Mike Cohen

My flight didn't suck

by

For the first time in a few years, my flight didn’t suck. I breezed through checkin and security, all of my flights arrived on time and my baggage arrived with me.

DSCN2778

Off to WWDC

by

I’m getting ready to leave for San Francisco early in the morning. My flight is at 6:45 so I’ll probably have to be up around 3AM. I change flights in Atlanta and arrive in San Francisco around noon, so I’ll have plenty of time to pick up my badge.

Banning all citizens of 'terrorist states'

by

This item by Matthew Yglesias illustrates the stupidity of our “zero tolerance” policies.

Shooting guard Bol Kong has drawn interest from a number of universities and recently received a scholarship offer from Gonzaga. It is the defense he has met off the court that has slowed him — and could prevent him from ever playing for the Bulldogs or anyone else in the United States. Kong, 20, is originally from Sudan, which is listed by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. Although he has lived in Canada since age 7, he does not hold citizenship there. He has been denied a visa to study in the United States three times, and it is unclear if he will ever satisfy the requirements for entry.

In other words, our wonderful government, in its infinite wisdom, assumes that every citizen of a country listed as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ is considered a terrorist regardless of his background or circumstances.

My iPhone prediction

by

There are lots of predictions about what Apple will announce monday, many of them sparked by mysterious boxes being delivered to dealers around the world.

I suspect there will be some kind of docking station with keyboard & display for the new iPhones. Since Apple is now referring to the operating system as ‘OS X Leopard’ instead of ‘Mac OS X Leopard’, there will most likely be some non-Mac device that will run it (actually it already runs on several non-Mac devices: the Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod Touch).

The iPhone already has a lot of the Mac’s capabilities, so it isn’t much of a stretch for them to have a docking device with a keyboard & display to make it a full-fledged computer. Another alternative would be something similar to target mode or portable home directories, where a Mac can use the iPhone as their home directory when it’s docked, so you can easily take your setup anywhere and use it on any Mac.

My MacBook Pro is fixed

by

Thanks to the awesome service at the Fort Lauderdale Apple Store, I now have my MacBook Pro working again. It needed a new motherboard, which they had in stock so they were able to replace it right away. I brought it in at 11AM this morning and was out of there in less than 15 minutes. A little after 1PM they called to let me know it was ready. Thankfully I won’t have to take either a Dell Inspiron 4150 or OLPC laptop to WWDC!

links for 2008-06-04

by

Dead MacBook Pro Display

by

I woke up to an unpleasant surprise this morning when my MacBook Pro wouldn’t wake up properly. I noticed it was warm and the display wouldn’t turn on. After rebooting, the display was still black, and it also wouldn’t drive an external monitor.

However, the MacBook Pro still showed up on the network for screen sharing and SSH, and I was able to boot into Firewire Target mode and access the drive. Luckily I do full backups to a bootable external drive at least once a week, so I was able to quickly do an incremental backup.

I reset the SMC and zapped PRAM several times, but still no change. This seems to be a widespread problem, according to Apple’s discussion forums, but there seems to be no consensus on a solution.

I’m starting to suspect a motherboard problem or the graphics chip failing. The console log shows several errors which seem to indicate that it can’t find the display:

Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:32: — last message repeated 1 time —
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: Matching service count = 1
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: Matching service count = 3
Jun 4 09:16:32: — last message repeated 4 times —
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 0
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: IG: Invalid firmware max backlight setting

With the console log filtered on ‘display’:

Jun 4 08:54:25 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 08:54:25 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 08:54:49 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 08:54:49 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: match category IOFramebuffer exists
Jun 4 08:54:50 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: match category IOFramebuffer exists
Jun 4 08:54:55 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: Not usable
Jun 4 08:55:06 Mcohen-MacBookPro com.apple.loginwindow[34]: Wed Jun 4 08:55:06 Mcohen-MacBookPro.local loginwindow[34] : CGSDisplayServerShutdown: Detaching display subsystem from window server
Jun 4 08:55:06 Mcohen-MacBookPro loginwindow[34]: CGSDisplayServerShutdown: Detaching display subsystem from window server
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:32 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:16:48 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: Not usable
Jun 4 09:28:16 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:28:16 localhost kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:28:26 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails
Jun 4 09:28:27 Mcohen-MacBookPro kernel[0]: display: family specific matching fails

Even more interesting, System Profiler now thinks the MacBook Pro has an Intel GMA X3100 instead of a GeForce 8600M.

GMA X3100
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Unfortunately this comes at the worst possible time for me, just a few days before I leave for WWDC. I’ll probably be bringing it into the Apple Store later today or tomorrow.