Red Hat Diaries/0037

Trouble Again!

Today was my day. What Syd got yesterday, I got today in spades.

I've been involved in a project to port S3 to X. I've got the actual application skeleton, with two entry fields, a 'Convert' button, and an output field, together with traditional Mac menu, down to 9728 bytes on disk, and all this without knowing any more about how to tweak Mac applications than going into the GCC settings and making sure they make sense. But getting around the system as one would do on Wintel requires access to documentation, and that access implies contextual help. That is to say, when you have your caret in a keyword in an IDE editor, some easily accessible toolbar button, menu item or keyboard shortcut must take you to the relevant information. And while reading the Apple book on Carbon out in the garden earlier today, I learned that this information was accessible through the keyboard shortcut Option+double click. So I was ready to go. Install a few handlers, link them to the dialog controls, and the application should be up and running.

Back at the tBook however, I found that things were not at all as easy as the Apple book would have them. Double clicking a keyword, with or without Option, with or without fn, Ctrl or Cmd for that matter produced the same results. It was then that I guessed that my earlier reluctance to install 300MB of documentation was paying off.

Out with the CD I'd ordered from Apple before Christmas. In with it into the automatic loading CD-RW/DVD drive. Up with it in the Finder. Find the right link and click to install.

Half an hour and 300MB and 25,000 files later the Apple Project Builder still refused to kick contextual help into action when I double clicked on keywords. My guess was that the Project Builder programmers had been a bit dumb and programmed Project Builder to turn off contextual help functionality if the documentation files were not found to be on disk. Solution? Wipe all the developer files from the hard drive and start all over and install the entire shebang. This took another hour or so.

Result? Nothing. Not a thing. Project Builder still refused to launch contextual help. Conclusion? Project Builder - and the Apple development environment - is for all purposes useless in its present condition. Remedy? Wipe the documentation files from disk, as they're not doing any good anyway.

That's when the punch line fell in, for me just as it had the day before for Sydney. X would not let me delete them, as although only administrator rights were needed to install, the installer put the files on the hard drive as owned by root. So I had to go up to root to get rid of them. But as there were approximately 25,000 of them on disk, I was not about to go to a console and navigate recursively through each of the several thousand directories to delete them all. I had to enable my root account from the GUI interface just as Syd had done.

And when I'd done this, I simply logged out of my administrator account and logged back in as root and then trashed the entire Project Builder documentation. Even this step of the process took several minutes. I watched the system work through all the files, displaying how many files were left - '24,512 still to delete' etc. Staggering.

And when the system had finally destroyed all these essentially useless files, I noticed in the Finder that I was still coming up short by 228MB on the hard drive. Here I was, with the exact same setup, the exact same files (or supposedly so) as before this futile operation - and still there was 228MB missing!

Sometimes X makes a few cleanup operations at startup that take care of lags and stray files, so just to be sure I rebooted several times and even shut the machine down to rest a minute - and yet although I did regain 8MB, I was still a walloping 220MB short. But that wasn't even the start of the fun.

Now the Finder was all screwed up. No matter what I did, its start window - the 'Computer' window - came up all screwy, with a scroll bar enabled where no scroll bar was needed, with focus scrolled all the way to the end of this non-existent real estate, forcing me time and again to 'arrow up' to see the two icons displayed therein. It was becoming obvious to me that the system was bouncing around and ready to capsize. So I opted to reinstall the shebang.

Out with the restore CDs, in with the first, hold down C and restart. Machine comes up in OS 9. Starts to restore. Takes all told about forty five minutes. Reboot to get back in. And note: All previous data on that hard drive is gone forever.

Booting again, system insists on coming up in OS 9 and will not let you in until you fill in all the data yet again, get online to Apple and register yet again, etc. Then you can go into your Control Panels and set the system to boot from X instead and restart the machine.

Back in X and up to now the process has been relatively painless (but oh how it hurts). Same registration process again, same Internet connect to Apple again etc. Finally the X desktop appears.

But this is X 10.1.1 - not the latest and greatest 10.1.2. This tBook shipped before 10.1.2 was available. So I have to go back online and download it again. 30.3MB. Put it on download and break for dinner. Syd is home now, sees me swearing and cussing out Apple, opts to go shopping and make her famous curry shrimp linguini (recipe available on request - it really is very good). When the food is served I sit down to eat but notice across the room that a dialog has popped up on the tBook screen.

'Hi! I'm your friendly Internet connection reminder do-thingie. I just wanted to remind you your computer has been inactive for fifteen minutes. Do you want to continue your connection?'

And all the while I can see the Software Update module and the Internet Connection traffic meter struggling in the background. The download is going full steam! Strike One against the New Delhi developers.

But I click 'Continue' to allow the connection to remain open (who knows what else these geniuses would have cooked up for me otherwise) and go back to my dinner. Syd winces in sympathy.

'Hey I got an idea - so I won't be interrupted again,' I tell her, and go back to the computer and open the Internet connection preferences. Two checkboxes I don't like are checked. They tell the system to disconnect after fifteen minutes of inactivity and to prompt as before. I uncheck them - and then click 'Save'.

All at once, and as a direct result of my turning off the two checkboxes in the preferences window, my Internet connection is broken. I've been downloading X 10.1.2 for an hour and fifteen minutes and now all of that has gone to shit. This has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever seen a programmer do.

Still relatively calm, I start up the connection again and try to get Software Updates to continue the download. Nothing doing. The program starts spitting bile and tossing that ridiculous beach ball around and only after several attempts to start him, to cancel and stop him, to exit him and start him again can I get any sense out of the dumb thing. And now - finally - after several hours pain can I begin to seriously download 10.1.2.

And my dinner is getting cold and Syd looks every bit the frustrated user that I do.

Click here »