bryan wann :: binary fury

Well, that was quick. I’ve already lost all the data on my IntelBook Pro. I spent a good chunk of last night and this morning tracking down my kernel panics and reading through Apple kernel development docs to figure it out. So far I had decided they had to be related to DivX and Xvid, as long as a program didn’t use those it would run for hours. Every time I used VLC or QT with Xvid component loader, it would panic. The final straw was when I had only VLC open watching a Divx video, the system locked up hard without any panic or error message. I power cycled, then the system kernel paniced during the grey Apple boot screen. I rebooted again and it wouldn’t mount the volume.

I tried going to the “Genius Bar” at the Apple store, but they were all “you don’t have an appointment, shoo shoo!” I loaded up Disk Utility from the CD, tried running “Repair disk”, and it reported “Invalid node structure Volume check failed. 1 HFS volume checked 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error.” In other words, proper fucked. Disk Utility couldn’t do anything about it; journaling was even enabled. At this point I don’t know if my rash of kernel panics was the cause or the effect of my delaminating filesystem. I’ll find out in a couple of hours when I get the OS installed, my data copied back over, and start using it again.

I downloaded a nightly build of Firefox (Deerpark) and VLC compiled for Intel. Deerpark is a huge improvement, it has a more responsive interface and snappy when it comes to rendering pages. VLC, both the PowerPC and nightly Intel build, on the other hand has crashed OS X so many times tonight. It seems to crash when I’m running either Firefox or Deerpark at the same time; I haven’t nailed it down yet. Fortunately the IBP boots under a couple of minutes.

I had a problem with my Epson scanner in that I could do reflective scanning, but when I tried to scan film with the lamp, I got garbage for the preview. After hooking it up to my PC, it worked fine, I figured out it had to be busted OS X drivers. I preened every shred of Epson from my Mac (Spotlight was very handy for this), rebooted, installed the latest TWAIN and Epson Scan utility and I’m back in business now. Epson’s site says this is a universal build, but Activity Monitor shows it’s running PPC binaries for various components. My TWAIN driver doesn’t show up under Photoshop’s import command, I don’t know what’s going on there.

Nevertheless, I have about three months of scanning to catch up on now.

I finally broke down and bought an IntelBookPro (a/k/a MacBackPro, what a horrible name) on Thursday. I felt very smug walking into the Apple store, feeling as if they should roll out the red carpet as I walked straight to the service desk to order it. After picking up my booty, I sneered at all the non-Mac-owning people.

I spent Thursday night copying my data over to it. The immediate downside was speed. I quickly noticed it was slower than my Powerbook; my MBP has 512MB whereas my PB has 1GB RAM. I fired up App Monitor and saw it was constantly paging to disk when I had more than one app going. A few of my Apps like Firefox (which is surprising), Yahoo messenger, Photoshop (expected) were PowerPC binaries and required Rosetta to run. I had to install a new version of iTerm and the Cisco VPN client to work on 10.4.

Today I went up to Fry’s and bought a 1 GB stick of DDR2 PC-5300 RAM and installed it. Surprisingly, it was cheaper there than I could’ve bought it on eBay. Installing the RAM immediately fixed my speed problems. At first only the 1 GB stick was seated, but it made a /tremendous/ improvement in speed. Photoshop was quicker, switching among Rosetta apps was unnoticable. I later reseated the RAM and now I have 1.5 GB available. I can now say my MBP is faster than my Powerbook. Firefox will have a universal binary on their next release, which should improve my day to day usage as well.

Now that’s out of the way, it’s really nice having a notebook that’s actually portable again. The screen brightness can really be cranked up. I didn’t think I’d care much for the lighted keyboard, but it’s good to have. Front Row along with the Apple Remote is a slick application. I think if they can equip a Mac Mini with a recording capability, they’ll have a great media center appliance. I’m wishing my Xbox had the same interface; it’s very easy to use and will play anything Quicktime will.

The MagSafe power connector is a nifty thing, but I’m not liking it on the side since I tend to sit with my notebook in my lap with my legs crossed over. The lack of a SVideo connector is sad, since I occasionally hooked my PB up to my TV to play videos. I’m playing with Q, which is a x86/x86_64/sparc/powerpc/MIPS emulator for OS X based on QEMU. I’m attempting to install Win2k, it seems to be hanging during setup right now.