MacBook Pro

This is just me blogging about getting a new toy...I just upgraded my work Mac laptop to one of the new 15" MacBook Pros. Some random musings...

They're really, really nice machines. Apple does a great job on the "appliance" aspect of the machines. The power cable attaches magnetically. The machine comes with a remote control that integrates with every media app that ships with the system. (All of which can share media from a remote server right out of the box. Digital housem anyone?) As always with Apple power management is good - Apple was preaching power management 10 yearse ago when no one knew what that was about, so by this point it's down in all levels of the software.

The MacBook Pros cost a bloody fortune ... I wouldn't own one if it wasn't for work. But the pro models come with a Radeon X1600, a very nice graphics chip for flight sim. By comparison the regular Mac Books ship with Intel integrated graphics, which are just crap...I'll have to rant on that some other time. Bottom line is - the non-pro MacBooks really aren't usable for flight simming, let alone flight sim dev. But for non-flight-sim users, the regular MacBooks aren't a bad way to get a nice Apple media-friendly machine.

Performance is great. Compile and sim speed rival the G5, a full sized heavy-duty desktop, and should be even better when the second gig of mem comes in the mail.

One quirk that I've seen in web forums too: when the machine is on batteries the wireless network will hang up if left idle for too long. Leaving a ping running keeps the card alive, but email checks aren't frequent enough. I haven't found a setting to keep wireless alive all the time.

EDIT: there is one way the G5 hauls the MacBook Pro - obvious but - virtual memory performance from the 7200 RPM SATA drives in the G5 is light-years ahead of the 5400 drive in the laptop. This is one case where a desktop comes through; the G5 is a "no-wait" machine because the paging performance is so good. But that's a form-factor issue.

Decoding Error Codes

While i'm on the topic of Windows shortcuts, I'll talk about a command prompt tool that'll decode error codes for you quickly.

net helpmsg <code>

Will respond back with a sentance explaining the error. For example:

net helpmsg 17
The system cannot move the file to a different disk drive.

Very handy! The only catch is that the error code needs to be in decimal...not hex!

Service Control - SC

Windows comes with a built in function known as the Service Control (sc.exe) which gives the user access to some pretty interesting capabilities and information about services. One can Create, Stop, Start, Query or Delete any Windows service.

First the syntax:

SC [\\server] [command] [service_name] [Options]

Now the commands:

query  [qryOpt]   Show status
queryEx [qryOpt]  Show extended info - pid, flags
GetDisplayName    Show the DisplayName
GetKeyName        Show the ServiceKeyName
EnumDepend        Show Dependencies
qc                Show config - dependencies, full path etc
start          START a service.
stop           STOP a service
pause          PAUSE a service.
continue       CONTINUE a service.
create         Create a service. (add it to the registry)
config         permanently change the service configuration
delete         Delete a service (from the registry)
control        Send a control to a service
interrogate    Send an INTERROGATE control request to a service
Qdescription   Query the description of a service
description    Change the description of a service
Qfailure       Query the actions taken by a service upon failure
failure        Change the actions taken by a service upon failure
sdShow         Display a service's security descriptor using SDDL
SdSet          Sets a service's security descriptor using SDDL

The output looks something like this:

SERVICE_NAME       : messenger
TYPE               : 20  WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
STATE              : 4  RUNNING
                      (STOPPABLE,NOT_PAUSABLE,ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)
WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)
CHECKPOINT         : 0x0
WAIT_HINT          : 0x0

It can be useful from time to time to get some more in-depth information about a service that the administrator panel doesn't provide.

I/O Error (-36) when writing on Mac

For months X-Plane's web-based installer has been returning I/O errors randomly to users withithe new Intel Macs. The specific offending routine was FSWriteFork but we couldn't figure out why.

We eventually turned to DTS, Apple's third party developer support team - you can buy a tech support "incident" from them - that is, assistance with one bug. It was from them that I got the missing tidbit of information:

Usually ioErr (-36) means something has gone deeply wrong at the lowest levels. Here's what the actual header file says if you have Apple's Carbon SDK:

ioErr = -36, /*I/O error (bummers)*/

That is, generally speaking, application programs can't recover from this - it would usually mean the hard drive is going bad. By comparison paramErr (-50) means you passed something illegal to the function.

Well it turns out that if you pass a block of memory to FSWriteFork and part of that memory is not mapped (that is, trying to access that memory to do the disk write generates a segfault) then you get ioErr back, not paramErr. That tip led us to realize that what we really had was (blushes) bad endian-swapping code that (on little-endian Macs only) generated bogus pointers. Depending on luck and the stars, that bogus memory might be mapped (thus writing junk into the file) or unmapped (generating the -36 error), hence the unreliable behavior.

In hindsight this isn't surprising, once you realize that Mac Carbon file calls are written on top of BSD file manager calls. I don't know the actual implementation of FSWriteFork, but what if it uses BSD's "write"? Well, that can return EFAULT if you pass in unmapped memory.

Why I hate the new Google Blogger System

(And I know the Google team is listening to this right, because they can listen to everything?)

It turns out that if you are being invited to the new blogger beta and you have not made your own blog first or switched (which you cannot since slots are limited) you will be in a state where you have access to a blog but have not signed the terms of service! The result is that the edit bar
will appear but any attempt to do anything will put you in a login dialog box that will simply repeat forever, giving no indication of why the login failed to work.

The solution is to start to create a new blog, just to accept the terms of service. Then abort that process and go back to the blog you were invited to and it will work. Obvious!!