Disclosure – Walt-O-Matic

Avoid Awesome Screenshot

I was getting some pretty bad web performance, with a little exploration I learned it was a Safari Extension that was doing things I did not like.

While doing some web page debugging, I noticed that a simple, static, html file was pulling in a ton of web resource. Most noticeably from a place called Superfish, and sucking in with it a good deal of JavaScript libraries. On. Every. Page. Load.

The culprit seems to be a Safari Extension called Awesome Screen Show 1.3.7 by Dilgo. However, the developer site isn’t coming up, and I’m not all that encouraged by what I see over at Superfish either.

Uninstall the extension, as here’s the overhead you’ll be saving:

Hidden Preference File

Check your ~/Libarary/Preferences directory, do you have this hidden file?

I’m not keen on applications that leave cruft or secret files on my system when there’s no need to do so.

I ran into a file on my laptop called ~/Library/Preferences/.bridge01.dat as well as .bridge3_01.dat — why a preference file is hidden, I don’t know.

Suspecting the file might be part of Adobe Bridge (it wasn’t), I copied it to the desktop, and looked at the file with less from the command console. It was clearly a binary preference file.

I renamed the file to bridge01.plist and started to open it with Xcode, although seeing BBEdit could open it, thought I’d give that a shot and was nightly impressed it detected the file type and presented it as a regular XML file.

Inside was slightly cryptic, but I recognized a sequence of text starting with ESC- and it looked like a serial number. Using Spotlight I was able to find another file that had a matching string, my purchase notes for Flux 3, by The Escapers.

Again, I’m not thrilled about hidden .dat files that ought to be public .plist files in my user’s preferences directory. But at least it was a mystery solved.

Files Gone on Drobo FS with OS X Lion? Get ’em back!

Using DroboFS and OSX Lion only to discover that your Drobo shares have no content!? Yikes! But fret not, you merely have a small corruption problem brought on by the firmware, and in moments you can force a rebuild of that database and all your files will be back safe, happy, and sound with no data loss. Here’s how.

I recently updated my DroboFS to firmware 1.2.0 and dashboard 2.0.3 when I switched to Lion, and while my volume mounted there was no data in it although the Drobo lights showed there was capacity, as did the Drobo Dashboard, and the health reports indicated everything was just fine.

I spoke with Drobo Tech Support that indicated this was a known problem they are actively addressing as high priority; the problem is with Lion and their firmware, and we can expect an updated firmware release.

What’s curious about this is that if one uses the Finder and mounts the Drobo drive with SMB, using smb://Drobo-FS/, the files are there. However afp://Drobo-FS.local/ and cifs://Drobo-FS.local/ mount but reveal nothing.

A detailed description of the problem is at the article entitled: “Missing” Data (AFP) and/or CNID DB Errors. This article then leads to a second one, but is only for the brave.

Using Dropbear (SSH) with Drobo FS to regenerate the AppleDB (CNID DB) has detailed steps for regenerating the apple database.

Walt’s More Verbose Directions

Using the Drobo Dashboard login to your Drobo as Administrator.
Unmount all shares.
Under All Devices / Settings / Admin you’ll want to check the Enable DroboApps setting, which will mount a volume entitled DroboApps on your system.
Download a copy of DropBear from the Drobo Apps page.
Unzip this .zip file, resulting in instructions and a compressed dropbear.tgz file . Move the dropbear.tgz file to the root of the DroboApps directory.
Restart the DroboFS by going to Capacity and Tools in the Dashboard, and selecting the Tools drop down on the right side, and selecting Restart. Or, just power off the unit physically for 20 seconds and then turn it back on.
When Drobo restarts, go to the Dashboard and select All Devices / Settings… / Network. Note the IP address given to the device somewhere.
From OS X’s Terminal enter the command ssh root@theIPaddressAbove
The default password is root, unless you’ve used Dropbear before and followed the instructions within it.
Enter the command ls /mnt/DroboFS/Shares to view a list of shares on the drive.
Tech Support promises the following will not cause any data loss, but anytime you’re doing reconstruction you should always have a backup (if you don’t, question your backup policy), and double check before hitting return. For each share of yours listed above, enter the command: rm -r /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/yourShareNameHere/.AppleDB and press return. Note the period indicating it’s a hidden directory.
Exit Terminal by entering exit.
Using the Drobo Dashboard unmount all your shares, which should be just the DroboApps share at this point; this is under the All Devices / Shares and you just uncheck all the boxes.
Restart the Drobo again (see above if you’ve already forgot how).
And just as important restart any Macs connected to the Drobo.
When the Drobo comes up, start the Dashboard, and test the mounts. They should be working.

