Aunque muchos no os lo creáis, pocas veces me sale la vena de fanboy de Apple. No me gusta la pasión desmedida de muchos maqueros hacia todo lo que hace la compañía del siempre halabado (y pocas criticado) Steve Jobs. Por contra, reconozco que yo también he tenido mis épocas de seguidor ciego del padre Jobs, aunque cada vez menos. Supongo que al principio de entrar en en este mundo con los polos hundidos y un mordisco alojado en el este, es algo normal sentir pasión por todos los apartitos que nos venden a precio de oro (no son los únicos), los buenos señores de Cupertino. Lo tienen todo para atraer al público: diseño, elegancia, cuidado en los detalles, buen hardware, genial software..., y de hecho consiguen una clientela tremendamente fiel. Sin embargo, hay que achacarles que su visión del mercado, elitista y exclusivo en ocasiones, deja fuera a un gran número de personas, que son las que, por otro lado, tanto critican a Apple, pero al fin y al cabo los negocios son los negocios, y Steve Jobs, como tantos otros, está ahí para hacerse rico con ellos.

En cualquier caso, Apple tiene toque, porque no lo puedo definir con mejores palabras. Tiene ese toque que les cubrió de oro con el iPod, y que ahora les está llegando con el iPhone. Sin embargo, el punto primigenio y poderoso de Apple son sus Mac. Los preciosos MacBook, el archiconocido y delgado MacBook Air, la potencia del MacBook Pro, son un éxito y deberán serlo más con las bajadas de precio que sorprendentemente está imprimiendo Apple a sus productos. Más de lo mismo cuando pienso los iMac, que sorprenden por su diseño y capacidad a todo el que los ve funcionar, e incluso levanta admiración cuando están apagados... Los Mac Pro son pura potencia, aunque sí es cierto que el precio los hace solo visibles para un mercado pequeño. Y los mini...., los MacMini podrían ser la piedra filosofal de los Mac, pero Apple no quiere que lo sea. He llegado a la conclusión de que Steve Jobs no quiere que el MacMini sea tan popular y tan accesible para todos que masifique el mercado. No es esa la filosofía de Apple, su filosofía es la exclusividad, y el ser mayoría dentro de una minoría. Y así han pasado por encima de ataques virales y troyanos maliciosos que asedian constantemente a Windows, su eterno competidor.

Apple tiene toque, porque el revuelo que se formó con la presentación del primer iPhone solo es comparable a la que levantó con el iPhone 2.0, éxito en el mercado seguro. Steve Jobs y los suyos reinventan el mercado de los móviles y los smartphones, tal y como reinventaron los reproductores mp3 con el iPod. No podría deciros cuál es mi artículo favorito de Apple, porque hasta el Shuffle, que nunca me gustó, al tenerlo y jugar con él me apasiona, y ese es el toque de Apple, que de una manera u otra, para bien o para mal, apasiona.

This time, it was a Kernel Task:

I was not doing anything when the crash occurred.  In fact, I was at the iMac doing some research on the internet and when I turned to go back to work, there I see on my Mac Pro's monitor the gray curtain of death.

It saddens me that all these crashing has my blog turn into the Mac Pro/Cintiq crash watch!  If I look back to several previous posts, it all relates to the issues I am having with the Mac Pro and the Cintiq.  Let's add Adobe Flash CS3 to that mix, since it's the only app that I run.

Okay, on a lighter note, I have the iPhone 3G.  I intended to write about that but I was too swamped with work.  It was released July 11 in Canada and I think I am one of the lucky few who was able to get an fully functioning one on the day of the launch.  Pictures and write up to follow as soon as I can squeeze in the time.

Did that Adobe update I just did threw in something to make the system unstable once again?

I will be performing a haxies removal procedure once again and see if that fixes things up.

Will update as soon as something turns up.

Right after the update has completed it's run, I went back to work.  Not a few minutes after, Mac OS X crashed.

Aarrrgghh!

Isn't it dandy?  It was just right after I responded to a comment made on this post on how stable the system was this last couple of days.

Oh, and once again, it was the WindowServer that was at fault:

Hmmm, I am starting to suspect that my stock graphics card may be at fault here, but I don't want to upgrade and buy the other card until I am sure that is the case.

Sigh.  Doing another Repair Disk Permission to see if that stabilizes things once again.

This is one of those issues that has very little covereage on the web so hopefully this will help someone.

