So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

1. That I should always always always run Disk Utility regularly, and *specially* before touching the OS. Think about this: as DU was scanning my system disk (a disk where I intentionally don’t put music collections, or photo collections, or large backups), it reported that it had over 1,009,000 files. That is mind-boggling. Of course, a couple power glitches, a couple dead ends where I turned off the machine, a couple of applications killed while they were processing files, a couple of unplagging of external disks before totally being ejected, and so on, *have to* have caused some damage to the file system. Installing on anything but a pristine disk is calling for trouble. Mea culpa…
2. That I should never trust the brands — Yep, this is not news. But somehow, I still remember the times when the Mac used to find things and fix them before I found out they were broken. I remember messages coming from apps that sometimes made me feel like there HAD to be a little dwarf looking at me from the other side of the screen, or else HOW could the machine know so exactly what I was about to do, or wanted to do? The mac spoiled me, made me feel like I didn’t need to nderstand its complexity, “the rest of us” were not hackers, were just normal people who need the computer, just like me… But something has happenned in the last few years. We gradually gave for granted that the massive complexity of a system that, in minimum loaded state, has 1 Million files, was *managed*, not swept under the rug. Sure, OS X is a great OS, but mother, is it complex. Does that mean that I should just bite the bit and learn all of its details? Not really: for that I have already Windows (and Linux). If Disk Utility is something I need to run before upgrading, please don’t bury that fact in some obscure Read Me file that I am sure is part of the 10.5 DVD. Just run it transparently in the background, fix what you’ve got to fix, so what ya need to do, and be a MAC!
3. iPods and Macs from the same company is a bad idea. I’ve had five iPods so far (gave them all away except the Shuffle, which sits in one of my stereos). The first, I gave away because the second (and a beautiful PC clone that is still my favorite, from creative) made it look clunky. The cost, the use, the mind set of the iPod was so “consumerish” that I didn’t even think about it (the guilt of being a spoiled privileged imperial guard is a different issue). I felt a little screwed by the battery thing, but I didn’t care about been screwed by Apple, after all this was mostly a whim device. I felt a little sour when the useful life of the battery (and the glossy cover) came and went fast. So what, this is just a transitional device…

But the Mac is a different thing altogether. I have tens of thousands of pictures in my Aperture library, all of them dear to me. I have files that go back to Mac Pluses and HP LX 100’s. Thousands of digitized CD’s of which at least 20% I have lost originals for. And so on and so forth. When I work in it, the huge visual real estate of the two 30″ Cinemas is used up to the last corner (I showed my desk to a colleague, who visited me while I was running a market research. He said that the two monitors were an exageration, so I asked him to point me to a screen that did not need to be simultaneously open with the others –or that it wouldn’t distract me hunting for it if it weren’t–, or one that could be made smaller, or one of the visible apps that could be hidden without sacrificing context and awareness, and he couldn’t find waste). The computer is the mirror of my mind, where I manipulate my thoughts as a proxy. It costs a fortune (just the video card that drives the monitors does, an obscene amount of money) because it’s worth a fortune. I don’t want Apple to treat it like an iPod, but unfortunately, more and more, Apple does.

When I bought the laptop from hell, the one that was so hot that even Satan would burn his fingers on it, I ended up returning it for a 15% loss. Talk about a rip off… I challenged the “genius” at the store to keep it on for an hour, and then keep his fingers on top of the upper bar for one minute without raising them, and he declined… “It’s supposed to run hot [Verbatim]“. To add insult to injury, all posts on the Apple support forums that mentioned the word heat, hot, burn, etc, would disappear in less than 2 minutes. Censor a message that says that cover of the iPod gets easily scratched, but don’t hide the ball from the next buyer of a mind mirror…

I don’t know if I will be able to fix the Mac. But I have already invested almost three days (plus the ones I will probably need to invest to reinstall apps, plus data that will disappear, plus the confusion of one more backup that I will never get to delete, etc.). Sure, it’s more powerful, but it’s not a Mac any more.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Hell has its privileges

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks. Of course, it breaks at the precise wrong time: hours before I need to deliver a Web conference, already preset to be held on Microsoft’s web conferencing service. Unfortunately, from a Mac I could only run the conference on Safari, so I needed to solve the problem *really fast*…

The problem is, *there is no way to just re-install Safari on 10.4*. The “geniuses” (not my choice of title) at the local Newport Beach Apple store suggested that I (a) downloaded Safari from Apple — twenty minutes until I showed them that I had already tried but there is no such thing as Safari download, (b) fixed disk permissions — which I had already attempted and hadn’t worked, (b) re-installed the OS (???) or (b) upgraded to 10.5. (???)

First red alert – This is the company and OS that is supposed to be the easiest to use and best supported. After decades of using Mac, I could probably get a better answer from the likes of Fry’s “customer service” personnel.

Time ticking, decided to upgrade to 10.5; somehow, an “upgrade” looked like less intrusive a move than a “reinstall”. Notice that somehow the “fix” had disappeared from the option list

Second red alert — Don’t trust a doctor who immediately suggests open heart procedures to eliminate a whart.

Call me stupid, I decided to ignore both red alerts. Hell started…

10.5 installed to a semi-hanged state, where I had windows from “Time Machine” asking me which drive to use to back up the 3.4 GB of content I had in-line at the time (of course, I had no disk with that capacity), and a couploe of windows that I opened by clicking around the dock. But no Finder (that is, no drive icons on the screen). None of the menus in the Finder worked (amongst them, shut down, restart, log out, and all the biggies) and nothing I did in the screen (except a few clicks in the browser, invoked from the Dock) worked. OF COURSE, re-launchiing the Finder from the “Kill Apps” menu didn’t work either!

Red alert 3 — Why have a menu to kill apps that, if the Finder id broken, won’t work? Ask the geniuses, or the marketeers who trump the virtues of the OS

After waiting for two hours, I decided to shut down the power. ZFour or five iterations of this process, and somehow I managed to boot to a working Finder.

You may say: “Hey, you called the problem on yourself by dinging around with the power button”.  But no, not really: a “user friendly” OS is not supposed toleave me with a non-operational mouse, a frozen screen and a spinning wheel where the mouse arrow is supposed to be, WITHOUT A SINGLE MESSAGE or indication of what is going on. I was kind enough to wait for a couple hours before pressing it…

In any case, 10.5.1 seemed to be finally working. As soon as it did, multiple apps starting reporting upgrades available, and for the next day or so I installed a few of them. Then, I installed Aperture 10.2, which in turn proceeded to tell me that it refused to work unless I installed 10.5.2.

Mea Culpa 1 – By now, I should’ve just given up on the whole thing. Too many red alerts, too intense feelings of being abused by Jobs and Co., too many stupid answers collected from forums (who treated me like crap just because I was having problems and I am not a hacker). But I felt like I was in a one-way street with no choices to go back: Aperture is one of the apps I constantly use, if I can’t (and going back to a previous release probably would render my whole library unuseable) I much rather not use the Mac any more…

So I ran the upgrade to 10.5.2. Same as with 10.5 (NO Finder), except that now, no matter what I do, the finder is gone. Went back to 10.5… Same thing, no Finder.

I can’t get to disks, any dialog that opens a file selection dialog freezes, no cleaning the trash, no log out or restart, no system preferences… etc. I have lost exactly three days with this problem, and I feel abused, once again, by Apple, who just needed to put something out to cool down the Vista renassaince… Somehow, Apple and Microsoft have become the same company: closed, abusive of their power, unconcerned about the user, glossy only in commercials and advertisements.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple OS X 10.5 – Welcome to hell