TheFlip: files in the root directory? Come on….

Were you aware that the Flip video camera you have is writing stuff to your root directory?

I’m using a Flip UltraHD on OS X 10.6, and while I’m happy with the device, I’m not so happy with FlipShare, the software that comes with it.

While the device when mounted (/Volumes/FLIPVIDEO) has a DCIM directory that has the standard video subfolder(s) 100VIDEO. Inside there are all the .MP4 files that work as-is with the Mac.

While the FlipShare seems to be over kill for accessing files in this directory, I encourage anyone with this device to go open Terminal and take a peek at your root directory. Yes, your root directory.

$ ls /

You’ll find a file, /logFile.xsl there, which appears to take an XML file for FlipShare and convert it into an HTML file.

My question is this: Why is FlipShare installing user files to the root directory? This is a horrible practice, most certainly a violation of Apple recommendations, and it’s down right tasteless in Unix parlance.

Cisco, you know better than this. Come on…! Fix this.

Caution – the new Mac App Store just bit me

Be VERY careful when using the Mac App Store — here’s how it purchased an app without my permission, along with THREE simple things Apple could have done to fix the problem.

Admittedly, I had my skepticism about how an App Store was going to fair servicing applications to the desktop.

The majority of Mac users seem to quickly grasp dragging an icon to a folder or double clicking the installer; the “hard” part is unzipping a file or opening a disk image file. But perhaps there is a target audience that still has a hard time of installing apps and keeping them up to date.

The downsides I expected were the less obvious things: Apple wanting a chunk of each sale resulting in trickle down inflated prices (though for the moment quite the opposite seems to have happened), certain established apps getting marketing preference due to historic purchases rather than innovative replacements getting visibility, the fear of embedded application ads becoming mainstream in the Mac culture, etc.

I saw up sides too, with copy protection and serial number issues going away. This of course had other down sides, such as apps having to check in with the Internet. I figured this meant a lot more problems for the publishers than the end consumers.

Seems I was wrong about that. I just got bit by the App Store.

I made my first Mac App Store purchase today, and in order to do so I had to authenticate. And, I’m happy to report, the purchase process works exactly as described — the application was downloaded and installed seamlessly. Go Apple!

I then decided to see if there was an update to Aperture, which I had commercially bought. Sure enough, when I went to its page, it said it was already Installed. Clever. Well done, Apple.

This is where things start to get weird. Non-Apple applications, like Coda, which I had externally bought and purchased a while back correctly showed up as Installed as well. This was nice.

But, then I noticed that a packaged I had already purchased, had a license and receipt for, and was already installed, OmniGraphSketcher, was in the App Store, too. It did not show itself as installed. And, wanting to see if it was a newer version, I clicked on it — and next thing I know, the App store begins to purchase it.

Fundamentally the problem seems to be that the purchase button behaves differently whether or not you’re authenticated. Plus, you’re two pixels away from Copy Link / Tell a Friend from an actual purchase.

For me, it was an unexpected $30.00 hit to the wallet simply because the buttons didn’t behave the same way they had a moment ago. That’s just not right, especially not from Apple who studies user interfaces with the same passion you or I crave oxygen.

While I’m screaming, “No, no, no, NO, NO!!!” at my machine, which doesn’t help by the way, I was taken aback that there was NO CONFIRMATION process, nor was there a CANCEL option, nor was there a RETURN UNOPENED option.

Bad Apple, bad.

Because I had previously authenticated for a prior application, it blindly assumed I authorized this purchase. That’d be like buying one item in a store, and after the cashier touched your credit card, anything else you picked up in the store would get bought too.

I’ve just written to Apple at http://www.apple.com/support/mac/app-store/, and we’ll see where that goes.