The majority of our workstations are Mac Pro desktops and we have quite a large number of them.  Due to this we tend to see problems that most people would not see with just a few workstations.  One of the most irritating problems these days seems to be exclusive to the newer Intel x86 Mac Pro workstations running TIger.  We have not run Leopard long enough to determine if it also has this issue.

The root volume will start to show file system corruption over a short period of time, but HFS and/or OS X will not reporting it to the user or in any of the log files and continue to make the corruption worse.  If the corruption is caught early on a simple Single User mode fsck will fix the issue.  If it not caught for some time then Disk Warrior is needed to repair the volume.  And if the issue is left alone too long even Disk Warrior will not help and a reformat of that partition (and re-install, being the root partition) is necessary.

These system are all on UPS Battery backup power so they do not shutdown uncleanly.  The systems are centrally managed and patched and updated regularly.  Only the Intel x86 versions show these symptoms.  PowerPC versions of our Mac Pros do not show any of this corruption.  The only reboots on these systems happen for System Updates so it is possible that System Update is rebooting the system before the file system is fully synced after the updates.

In order to detect this problem we routinely run a Verify with Disk Utility.  This can be done on the commandline with:

diskutil verifyVolume /

This command can be integrated into a cronjob which will email the administrator if a problem is detected.

Hopefully Leopard on x86 Mac Pro does not start showing these same symptoms, but time will tell.  Another post will follow if Leopard does show the same symptoms.

I was starting to think that I was the only one running this set up because anytime I search google for "Mac Pro and Cintiq crashing", it only led me back to my blog!  I really wanted to know if any one out there has the same set up as mine to find out if they too were having the same issues as I had.

So far, I have not heard from any one else.  It might be that most of them are really busy with what they were doing that they have no time to go online.  One that really makes me shudder is that maybe they are having a grand time with their set up and have no troubles at all.  I definitely envy them!

I posted my troubles in Apple's own discussion forum.  I had a number of responses, but not enough to give me a definite answer to why my crashes occurred and how to completely eliminate them in the future. The thread can be found here.  It gave small consolation that some do run a set up almost similar to mine, albeit with a different Mac Pro and Cintiq model.

I hesitate to say that what I am seeing from running this current set up right now is encouraging because I was burned before when I did that.  I will keep on monitoring this set up and hopefully the stability that I am experiencing will continue on.

Oh, I have to point out that right after I rebooted from the crash I had that day, I immediately did a Repair Disk Permission.  Just a note in case that helped solved the instability.

It indicates that Window Server was the cause of the crash.

I did a Repair Disk Permission right after restarting the machine. Then I restarted once again and will try to dive into work once more.

Sucks, doesn't it? An 8-core Mac Pro, supposedly the top model in Apple's desktop range, and a Wacom Cintiq refusing to work trouble-free? I know it does not say anything in the crash report that the Cintiq was at fault, but I was working on it when the crash occurred.

Does this has to do with my graphics card being the stock ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB GDDR3 memory (two dual-link DVI)? The card does say it can handle two monitors. But can it handle a touch screen LCD monitor?

I am trying to imagine if I would have fared better had I stuck with my Windows machine.

Sigh, better get back to work. Oh, tread lightly, Randy: you might cause it to crash.

Sheeesh!

I started reporting the crashes here.  By then, I was running under 10.5.3.

The most stable so far was when I run the Cintiq under 10.5.1.  This was the configuration that I had when I first took delivery and operated the Cintiq.  I could not remember experiencing any crashes back then.

I had to downgrade by reinstalling Leopard and all my other applications.  I installed a new hard drive on my Mac Pro and installed the fresh new Leopard on that volume, keeping the problematic configuration on the stock hard drive.

As I suspected, everything worked fine under 10.5.1 and I was able to work problem free for a week. However, I could not resist trying out the new Tablet Driver that Wacom released.  So I cloned the new hard drive onto the stock hard drive, virtually deleting the problematic configuration on that drive.  I then rebooted to that volume, performed a software update to get it back to 10.5.3, and installed the new driver.

It still crashed.

By that time, Wacom emailed me back and told me that there were haxies running in my system.  They found this out from the crash logs that I sent them.  They told me to remove these as they are causing incompatibilities and may be the culprit to the instability that I was experiencing with my system.

Still under 10.5.3, I performed this procedure to remove said culprit.

