The BFC Computing Weblog

Apple hyped Quartz Extreme, 3D acceleration on Mac OS X, quite a bit when Tiger was released. But they ship Mac OS X with 2D acceleration disabled. (Wha?)

Apparently on some hardware and with some software there are rendering glitches. On my Macbook Pro with all the software I use I haven’t seen any yet. And with it on, many applications, especially Firefox which does some ugly things with lots of 1x1px hidden windows, are several times faster than without the acceleration.

To turn it on temporarily, install the Developer Tools, launch QuartzDebug and enable it from the menu. You have to launch an app after it’s been enabled to get acceleration.

When you quit QuartzDebug it’ll be disabled again. To turn it on permanently (until you launch QuartzDebug again, anyway) execute this command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Quartz2DExtremeEnabled true
          

Once you’re satisfied that it works well, if you use an LCD display, try turning off BeamSync - a rendering delay built in to sync the screen refresh with the CRT electron beam sweep. You can test this in QuartzDebug or turn it off via the command line:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates 0
          

You can also edit these with PropertyListEditor, but you’ll have to give the admin group write access to it first:

sudo chmod 664 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver
          

Note, QuartzDebug resets this to 644 when you launch it.

One of the more interesting features of Mac OS X is its Spotlight - a system-wide metadata database (metadatabase?) that was obviously rushed out the door before it was completely baked.

For a couple weeks I haven’t been able to do full-text searches of my e-mail store - it just stopped working. I found in the Spotlight preferences, the hard drive was added to the ‘Privacy’ pane (not by me) and it couldn’t be removed. Looking at the actual files (/.Spotlight-V100/) the modification times were changing but the size of the database files never did. Nothing in the logs about it.

After several dead ends, I finally figured out that one just needs to remove all the Spotlight files and reboot. One nice advantage of the Spotlight architecture is this is non-destructive - everything will be re-built automatically. One disadvantage is everything has to be re-built automatically, so it’s resource intensive. Anyhow, the exercise distills down to:

sudo mdutil -i off /
          sudo mdutil -E /
          sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/
          

Then restart the computer. This article from The X Lab is the most comprehensive, accurate, and intelligible reference to Spotlight workings I found on the ‘net.

3COM, through its TippingPoint division is creating a vulnerabilities market. They offer compensation for vulnerabilities found, and seem to have a responsible notification process.

The security researcher offers his finding to 3COM, and they decide how much it’s worth. The researcher then choses whether to accept or reject the offer. Now, this isn’t a real market, as there’s only one legit buyer - I’d like to see this done in a broker scenario, offering the sale to the highest bidder (presumably including the OEM responsible for the vulnerability). This would put pressure on the vendors to get their software fixed before shipping.

3COM doesn’t state (at least in what I skimmed) if they charge the OEM for the information. Their financial motivation seems to be that their IDS product is more up-to-date than the others because they have first-crack at the information.

This process exposed a QuickTime vulnerability that’s exploitable through a web browser allowing Java to execute (presumably through the QuickTime for Java bridge). This is just an illustration of the fact that as you expose more of the outside of the sandbox, your risks increase. Shore up your sandbox with NoScript, which, incidentally, now offers some XSS protection. This was previously reported in the press as a Safari vulnerability, but it’s not - it’s exploitable through Firefox too.

The only downside to this whole process is that they’re not allowing blackhats to play. They want to be able to file the proper IRS forms, they say, but I can’t see why fees to blackhats necessarily cause a problem here, especially if the funds are wired off-shore. Extortionists are paid all the time by big online companies, and there are no IRS forms there. This is some kind of excuse on 3COM’s part, but I’m not sure what they think their exposure is by allowing the blackhats to play - their products would increase in value just the same, and vendors still get their products fixed. Right now, the blackhats have to turn to a Mafia to get money for their codez, so IRS or not, allowing blackhats in only improves the security situation, and perhaps turns a few blackhats into whitehats.

On Monday I went to a memorial service for Suzy Smith, a friend and former co-worker. Suzy and I chatted over e-mail regularly, mostly about new Mac products, but more recently about some treatments in clinical trials for curing metastatic lung cancer.

Suzy was a Mac fanatic, an appellation she’d happily accept. It was really quite a curious memorial service with so many stories about her love of the Mac, and it wasn’t just because the Chapel was half-full of IT department workers. There’s something interesting about it beyond Suzy - I can’t imagine a similar scenario where you could replace Mac with Windows or even Linux and get so many warm smiles from a group. Suzy would have had lots of reasons to explain why this was true. If I were faster thinking, I would have sent a bouquet of flowers stuffed inside a Compact Mac case (alas, I think of these things too late).

Tonight I had the sad duty of deleting Suzy from my Buddy list and her vCard from my Address Book. But it’s an OSX Address Book, so she’d be OK with it.

Her family asked callers to the reception to take a ring from Suzy’s vast collection. I picked one out for Emma with flowers, in three kinds of gold, and we’ll have that remembrence of her for many years to come. Her sister said they didn’t know what to do with a hundred rings. I reassured her that what they chose to do was great, making a hundred people happy, something Suzy would have liked maybe even more than a new iLife release.