UPDATE: Got a very kind email from Apple who credited me the correct amount, but for the wrong line item. I sent them a follow up because I want the right developer to be paid.

If this is an indication of how Apple will deal with application purchases in the future, we can all breath a happy sigh of relief. My own hesitations about exploring the App Store have been lightened. Plus I know never-ever-ever touch anything that looks like a price tag button, instead click the icon which doesn’t look clickable.

MySQL Cascade Delete Problem

MySQL 5.1.51 introduced a nasty little bug that has the potential to really cause some production servers some ill — cascading delete and updates can sometimes fail if you’re dealing with “too much” data at once. Where “too much” is a relatively small amount. You may get bit if you have a one-to-many relationship.

A note of warning to MySQL users using 5.1.51, you may want to downgrade to 5.1.50 for a little bit.

There’s a problem with 5.1.51 in which cascading deletes or updates throw an error. Not good if you have constraints and one to many relationships.

ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error -1 from storage engine

The mysql error log will say something like:

InnoDB: Cannot delete/update rows with cascading foreign key constraints that exceed max depth of 250

This is a confirmed bug in MySQL and is repeatable. The error will cause a transaction rollback. Not good news for people running production systems.

See MySQL Bug #357255.

While the problem was quickly identified and apparently resolved, as the defect report is closed, it does not look like the 06-Oct-2010 change has made it out to the production baseline as of the time of this writing.

Additionally, the MySQL pre-release snapshots on labs.mysql.com show there is a mysql-5.1.52 pending with a September date, and this hasn’t made it to general production yet.

That leaves one to speculate that the fix will appear in the 5.1.53 version, and we won’t be seeing that for a month or two. Yikes.

Error 0x80070057 (SOLVED)

Copy File

An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070057: The parameter is incorrect.

SOLVED!

Went to copy a directory on Windows 7 from one drive to another, something that I had done quite frequently, even earlier that day.

However, this time, and nothing had changed substantially with the source files, I got an Error 0x80070057 message stating “The parameter is incorrect.” At that point the copy dialog from my simple drag and drop would allow me to retry (useless) or abort mid-copy.

The error message was unusually cryptic and less that helpful:

Copy File

An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070057: The parameter is incorrect.

The disk was not full and a check disk revealed no errors.

THE SOLUTION
The destination directory name that I was copying into was pretty long, I basically had used a descriptive prefix, a date stamp of YYMMDDHHMMSS, by a space dash space, and a short descriptive comment. All in all it was about ~55 characters in length.

The directory I was copying from was a fairly deep structure.

That made me wonder if the fully qualified name of some directory path wasn’t exceeding some limit. On Windows, it appears to be 256 characters. On a Mac it appears to be 1023 characters.

Tricks aside, I was limited to the file system limits.

So, on the same disk, with the same files, immediately after yet-another-failure to copy, I renamed the destination folder to something considerably shorter and tried again.

Quick experimentation showed that was indeed the problem: the resulting path name formed during the copy was too long.

Solution: shorten the destination folder name and/or tighten up the path.

Beyond.com: don’t trust it.

Would you trust a service that scrapes dated resumes, creates profiles without your permission, and make it difficult to get rid of them? Didn’t think so. Then in my personal opinion, you wouldn’t trust beyond.com — find out what unsolicited content was waiting in my inbox.

This morning I woke up to an email, it basically read this:

You received this email because you have created an account on Beyond.com. This is a one-time mailer. If you have any questions, please contact us.

I’m thinking to myself, “what?!?” Actually, I’m thinking something quite a bit more colorful.

Then there’s another message from Customer Service.

Then there’s another message with my username and password.

…right.

After deciding it isn’t some email spammer trying to get me to some foreign national site, I login. And what do I find? Someone had screen scraped an old copy of my resume and contact information and made an account for me.

At this point, I figure that anyone with any common sense should completely discount beyond.com’s credibility completely. Here’s why.

First, if any arbitrary user is able to make up accounts for someone else, then clearly the database of provided by beyond.com can’t be trusted. I know my information was wrong, so clearly any potential employer looking for candidates would actually be wasting their time — it isn’t an accurate representation out there. But more over, this represents bad business and security practice if someone other than the actual person can create an account.