I was able to run this configuration for a number of days problem free, except for those two crashes that occurred recently.  Those crashes were kernel panics, and there was no mention of the Wacom Tablet Driver being the cause of the crash.  So, the haxies removal may have solved it.

Enter 10.5.4, Apple's latest software update.  I may be wishfully thinking right now, but I have been sending my crash reports to Apple and maybe they have included some software fix to this update version.

So this morning, I updated the volume running 10.5.1, the one on the new hard drive, to 10.5.4.  To do that, I first removed all Wacom Tablet Preferences and removed the driver itself.  Once the software update was complete, I performed the haxies removal procedure and once rebooted, I downloaded the latest Wacom Tablet Driver once again and installed it.

So there you go.  Crossing fingers once again and throwing all caution to the wind, I intend to run under this configuration.  Wish me luck!

Seit über 10 Jahren hatte er hunderte Diskussionen über das "warum", "ob" und "wieso". Ihr Apple-User kennt das, da heißt es immer: "Da ist doch alles anders", "Ich krieg ja keine Software dafür" [also "gebrannte Software", Ihr versteht?], "Ich will aber alles installieren können, was es am Markt gibt", "ähh, so teuer", "naja, sieht ja schick aus, aber ich weiß nicht...", "Windows-PCs haben doch alle, das will ich auch", usw. usw...

Ein bißchen hatte Webwomel schon aufgegeben. Milliarden Fliegen können sich nicht irren - Hundekot muß gut riechen.

Axel-Springer, wißt Ihr was Euer Problem sein wird? Vielen Eurer Mitarbeiter wird es schwer fallen, sich an die leichte Bedienung zu gewöhnen :-)

Schon verrückt - da hat eine ganze (PC-)Generation in Schulungen, Support, BugFixing und Wartung investiert... und nun das. Und ich höre schon die PC-geprägten Leute fluchen: "Das ist doof, das ist anders". Übersetzt heißt das: "Das ist so leicht in der Bedienung, das versteh ich nicht, ich war es komplizierter gewöhnt". Springer, stellt Euch auf zwei bis drei Quartale  Kulturschock ein!! ;-)

Klar, Apple-Rechner sind auch nur Mensch... äh. Computer. Aber man ist viel produktiver, weil weniger Zeit für Treiber-Problem oder DLL-Fehlermeldungen flöten geht. Mal abgesehen davon, daß das Fundament ein UNIX-Betriebssystem ist (sehr vereinfacht gesagt): Eine Art Linux mit cremig zarter Bedienoberfläche.

Spannend ist nur die Frage, ob man anwendungsseitig auch auf Apple umsteigt. Wird dann die Korrespondenz mit "Pages" geschrieben? Kalkulationen mit "Numbers" gerechnet? Oder MS Exchange abgeschafft und nur noch mit "Mail" gearbeitet? Werden Photos dann mit Aperture verwaltet? Bei aller Apfelliebe, schwer vorstellbar ;-) Demnach müßte ja auf allen Rechnern Windows laufen. Komische Welt. Aber dennoch ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung hinsichtlich Ergonomie, Sicherheit und Produktivität.

Nunja, ein Lichtblick nach über 10 Jahren. Die Vernunft scheint sich doch durchzusetzen. Gute Entscheidung, Prost auf die IT-Abteilung.

meint
Webwombel.

Pros
-Thin
-Light
-Sleek

Cons
-Price
-Not a Full keyboard
-Type for a long time may cause your fingers to be sore.

A interface revela a todo o momento, a velocidade que seria alcançada com um overclock.

Clique para ampliar

Ela só é compatível com a última versão do Leopard e com esses modelos.
Como mostra a imagem, a aplicação é muito intuitiva, mostrando a todo momento a velocidade que se alcançaria com o overclock.

I was just hating it. Here's a typical stare down between me and the darn things:

That's a genuine frown over there!  Too bad it was taken in profile; had I taken a frontal view, you could have seen the walnut-crushing crow's feet on my forehead!

I was running on 10.5.1 when I got an email from Wacom Support suggesting a fix. They said that from the crash log files that I sent them they found some haxies and that I should remove them because these are what probably is causing my crashes.

From my short stint googling for information, these haxies are probably from something called Application Enhancer, a third party app that, well, as the name suggested, enhances some apps. Haha, you can judge by my expert explanation how knowledgeable I am about that!

