 Mflop/sec
vecLib FFT 22.79 751.85 Mflop/sec
Floating Point Library 18.04 3.14 Mops/sec
Thread Test 21.41
Computation 19.39 392.84 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 23.90 1.03 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 14.00
System 18.66
Allocate 46.73 171.62 Kalloc/sec
Fill 18.49 899.16 MB/sec
Copy 11.72 242.17 MB/sec
Stream 11.20
Copy 10.54 217.72 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 10.65 219.94 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 11.91 253.66 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 11.84 253.26 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 23.58
Line 21.31 1.42 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 19.14 5.71 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 20.11 1.64 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 30.81 777.20 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 32.61 2.04 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 28.94
Spinning Squares 28.94 36.71 frames/sec
User Interface Test 9.87
Elements 9.87 45.29 refresh/sec
Disk Test 60.80
Sequential 80.24
Uncached Write 98.83 60.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 105.54 59.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 45.87 13.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 118.21 59.41 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 48.94
Uncached Write 18.52 1.96 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 110.22 35.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.48 0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 131.51 24.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA PCI Card not list in System Profiler
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006Download & install the latest firmware from Sonnet Tech Support & all should be well!
b0 error
Monday, March 6th, 2006You’ll receive this error if you have partitioned your disk using the 10.4.4 Disk Utility, using a Windows 98 Bootdisk run
fdisk /mbr
then run fdisk & make the partition you installed OS X on active & reboot, OS X should boot now without any probs
Overlapped Extent Allocation Errors (File 123465x) Fix
Saturday, October 29th, 2005Due to a lack of disk space I decided to zap my /System & /Library folders while my PowerBook was in Target Disk mode & connected to my G4 PowerMac, only to find out that I couldnt install Tiger when I got the PowerBook home ![]()
Running Disk Utility & trying to repair the disk brought up several Overlapped Extent Allocation Errors (File 123465x)
After laying a few bricks here & there as I hadn’t backed up (surprise! surprise!!!) I googled around & came up with this
As Keoneo mentions in the 3rd tip, if you make a note of the file numbers DiskUtility complains about, fire up terminal.app & run find / -inum 123456 (dont worry about any of the letters at the end of the file number)
You’ll be given the file name of the offending file number, unfortunately you cant actually delete the individual file, you have the delete the folder which the file is in by typing the following command in terminal.app rm -rf /path/to/offending/file/
If you are doing all this from the OS X install Disk or if you have connected the broken disk/System to a healthy Mac add /Volumes/*disk_label*/ to the beginning of the path e.g if your broken disk is called "Macintosh HD" you would issue the follwing command
rm -rf /Volumes/Machintosh\ HD/path/to/offending/file/
note the backslash between the word Macintosh & HD, you need to have that in so the shell understands that whatever you are referring to has a space in otherwise it treats the text either side of the space as two seperate things which wont work!!
Once you have removed the offending files, run repair disk in Disk Utility again & all should be well again!! ![]()
Verify and Repair disk "Macintosh HD"
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 29573 instead of 466435)
Invalid volume directory count
(It should be 5662 instead of 80007)
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 5920335 instead of 1269081)
Volume Header needs minor repair
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully.
Mounting Disk
1 HFS volume checked
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 HFS volume repaired
Improving Virtual PC performance under OS X
Saturday, August 20th, 2005From the Application Preferences in Virtual PC install the script menu. Then pick the VM from the Virtual PC list you’d like to speed up, goto the Virtual PC Scripts section in the script menu & choose Toggle System Disc Cache.
Running Solaris 9 on Mac Virtual PC
Saturday, August 20th, 2005Solaris 9 normally wont allow you to install onto a virtual machine on Virtual PC, it bombs out with the error 486 Processor Detected
This Processor is not supported by this release of Solaris
Thanx to this simple hack found on Kernel Thread its possible to install Solaris 9 without a hitch on VPC
Simply run the following commands against the .iso of the install CD or Software #1 CD:
perl -pi -e 's#Pentium II#ff/08.....#g' filename.iso
&
VPC 6 users: perl -pi -e 's#GenuineIntel#ConnectixCPU#g' filename.is
or
VPC 7 users: perl -pi -e 's#GenuineIntel#Virtual CPU #g' filename.iso
Running OPENSTEP on Mac VirtualPC
Sunday, July 10th, 2005I has not been possible to run OPENSTEP on Virtual PC for Mac for quiet a while (since V6), until now ![]()
The new update for VPC (v7.02) solves some issues which allows you to once again install OPENSTEP, the install process goes pretty smoothly aslong as you dont install any additional components (samba, aditional languages, documentations etc etc), otherwise the window manager will keep on panicing & restart cause of excessive DPS errors
MSN Video / Webcam support
Thursday, May 26th, 2005the cvs checkout of amsn (0.95 Beta) comes with video support enabling you to use your webcam on the MSN IM network ![]()
I had problems tryinig to get the last 2 nightly builds to run on OS X 10.4
After a bit of googling around I came across a packaged version of a nightly build from a couple of days ago for OS X here
Enjoy!
http://usuarios.lycos.es/sonicromsx/amsn.dmg
17″ PowerBook xBench Results
Thursday, May 26th, 2005compare results here
Results 132.93
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.1 (8B15)
Physical RAM 512 MB
Model PowerBook5,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.67 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV360M11
Drive Type ST9100823A
CPU Test 193.63
GCD Loop 182.83 7.14 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 193.07 698.23 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 204.41 5.94 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 199.44 3.10 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 189.86 7.60 Mops/sec
Thread Test 137.50
Computation 97.15 1.31 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 235.21 2.95 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 133.55
System 141.28
Allocate 771.57 503.29 Kalloc/sec
Fill 170.86 1360.08 MB/sec
Copy 71.00 354.98 MB/sec
Stream 126.62
Copy 125.39 916.62 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 126.36 932.57 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 129.31 827.57 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 125.50 766.79 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 149.33
Line 130.15 3.31 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 125.46 8.83 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 146.70 3.38 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 161.82 1.76 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 207.00 3.37 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 134.70
Spinning Squares 134.70 94.27 frames/sec
User Interface Test 231.27
Elements 231.27 74.39 refresh/sec
Disk Test 69.98
Sequential 79.31
Uncached Write 86.47 36.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 58.84 24.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 152.72 24.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 65.26 26.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 62.61
Uncached Write 48.56 0.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 63.16 14.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 71.21 0.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.50 15.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
More Toys, YAY!!!!
Thursday, May 26th, 2005Since I last posted I have bought myself a beautiful new 17″ PowerBook & a cool new iSight.