Second, let’s assume that such a thing isn’t possible. The alternate conclusion is that beyond.com is scraping the web, making accounts, in an attempt to build a database to give the appearance they are more than they really are. Will some suckers sign on and “correct” the information? Perhaps. But I suspect many others will ignore it. Again, this is really not helpful for anyone trying to use beyond.com for candidates.

Bottom line, either side of the coin — something is wrong. Very wrong.

And, of course, removing that profile is painful and obscure. The help files toss around words like ‘deactivate’ rather than ‘delete’. Such things should make users of beyond.com question the marketing metrics of beyond.com as well.

To me, and in my personal opinion, beyond.com isn’t worth the pixels its printed on. In fact, it sucks.

REVIEW: Walt gives Beyond.com two thumbs down.

Loathing Dell, Hating Symantec

A password to uninstall Symantec Antivirus…?

In trying to repair a Windows laptop which was acting really slow and appeared to be riddled with problems, I discovered it was running Norton / Symantec Anti-Virus.

Ugh.

It’s been shown with benchmarks that this software kills PC performance. And, in other tests, AVG, which costs less, catches more, without being a resource hog.

So, I go to uninstall Symantec, which can be a chore unto itself. But this time I was greeted with a new source of irritation.

I got a dialog box which said “Please enter the uninstall password”. Great. Just great.

So, given that this OEM laptop had paid support by Dell, I figured I’d ask.

The answer I got back was “I wasn’t aware there was a password to uninstall.”

While Dell was dodging the support question, I found this very helpful article:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/05/hack-to-removeuninstall-symantec-norton-antivirus-sav-client-without-password/

In it, it said change the value of this registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\Administrator Only\Security\, from 1 to 0 with RegEdit.

I tried it. It worked. No problems. Problem solved.

So, I tell the Dell Support person the point is moot, I got past it, and shared the link with him so that future customers with the same problem could have the problem solved. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Learn something, and share — that way others don’t waste time down the path you traveled?

Dell’s tone instantly changed, they didn’t seem happy I got past it. And, then he tells me that Dell support doesn’t give passwords, or tell how to override them, even for OEM installed stuff; they would not be sharing the information, no matter how useful.

So, did they know about the password and just feed me a line? I was certainly left with that impression.

Incidentally, I’ve been told by an IT person, the next time I encounter the password box, enter: symantec

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Four Complaints of Leopard

OS X 10.5 – sweet, sexy, cool… and four annoying problems that are bound to get fixed soon.

Before we begin, let me say that I like Apple and that I had a very smooth transition to OS X 10.5 Leopard. I had the foresight to upgrade all of my applications, thanks to Version Tracker Pro pointing out what needed upgrading. And, I also had the foresight to update Unsanity’s Application Enhancer before doing the OS X upgrade.

Things couldn’t have been smoother. Shortly after inserting the disc, I was running the upgrade, and my desktop, data, applications, and settings were all preserved perfectly. I’ve never had that kind of experience with Windows.

That said, there are four complaints I have regarding Leopard.

UPDATE: Phil Wherry points out that I overlooked the obvious: Command-Drag the .Mac icon off the toolbar. This works with any icon.

Additionally, there’s some serious value in looking at notMac.

One: Dot-Mac is in-your-face. There’s a new icon in the status bar at the top for .Mac, and you can’t get rid of it with the preference pane unless you sign up for a trial account. Then the preference pane gives you the option.

Come on Apple, that’s so unlike like you.

Here’s why I don’t want .Mac in a nutshell: I have Linux, and it does a better job. I can secure FTP, secure copy, and rsync; it has Apache, Lighttd, and a host of other web servers; it has Sendmail, Postfix, and other mail options; it has DNS, ssh, X-Windows and other services; it has Samba; it has multiple accounts, with permissions; and it has far, far, far more than 10GB of disk space. For those of us with Unix experience and servers of our own, we don’t need .Mac, therefore, we don’t want it on our desktops. It comes across as an overly inflated service that can be mimicked by simple services included in the standard install of Ubuntu. And it’s free.

Sure, some people don’t know how to set it up, and they might want it, but don’t force it on my desktop.

Two: The Finder’s Sidebar has much smaller icons. Plus, for example, the desktop icon doesn’t mimic the desktop wallpaper I’m using. I liked large, findable, easily clickable icons.

