Macintosh

I went to the Apple Store in Boca Raton to buy a new AC adapter for my MacBook Pro. They didn’t have a Wireless Mighty Mouse or I might have picked one up. Thankfully with the new adapter my battery is charging. I’ll see if Apple will replace my old adapter so I’ll have a spare.

Driving up there I took Powerline Road (speed 45-50 MPH) with the AC off and the windows open. I was able to get 60-70MPG most of the time and I saw the battery fully charged (all bars green) for the first time. I took I-95 (speed limit 65) home, with the AC on and the windows closed. I barely managed 50MPG and the battery stayed around 5 bars, sometimes going down to half or less. Now that the car is getting broken in (and I’m more experienced driving it), I find that my mileage is generally improving.

The power adapter for my MacBook Pro appears to have died. Last night I noticed that the light on the plug would go out if I moved the cable. Today I can’t get the light to come on at all and the battery is discharging.

I got the Leopard preview at WWDC and installed it on an external drive, but I’ve booted it about 5 times and only for a few minutes. I always go right back to 10.4 since I can’t do any real work in Leopard. Here’s why:

• I can’t check my email in Leopard at risk of losing email and getting out of sync with my mailbox in 10.4.
• The current version & betas of Parallels Desktop won’t work. They’re unable to load the HDD file.
• Of course there’s the inconvenience & sluggishness of booting from a USB drive (adding a larger internal drive with a second partition will eliminate this one).
• There aren’t really any “must have” features that I’m really excited about.
• Time Machine requires a lot of space on my server, and since I’m using a NFS server, it uses a disk image on the server. It also needs to be running for a few hours to back up the machine initially.

I’m thinking of upgrading the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro to 160G, so I can add a second partition to boot 10.5. There are two options. One company is offering overnight service: they send a box & pick up the machine, upgrade it, and ship it back overnight. Unfortunately they use DHL for shipping. My other option is to buy a 160G drive and upgrade it myself, which involves removing 21 screws and removing some very tightly wedged parts. Even the guy demonstrating it in OWC’s upgrade instruction video had some difficulty.

My Battery Exchange Saga is over. The replacement battery was received this afternoon.

A few days before I left for WWDC, I requested a battery exchange for my MacBook Pro. I got a call from the courier on Friday before I left to confirm the delivery address and let me know that it would be delivered Monday. It turns out they left one digit off the address, which made it a non-existent address. I corrected them and let them know I would be out of town that day, so they should deliver it to my neighbor in the next building.

When I got back I found that the package was never delivered and no note was left. I tried to re-enter the same battery serial number on Apple’s page and got an error message saying that the exchange was already requested. I then called Apple and the person I talked to seemed to be using the same form. He just told me exactly the same thing I found from entering the serial number. He wasn’t able to do anything more than I could do through that form. He also couldn’t give me a tracking number for the shipment.

I then called DHL and after being transferred to several people and having to call back my local office I found that it was delivered to a completely different address. They would send someone to that address to recover the package. After I called them again today, I was informed that the package was recovered and will be delivered tomorrow morning. That’s how it stands now. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I got a very weird kernel panic as soon as I plugged in my iPod. Instead of the usual panic screen, it printed the backtrace in text mode. Here’s what it wrote to panic.log, which shows that it’s USB related:

Fri Aug 11 17:17:17 2006
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x0019CADF): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 1, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0xeeeeeeee, CR3: 0x00d79000, CR4: 0x000006a0
EAX: 0x00010001, EBX: 0x039feda0, ECX: 0x00497938, EDX: 0xeeeeeeee
ESP: 0xeeeeeeee, EBP: 0x24f8bbb4, ESI: 0x00000000, EDI: 0x00497938
EFL: 0x00010212, EIP: 0x00383135, CS:  0x00000008, DS:  0x01560010

Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x24f8ba34 : 0x128b5e (0x3bc46c 0x24f8ba58 0x131bbc 0x0)
0x24f8ba74 : 0x19cadf (0x3c18e4 0x1 0xe 0x3c169c)
0x24f8bb24 : 0x197c7d (0x24f8bb38 0x24f8bbb4 0x383135 0x120048)
0x24f8bb30 : 0x383135 (0x120048 0x1560010 0x10 0x1560010)
0x24f8bbb4 : 0x3b2049 (0x39feda0 0x497938 0x40 0x3b1cd0)
0x24f8bbe4 : 0x3b21aa (0x35a34c0 0x39ff400 0x8 0x34da300)
0x24f8bc04 : 0x3812f1 (0x39ff400 0x8 0x1 0x5697600)
0x24f8bc84 : 0x3810c9 (0x5697600 0x4cb9a00 0x0 0x310)
0x24f8bcd4 : 0x3822c1 (0x5697600 0x2 0x0 0x0)
0x24f8bd14 : 0x37c0a6 (0x5697600 0x2 0x5697604 0x0)
0x24f8bd54 : 0x509ac3 (0x5697600 0x2 0x4 0x0)
0x24f8bdc4 : 0x816bcc (0x4c8fe00 0x5285500 0x1 0x1)
0x24f8bde4 : 0x81682b (0x5285500 0x1 0x1 0x0)
0x24f8be34 : 0x8163ed (0x5285500 0x515438 0x34c0cc0 0x10001)
0x24f8be64 : 0x37ffda (0x5285500 0x4c8fe00 0x1 0x3b0e27)
0x24f8bec4 : 0x38185f (0x4c8fe00 0x5285500 0x39b9c80 0x4c8fe00) 	Backtrace continues...
      Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.driver.AppleUSBComposite(2.5.0)@0x815000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(2.5.6)@0x4fd000
         com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(2.5.6)@0x4fd000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.7.1: Wed Jun  7 16:19:56 PDT 2006; root:xnu-792.9.72.obj~2/RELEASE_I386

The pundits are calling Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote “disappointing” because he didn’t announce any new iPod or consumer products like the iPhone. Since WWDC is for developers, not consumers, his announcements were exactly what would be expected. The new Mac Pro and XServe completes the Intel transition and Leopard’s new features add some very significant improvements.

A few days ago I correctly predicted that there would be no new iPod announcements at MacMegasite. My biggest surprise at WWDC was seeing how many developers are still using PowerBook G4s, which far outnumber MacBook Pros and even MacBooks.

I’m on my way to WWDC. I’ll be posting keynote updates at MacMegasite, if I’m able to get online from the auditorium.