Anyway, it was worth a try to seek out these so called "haxies" and remove them from my system. I booted up to the 10.5.3 running and threw caution to the wind. I googled a "how to remove haxies" and tried the procedures from some of the hits that I found, but I was having a hard time finding the folders or files that point to them in my System file.  Apparently, they do not exist in my current configuration. Remember, I reinstalled Mac OS X.  Whatever app that had these probably are not there anymore.

I was not taking any chances, however, and decided to dig some more.  I found a way to remove them but I had to do it at the Terminal level.  The article can be found here.  I had to use the command line to remove whatever application enhancement software I had on my Mac.  It was some really scary stuff for me because I have not done anything of that sort.  However, after completing the procedure, I was able to safely reboot the Mac Pro and proceeded to do my work.

I have been running at it for three days straight and I had no crash so far.  Hmmm, could it be that that was the solution?

Coincidentally, Apple released another update, 10.5.4!  I have not done any software update yet, but I probably will.  I have been sending all the crash reports to Apple and maybe they took some notice and did a fix?  What wishful thinking!  But I will do a software update and will try to see how far this thing will go.

I intend to do a timeline of all this things once I finally find that everything has been ironed out (if at all). Everything right now is looking surprisingly good so far.  If it goes on like this for another week, I will probably update the other hard drive, the one I intended to be my start up disk which was running problem free under 10.5.1, to get it up to speed.

Well, knock on wood!

The more interesting point is that this has been released at all. The PC overclocking field is well established but until now there has been little of interest for overclocking Apple Macs. It's different in the hackintosh realm, where overclocking the Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad is well documented and common. My own hackintosh has been running an overclocked Core 2 Quad 6600 at 3Ghz (up from the stock 2.4Ghz) for several months. This is set from the Bios and doesn't appear to have any effect on OSx's timekeeping ability.

Read the article and download the overclocking tool at ZDNet.de

It's really sad.

Anyone out there who knows how to solve this issue, I would welcome it.  I just could not get any from Wacom Support, so I am throwing it out there.

Meanwhile, I'll still continue working with this configuration and try to get as many crash report as I can the whole day and then revert back to my crash-free configuration.

That is not entirely true as of this Sunday morning.

When I opened up the Console to see if everything was fine, lo and behold, it was filled up with messages again, and some of these are the same ones that I used to see before, messages from the configuration that crashed a lot.

Oh well, there goes my rising confidence.  It's slowly sagging once again and I work in constant vigilance, always worried that this configuration will crash too anytime soon.

To it's credit, this current configuration was incident free since I started working with it yesterday morning. I was at it for 8 hours straight.

Crossing fingers and knocking on wood.  That is where all this issues has come to.  Sigh.

So far, so good.

It looks very promising.  I have opened the Console and found no error messages so far.  When I started launching the Console during those crashes, the Console would churn out a lot of messages.  Now, it is all clear.  Can it be that the gremlins have been chased away?

For documentation's sake, here is what I have done:  I've reinstalled Mac OS X on a new hard drive.  I made a fresh install of Adobe Flash CS3 and the latest Wacom Tablet driver of that moment, Driver 6.05-3 for Mac OS X. Initially, I did not do any software updates whatsoever to both OS X and Adobe Flash CS3, electing to run the configuration for a number of days to see if a crash will occur.  I encountered none.

Enter Friday, where I got a heads up from a reader of this blog that a new driver has been released, Driver 6.08-2 (RC) for Mac OS X.  I decided to bite the bullet and do some Software Updating to see if I will be lucky.

First, I did a Repair Disk Permission to the crash free, 10.5.1 running harddrive.

Once Repair Disk Permission was completed, I restarted my machine.

I then used Super Duper to clone that harddrive to the other volume that contained that troublesome configuration, virtually erasing it.

Once the cloning was complete, I booted using the harddrive containing that cloned version.

I immediately removed all Tablet preferences and then removed the Wacom Tablet Driver.

I did a Software Update for Mac OS X and installed 10.5.3.

I then downloaded all the latest updates for Adobe Flash CS3.

Once these two were completely updated, I then downloaded that latest Wacom Tablet Driver and installed it.

As I've said before, I have been using it for some three hours, incident free and, from looking at the Console messages, error free.

The new driver might have fixed the issue.  Installing all the latest updates for both Mac OS X and Adobe Flash CS3 seems to have smoothed out everything too, Adobe Flash CS3 in particular, for  I remember dismissing and canceling one or two software update notices for Adobe Flash in the last few weeks because I did not wanted to be interrupted with my ongoing work.  That must have been my mistake and may have been one of the many reasons why these crashes have been occurring.

