dsandler.org

Bah. Just posted a comment to this reddit thread about e-voting and noticed that my comment started at +0 instead of +1; on a hunch, I logged out and reloaded the page, and, sure enough, I’m banned from reddit again.

Apparently there’s only one thing that is currently theorized to merit the reddit death penalty, and I swear, I didn’t do it! (I even own a copy of Hackers and Painters…)

Update 10/10: Un-banned. See comments.

My PowerBook seems to be cursed. I still haven’t figured out why it switches to the wrong application sometimes (example situation: in iTerm; click on a Safari window; Safari pops to the front, then the Finder immediately pops up in front of everything. WTF?). Now I have a new bug: some of my applications appear to be cloning themselves in the Finder.

Over the weekend I decided to fire up Google Reader again. (I’m still a fan of NewsFire, but now that I’m using the other GApps I’m sort of hooked on instant, painless, in-sync access from multiple machines.)

The UI is better than I remember it, but what is the deal with the message latency? At 4PM central time I took the following screenshot:

Five hours? I’m all for fetching feeds less frequently, but this delay is absurd. Is Google trying to cure my ADD?

Irritating:

$ python2.3 -c 'import urllib; print urllib.getproxies()'
{}
$ python2.4 -c 'import urllib; print urllib.getproxies()'
{'http': 'http://localhost:8501'}

Is it documented somewhere that getproxies() just plain doesn’t work in OS X with the Apple-supplied 2.3 build?

Video: white screen of death; endlessly scrolling menus.

As you can see, my beloved Z520a’s screen is broken; probably a fatigued connector in the hinge. Apparently, this just happens to Sony-Ericsson phones. [Good timing, too: I’ve had the phone for 18 months, which is out of the 1-year warranty but still six months shy of an upgrade discount.]

I guess I meant to write something more meaningful as my first nontrivial post in a month.

My poor little PowerBook G4 (Al, 1.3GHz, 768MB) is suffering. Something is eating cycles, and I can’t figure out what. It’s been like this for a week or two. Take a look:

Not enough information? Fine, here’s a top listing, showing that I’m barely running anything, and that the CPU figures don’t seem to add up:

So, I finally updated our sunflower iMac G4 to Tiger (OS X 10.4, for those just tuning in). I did this because Erin’s new MacBook preferred to crash rather than print to the iMac’s shared HP DeskJet 810C; relevant support threads indicate that the PPC print drivers weren’t totally happy inside Rosetta. The best known fix is to install the Universal (i.e., PPC+x86) HP print drivers (version 3.3) from the MacBook’s OS X DVD. Of course, these drivers require Tiger, so an update to 10.4 was in order.

The fix worked; the MacBook can now pull up the Print dialog (in which the DeskJet is the default printer) without crashing, hard.

Except that now there’s a new problem: The print queue will randomly stop, mid-job, causing half-printed pages and other mayhem. An excerpt from /var/log/system.log shows why the queue stops:

Jun 26 19:57:31 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38071.978 AppleUSBOHCI[0×11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 19:59:25 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38185.985 AppleUSBOHCI[0×11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 20:00:43 imac crashdump[6014]: PrintJobMgr crashed
Jun 26 20:00:46 imac crashdump[6014]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/PrintJobMgr.crash.log

So the Mac loses the USB connection to the printer. Turns out that others have experienced similar issues when upgrading to Tiger. Any OS X USB nerds (I’m basically looking at you, Manuel) got any bright ideas here?