Photo: two coworkers decided, independently, to make 6-colored Apple cookies for the reception.

I’ve recommended SuperDuper to a few folks looking at Mac Backup solutions based on this survey so I figured it was time I implemented it myself. I’m sorry to report results are poor.

For some reason SuperDuper gets confused when copying some files. I think there’s probably a race condition with transient files. It reports I/O errors on files that no longer exist when I look at them, and I/O errors on files that I can copy by hand, with cp, and with ditto just fine. It’s not open source, so it’s hard to say exactly why that happens.

Now, that, in and of itself, wouldn’t be a huge problem - I see the same kind of thing with rsync, and any other backup tool (but perhaps not with ZFS snapshots – but that’s another article). However, SuperDuper stops the backup process when it hits a few of these errors, leaving a potentially not-backed up disk, for a few file copy errors.

Since I was planning to purchase SuperDuper, I sent the developer a note about it. His built-in reporting tool is very smart about integrating with AppleMail and used the Keychain appropriately - a nice touch. He wrote back with a link to a blog article he wrote about this issue as a response, and assured me that not to worry, most of the files were backed up anyway.

His point is that if there’s an I/O error, then you have a disk problem and need to get that looked at. Now, he has a point - if there’s a real disk error his tool isn’t going to fix it. But, in this case, there’s no apparent disk error, so the behavior of SuperDuper is incorrect. Even if there were a disk error, I’d be trying to use a disk backup tool to recover the data. Sure, if you have $2K, send it off to DriveSavers - they’ll do a better job, but most people don’t.

But besides that, his assertion that most of the files were copied anyway was incorrect, by SuperDuper’s own reporting (and a visual inspection of the target disk image) – in my case, SuperDuper stopped after 553,643 of 1,987,938 files. So, not so complete.

Clearly, for my usage, SuperDuper wasn’t copying most of the files, and was stopping on false I/O errors. This makes for an unusable backup tool.

So, I wrote back to the developer, explaining what I had seen and asking if he could include an option to allow the user to decide whether continuing after I/O errors was the right thing to do (most tools - rsync, dd, etc. all have such an option).

This is the entirety of his response:

From: support@shirt-pocket.com
Subject: Re:(Case 38299) SuperDuper!: Error during copy - copy stops due to I/O errors
Date: April 10, 2007 18:51:38 EDT
To: bill@bfccomputing .com

I’m sorry this is a problem for you, Bill, but I wish you the best in finding a good alternative.

Dave Nanian
Shirt Pocket

Clearly, he feels so strongly that his behavior is the correct one that he’s willing to forgo many sales to not give the user a choice in the matter. I respect his conviction while strenuously disagreeing with his conclusion. So, if I’ve recommended SuperDuper to you previously, please consider that recommendation rescinded and accept my apologies for not testing it thoroughly enough first. I’ll try to e-mail a link here to everybody I can recall.

Now, that leaves the problem of what to use for Mac backup software. I have some Enterprise clients using a version of rsync I patched up. I’ve done some ditto backups locally. But all of those things have problems, and none are currently the right answer. rsync is probably the one with a chance, since it’s open source, but the patch sets to date are inadequate. If the entire problem with copyfile() is fixed in Leopard (perhaps via ZFS) then rsync can start working. I’ll be testing that once I’m confident I have a good backup of my laptop (a Catch-22, no?). Otherwise, it’s probably going to be time to start up a SourceForge project to get interested collaborators together to come up with a working solution.

Mindless link propagation.

Oops - I told a few folks that Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on PowerPC had support dropped based on a news story I had read. That was incorrect. It’ll be supported until 2011. I’m glad they’re doing the right thing.

I’ve been using minicom for doing serial device work. It was designed as a modem dial-up tool, but works fine for configuring switches, etc. Well, it turns out my new laptop didn’t have minicom, and for some reason fink under 10.4 doesn’t have it as a package (it can be built from source or downloaded as a staticly linked binary). Researching options, I stumbled across the seemingly obvious - screen(1) makes a fine terminal emulator for basic tasks. Just run screen /dev/serial-device and you’re off to the races, at 9600N81 by default. It takes parameters for other line conditions.

A couple of these videos are priceless:

perhaps Not Safe for Prudish Workplaces Without Headphones (henceforth: NSFPWWH)

I’ve been considering getting a new MacBook Pro - the specs are very nice, it’s a real desktop replacement, and even though there are some weird things like a slower DVD drive and a lower-res screen it would be a good computer.

But there’s one thing that’s ruled it out - the lack of support for Java embedding in Rosetta, the PowerPC translation engine for Mac on Intel.

So, Java embedding sounds sort of obscure doesn’t it? But what it means is that lots of free software I depend on for my workflow won’t work. Firefox won’t work unless you can give up Java and Flash. 3 months ETA on that. NeoOffice/J, the OpenOffice platform for Mac won’t work either, and there’s no ETA on that.

Apple has a large following among Open Source geeks and they like to court the Alpha Geeks. Maybe they should reevaluate their support level for Java in Rosetta and get these things working. I remember when Steve Jobs said the Mac was going to be the premiere Java development and deployment platform.