Christmas Wishes

Merry christmas to you all, see you in church.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Apparently if you type this arbitrary number backwards three times into Windows Vista calculator, the devil appears and asks you to reactivate Windows.

Wiimotely usable?

Finally got around to updating the Wii with the release version of the Internet channel and decided to see just how awkward it would be to write a blog entry with the Wiimote…answer is reasonably awkward, but actually a little better than expected.

I imagined that typing with the on-screen keyboard would be a real chore, but the feedback (audible and visual from the screen and haptic from the Wiimote) makes poking away at the on-screen keyboard easier than most on-screen keyboard interfaces. So it’s pretty impressive but i’ll stick to the laptop for any updates in the future!

Otherwise whilst it’s understandably constrained, the ability to scale the display and to remove the navigation bar makes for a reasonably usable browser even on a regular PAL TV. In terms of technologies, it seems to support the same standards as desktop Opera, with Flash 7/AJAX/RSS all working well.

Being the kind of person who carries his laptop around the house at all times, it’s not as if i’ll be using the browser often, but there will be those odd cases where i’m infront of the TV and not flinging my arms about in Wii gaming world. If only for these moments, it’s nice to know I can watch YouTube, check my Google Mail and Calendar and browse porn RSS feeds with nothing more than a wave of the Wiimote…if only because I am a stupid lazy geek.

Mantis, PHP and PCRE

Had an odd issue to look at where Mantis 1.0.6 was sending blank notification emails once they got to a certain size. After looking at the issue long and hard I determined that it was only happening on PHP 5.2.0 and above and seemed to be related to the size of the notification email, but wasn’t a constant size and seemed to depend on the contents of the bugnotes.

Long story short, the PHP function preg_match_all was failing once the email reached a certain size. preg_match_all is basically a thin wrapper around the Perl Compatible Regular Expression function built into PHP and since 5.2.0 the recursion and backtracking limits have been set and you need to edit your PHP.INI in order to increase them…

[Pcre]
pcre.recursion_limit = 100000
pcre.backtrack_limit = 100000

These are the default values that need to be increased, I found 500000 in each happily worked but I think you need to be careful when changing this as you can allow a complex recursive expression to consume all the stack space and crash PHP. Hope that helps somebody.

More battery woes…

I’ve been running CoconutBattery since I got my MacBook Pro and was interested in watching the battery degrade over time. Last week I was a little suprised to see the battery degrade very sharply to the point where it lasted for 20 minutes tops and often the Mac would simply die as opposed to normally going into Sleep mode.

Given i’ve already had one battery go kaput and knew about the battery recall, I checked but the battery didn’t have a recalled serial number. I contacted AppleCare on the Monday and had a very breif call as they didn’t ask to reset the PRAM or anything else, it was simply a case of Q. “Have you calibrated the battery recently?” A. “Yes I do it every month” and that was it a new battery was on it’s way indeed it arrived the next day – so does Apple have another battery problem which is silently being dealt with through AppleCare or am I particularly unlucky in battery life?

One

One new battery winging its way to me fresh from the clutches of the house that Jobs built.

The experience of calling Applecare was far from the pulling teeth experience to which I have become accoustomed to when calling technical support in the past. The call went straight through with no time spent on hold admiring the frayed ends of sanity. First off we went through the usual NVRAM reset and then the PMU reset – luckily when running dcnet it only takes a minute or two for the Mac to switch off abruptly so the top checklist items were checked off in rapid succession. Next up was the elevation to second line support where the hero of the day confirmed the abrupt halt was indeed the thing that should not be and suggested that a replacement battery would be the cure.

So poor twisted me is left with my planned obscene diatribe kept in storage for a future support call to a less efficient organisation.

Cannot kill the battery

In 1986, the metal band Metallica asserted on their seminal album “Master of puppets”, that a battery could not be killed. Sadly for me, in 2006 Apple Computer threw an exception and Metallica were left holding the remains of their money grubbing power supply assertion in their well groomed hands. My MacBook Pro has developed a bad case of “Fat-Crap-Battery Syndrome”. This disease first presents itself as a bad case of the Mac switching off unexpectedly whilst on battery supply. Slashdot et al have covered the story in some detail in the past, so I was well aware this affliction could possible hurt my lovely little machine and I was immediately looking for the symptoms:

i) Shutting off on battery power, even though the battery monitor reported a full charge seconds before. Check.
ii) Battery beginnning to swell like some crap, overpaid talk show hostess. Check.
iii) User wishing Mr Jobs’s colon cancer had given him a bit more gip. Cruel but Check – the guy is a perfectionist after all.

So it looks like time to call Applecare and scream at some poor dick until I can scream at some Merc driving manager dick. Sometimes I wonder if my experiences with other companies’ support has damaged my expectations of product support…regardless, I will spend the rest of the time until Applecare UK opens honing a fantastic stream of obscenities and expletives into a workable sentence to throw at the first person who makes me follow their corporate “Wear the customer down until they fuck off” checklist of other-possible-but-clearly-unlikely scenarios checklist.

Problems with Mushkin RAM and the MacBook Pro

If you are think of upgrading the memory in your MacBook Pro to avoid the rather large Apple price tag, then I would steer clear of the Mushkin 1GB PC2-5300 SODIMM (Part 991504) as they appear to have an incompatibility with the MacBook Pro.

Immediately after installing the Mushkin SODIMM, the MacBook Pro began spontaneously restarting within a minute or so of starting up. I took the memory out and tested the laptop with just it’s standard 1GB and all was fine with no spontaneous restarts. So I reinstalled the memory hoping that it was just a bad seating, but the problem came back.

The odd thing is that if it doesn’t restart with two minutes or so, then it stays on without issue however this usually requires one or two reboots. Once it’s working OK, then I can put it to sleep and it’ll wake up fine, I can run it hard and it’ll run all night – but if I reboot then the problem reappears. I’ve run the Apple Hardware Tests in basic and extended mode repeatedly and it never reports an issue at all. There is nothing in the console logs when it does reboot, it just seems to power cycle.

I recently got a 1GB Crucial PC2-5300 SODIMM and that doesn’t have the problem at all. I ended up trying all the combinations of slots and memory types (the standard Apple SODIMM, the Mushkin SODIMM and the Crucial SODIMM) and if the Mushkin is installed in any slot, either on it’s own or with one of the other SODIMMs, then the problem reappears. The only explanation would seem to be an incompatibility between the Mushkin and the MacBook Pro…so I would suggest avoiding Mushkin for your MBP upgrades and go with Crucial.

Think Different

Well the experience of being a MacBook Pro owner has really brought back the excitement that computers used to have for me – now after using it for a few days I can confirm that it really is different.

It’s a luxury item to be sure – but when you open it up you know you are no longer in the world of the low margin PC box shifters. OS X is beautiful and elegant on it’s own, but with the addition of a few utilities like Desktop Manager and Quicksilver it simply shows you a world of productivity and ease that I never imagined…Apple can put me down as a switcher once I get used to the odd keyboard. If only Microsoft would build Visual Studio for the Mac and Valve would build Steam & CS:S I would be in seventh heaven.

Penny Arcade

I went looking to see if my faviourite web comic had updated and what do I see, Gabe and Tycho talking about the Mac and there was the quote any geek waiting waiting for his new computer wants to see:

It’s just really fucking good and that’s all.

And to top it all off, they had put up a new strip and that was also Mac related.