So with crossed-fingers, I look forward to working for the next few days with this current configuration and settings.

Better get back to work.  Let's see if I am correct with these assumptions.  Wish me luck!

I've mentioned in an earlier post that there was a new driver for the Wacom. It is still in release candidate version, not the final version yet. But that has not stopped me from trying it out.

I've cloned my crash-free Mac OS X version, the one that has been running trouble free for almost five days since I downgraded, into another hard drive. I've booted into that hard drive and did a software update to Mac OS X to bring it up to 10.5.3 once again.

I also software updated Flash CS3 to make sure that that too is in its latest version and boy, does the update take a lot of time! Earlier before and during those mishaps with the Cintiq, I've cancelled most of the updates. To cover all the bases, I intend to make sure I have all these updates installed.

Once I've completed that, I will remove the existing tablet driver, do a repair disk permission on this hard drive and then download and install that release candidate Wacom Tablet driver. I intend to run this set up this weekend and see if I can make it through the day without crashing.

I just have to have 10.5.3. I have applications that only run in that version of Mac OS X such as Aperture 2, my Raw Photo editing tool. I have several pictures in my camera waiting to be downloaded, post processed and posted! There were a lot of going-ons behind the scenes that I was not able to share because of this Mac Pro/Cintiq issue that took up most of the space in this month's postings.

Until then, have a great weekend!

Today, I decided to see how much I would have saved for each developer if I had chosen similar Dell machines. Of course, I wouldn't have cared what my savings would be, because part of the incentive to buy Mac Pros was to provide our dev team with the flexibility to develop anything for any platform. But to my huge surprise, buying a comparable Dell had a $1,304 premium!!! Take a look for yourself:

As you can see from the images above, the Dell price without tax is $4,153 while Apple's price is $2,849. 

Who is Dell joking here? Now to be fair, there are 2 differences in configurations:

• The Dell System bus is 1,333 Mhz vs. Mac Pro's 1,600 Mhz bus
• The Dell Memory is 667 Mhz vs. Mac Pro's 800 Mhz

That's right! The Mac Pro has even a better configuration and costs $1,300 less. Upgrade pricing was equally insane. While Apple charged $200 for a 2nd 500GB drive, Dell's price for that same upgrade was $339.

So now taking the Dell premium into consideration, the faster Mac Pro, better style and looks, the easier component access and ability to run OS X, is there any reason to stick with Dell?

The driver is in what's called a release candidate, meaning it is not the final version.  

I am hesitant to try this out right away as I am in a midst of a deadline.  But once I get some breathing space, I will install this on my other hard drive that has 10.5.3 installed in it and run it through it's paces.

I am also looking up reviews on this driver to see if anyone having the same issue as mine have used it already and has gotten some positive results.

Plus, I am hoping that Wacom Support will reply back to me and refer to this driver as a possible solution to my problems.  So far, they have only asked for the crash report logs and have not replied back since.

My sincerest thanks to Bryan for bringing this to my attention!

• Dell Latitude D630 Notebooks
  • 4GB RAM
  • 7200 RPM Drives
  • 2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo
• 2 x 20" Dell LCDs (1600x1200 resolution)
• Docking station (to allow 2 monitors)

Here's what a setup looked like:

There's a great story behind the pink pony in the picture, but that's for another blog :-)

So we just started a transition for our developers to a Mac Pro setup.

• Mac Pro With:
  • 2 x 2.8Ghz quad-core Xeon (8-cores total)
  • 6GB RAM (buy memory upgrade elsewhere, much cheaper)
  • 500GB Drive
• Apple 30" Cinema Display (2560x1600 resolution)

So here's what the new setup looks like:

These workstations are absolutely amazing. They are the world's fastest workstations for running Windows, and of course, they are the world's fastest for running OS X. The idea is that our developers now have the best of both worlds and they have the flexibility to meet changing Axosoft demands. With such blazingly fast machines, they could choose to run Windows in a virtual environment and still run it faster than their old setup.

One question you might have is why did we switch to desktops from laptops? We had initially gone with laptops to allow for easier portability of the machines in case of travel, meetings, etc. However, about 51 out of 52 weeks of the year, the laptops didn't move from the desk. For the 1 week that they did, the developers determined it wasn't worth giving up the performance boost that comes from a desktop.

Lets see what develops...