Three: It feels like it boots slower. Yes, once I’m in it, it feels very snappy. And, intellectually, I know that a one time short wait is worth far more than perpetual ongoing stalls, though emotionally, to be honest, I haven’t gotten used to it.

Four: Stability. Yes, that’s right, I said stability. As in, it has problems.

My first experience was when someone handed me a disk with .JPG images dumped from their camera; a disc verify hadn’t been done, and unbeknown to me, it has a read problem with one or two files. Guess what – when cover flow hits them, it crashes the Finder.

Now, good on you for restarting the Finder, but I’d much rather it didn’t crash in the first place. At least my machine is still usable.

Which, incidentally, is more than I can say for Time Machine. It has serious glitches.

Using a directly connected firewire drive, I backed up my machine using Time Machine. And, as I worked, I let it run in the background.

Two problems there.

One, Spotlight appears to be finding things on my backup and on my main drive. Oh, that may sound handy, but not when you’re trying to launch an application. And certainly not when you right click a file and see two copies of things with the Open With… menu.

Two, Time Machine can sometimes take a good moment to backup the system. Especially if you’re using Virtual Machine technologies and your image file changes; that thing is huge. Time Machine dutifully starts to back that up, so I get up to take a break while it does its thing in the background. That causes the machine to fall into sleep mode, and that’s where the real problems begin.

When you wake the machine back up, Time Machine looks like it’s still backup up, but you’ve got just a spinner doing it’s thing. Worse yet, if you go to start any applications, they appear to start, bouncing the icon in the dock, but then nothing happens.

Almost.

According to both top and the Activity Monitor, a process is started, although the desktop doesn’t show any applications. You can see them with Command-Tab, but you can never get the application to come to the foreground. You can’t quit. You can’t force-quit. You can’t get rid of them from the command line using kill, either. Any open applications you have do continue to run, though.

That’s when you discover that your log has crazy reports about messages being sent to selector 0, and then you find out that Apple / Restart… doesn’t work either. Killing tasks with Command-Option-Esc simply reports “Application Not Responding.”

The solution, known to many Unix folks, is to ssh into your machine from another system, and issue the sudo shutdown -r +0 command. That does work. It also gives the illusion everything was just fine on shutdown, so Apple doesn’t get an error report.

However, don’t use Time Machine, and all is well with the world.

Concluding Thoughts
Does any of this worry me?

No.

I’m certain that other users are experiencing the same thing and deducing what causes the behavior, and that everyone is filling out the report-this-problem-to-Apple dialogs that appear.

Most certainly, Apple with issue a patch or two, and by 10.5.1 or 10.5.2, all will be well, and applications will come out with minor updates to fix problems. All will be well soon enough, and each of these problems will get addressed.

While minor bumps are expected with any major new release, this is certainly a much better experience than what happened with us and Vista.

I’m sticking with OS X 10.5 to ride it out, but to my Mac friends and followers without solid Unix experience, I’d say don’t let go of 10.4 just yet. One more pass from Apple’s magic wand is still needed.

ASIDE: Third Party App Problems Encountered So Far
SnapZ Pro is using CGSCreateCString, CGSCreateBoolean, CGSReleaseObj, and CPSPostKillRequest; these are obsolete and degrades system performance.
Parallels is using a forked process, when it should be using exec().
Firefox is reporting memory deallocation issues.
Version Tracker Pro crashes when it quits.

UPDATE 27-NOV-2007: Well, those smaller icons have grown on me. I’m liking them now, and before where they just sat there, I’m using them more often. Booting still seems a bit slower, but realistically, I don’t now, and never did, really have to reboot the Mac.

Furthermore, as I write this, 10.5.1 has come out, as well as many package updates. Version Tracker PRO works fine, Firefox has had an update, as have a number of utilities. I’d have to sat the Mac is quite usable and stable.

My recommendation is not to do an Update, but either an Archive and Install, or a migration from another machine/backup. This seems to clear things up quite well.

A lot of people seem to be treating this as a bash the OS post. It’s not. It required some serious digging to find stuff that was a little off. Unlike Vista, which instantly tried my patience and provoked my anger for many months.