EGOPOLY

If you use gmail, click on this link: http://video.google.com/data/contacts

[Via Google Operating System.]

Update: looks like this was some kind of security hole.  It doesn’t work any more.

And I am somewhat disturbed that I am more Wonder Woman than Batman.

Hmm.

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 85% Green Lantern 80% Superman 75% Iron Man 65% Robin 45% Supergirl 45% Hulk 45% The Flash 40% Wonder Woman 25% Catwoman 20% Batman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

As part of my attempt to fix my broken Mac Pro, I ended up reinstalling the operating system on a new hard disk. Actually, what I ended up doing was taking two smaller disks (160GB each) and making them into a striped RAID set. When I had just the one drive, the super fast Mac Pro with it’s 4 processors and 3GB of RAM was quite often bottlenecking on reading application images off the disk. So if I wanted to start two things at once, like Mail and Firefox, or three things, like Mail, Firefox and Adium, it would take forever.  Just as long as it took on my 3+ year old G5.

Anyway, it turns out this make a huge difference, not surprisingly. Everything starts way faster, and the machine boots faster too. So if you have the time, and two identical drives, you should try it. Here’s how:

Put the new disks in. Keep the old disk in there so you can copy your home directory over to it later.

Boot with the install disk. Hold down the “C” key after powering on.

When the Installer comes up, select Tools -> Disk Utility. Use Disk Utility to create a RAID set. You want striped, so the new virtual disk is the size of the two individual disks together. I recommend naming the virtual disk something other than “Macintosh HD” so you can distinguish it from your other, existing disk.

Create a journaled file system on the new RAID set.

Exit disk utility.

Now install the operating system, and select your new RAID set as the target. After you get booted back up, copy all your files and applications from the old disk to the same places in the new disk. You’ll be burning up the road from then on.

My Mac Pro is sad. I get random storms of applications crashing with illegal instructions, or memory access violations. All the kinds of things that are symptomatic of bad RAM. However, taking out either half of my memory doesn’t help, and extensive memtest testing reveals no problems.

At this point, I strongly suspect a flaky power supply or some other motherboard or daughterboard issues.

I was on the phone to Apple to try to set up a repair. It’s very bizarre, but you can’t really have them send somebody out to fix your Mac. I’ve been bitching for a while about how terrible Dell computers are, but at least they’ll send somebody to your office to fix the problems right away. With Apple, you have to physically bring the machine to an Apple retail store, and have a “genius” at the genius bar look at it.

Setting up the appointment was fairly easy. But I am not looking forward to dragging a 35 pound machine to the Mall the week before Christmas. Don’t these people serve a lot of corporate/professional users? Ugh.

I’ll post here with my experience. Maybe it will be a good one.

Update: Sitting at the genius bar in the Apple store at the mall the week before Christmas was not the worst consumer experience I’ve ever had. While my genius was trying to get some diagnostics running (and generally failing), about every 15 seconds somebody came up with a broken iPod. I now can recite Apple’s iPod replacement policies by heart. (The short version: stuff breaks and gets old. Get a new one.)

I ended up having to leave my precious, precious workstation at the Apple store over night. Someday, I hope that we are reunited. I miss you already, buffy, and this G5 I am using now to type this post means nothing to me. Nothing.

Update 2: The geniuses called me and said everything was fixed. Apparently, I had the RAM installed wrong: there are two daughterboards for the RAM, and you need to split it between the boards vs. filling up one then the other. I asked why the machine worked fine for 4 months prior to this week, if the memory was installed wrong? They had no answer. I was skeptical.

I drove to the mall, picked up the machine, and brought it back to the office. 2 hours later, it’s crashing again, same problem. It’s not fixed. I am now reinstalling the operating system from scratch on a brand new hard disk. I think it’s a motherboard or power supply problem, but I know Apple will ask me to reinstall the OS. So I’m doing that. Then I’m going to call them and ask them to send me a replacement unit.

Update 3: I reinstalled the OS. I decided to install it onto a striped RAID set, so improve performance, and because I only had 160GB available. (I didn’t want to use the old drive at all, so I can restore my files from it, and in case it is somehow malfunctioning and the cause of the whole problem.) Everything went smoothly, the machine booted up fine. After I installed the latest patches from Apple, however, the machine would kernel panic on every boot. I called Apple and they suggested a reset the PRAM (option-command-p-r keys during power on until you hear two chimes). The machine then started to boot, panicked again, but then reset itself and booted OK. I’m continuing the process now of restoring the machine to working condition with my files and tools.

Update 4: I finished restoring all software tools and applications on the new drive set. I’ve been running now for 24 hours without a crash. I’m now hoping it was a bad disk somehow, that would mess up on page faults or something. Keeping fingers crossed…

For future reference, a guide. (via schneier).

I’m not sure why I would actually want to do this, but it might be handy to be able to watch an episode of 24 in my office some day.

I checked in on my Yahoo! mail and Hotmail accounts today, something I do every few months to keep them alive.

When you sign in to Yahoo! Mail, you see some ads and top news stories. There’s a link to your inbox where your new messages are.

When you sign in to Hotmail, there is a link to your inbox, and a bunch of other links to other stuff.

But, you can’t actually see your, you know, new mail and stuff. Subjects, senders and dates of new messages.

How hard is it to figure out that when you sign into email, you might want to see your messages? All other mistakes they make are not surprising, given this whopper.

Everybody loves the underdog, until it becomes the overdog. For Google, this happened shortly after their IPO. Now it’s very popular to cast “the Google” as a nascent Microsoft, so big and lumbering they don’t care what happens to all the little players. But if you get past the trolls, and investigate a little, you find that the Google really is different, and really does care. This article by Matt Cutts is a great example. They really do have a lot of smart folks, and they really are trying to not be evil.

Also, it emphasizes the utility of Google’s webmaster tools, which is just a really nice little package. If you run a web site, you really shouldn’t do without it (them).

Have you been to the MySQL web site recently? It’s all BUY this and BUY that. Enterprise blah blah blah! BUY now. Not only that, I couldn’t even find the “download stuff for free” links. I think they might have been on the community section, but that site seems to be down. How convenient.

I love MySQL, because it’s free and it works. If it’s not going to be free, or if they are going to be douchebags about making it hard for me to quickly snag a new copy when I need it, then I’m not going to like it so much any more.

Not that they would care, if they are getting all greedy; I’m not the kind of customer who ever has paid for MySQL because I don’t need support, and I don’t redistribute software with MySQL technology inside. So maybe they don’t care about alienating a developer like me.

But it makes me sad.