Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Another OS upgrade, this time to macOS Sierra, made far more difficult than it should have been by on-going disk problems on my iMac. After downloading Sierra, the initial upgrade failed because the existing root volume failed to verify — something which also prevented me from booting back into El Capitan.

Having backed up the contents of my home directory — which I'd deliberately kept fairly small, given the untrustworthness of the internal disk — I reformatted the root volume, forgetting, until after I'd started the process, that I'd failed to copy the Sierra image to external storage before starting the process. I resolved the problem by booting into recovery mode, reinstalling El Capitan, rebooting, downloading Sierra again, and installing over the image of El Cap.

Eventually, with the system back up and running, I restored my home directory, applied the latest updates for Sierra and rebooted the machine. Fortunately, everything started up again without any errors and everything now seems to be back to normal.

I've been meaning to replace my iMac for a while — I've had it for over six years, so it's certainly put in its time and the internal disk seems to be increasingly past its prime — but Apple haven't released any compelling updates since last year, when the upper end of the iMac was refreshed to Skylake. My cunning plan — somewhat hampered by the spectacular devaluation of stirling! — is to keep my current system bumping along until the iMac release, when presumably the systems will move to Kaby Lake, before upgrading.

Without homebrew on my mac, I've using the Raspberry Pi to work on a few bits and pieces that need the usual standard command line tool chain.

Having configured the Pi to start TightVNC at boot, I'd been accessing the system using Screen Sharing on my Mac. But it quickly became apparent that the performance was dismal, despite my best efforts to improve it: I suspect the cost of constantly generating jpegs is just too much for the server.

Eventually I decided to bite the bullet and, after discovering that X11.app was no longer included in OSX, I installed XQuartz. This resolved all the performance problems I'd been seeing at the cost of reduced resilience; unsurprisingly, the connections to the X applications drop whenver Mac going into sleep mode. So, an improvement in many ways, but not an ideal solution...

I've discovered that much of the truly horrible recent performance of my iMac is not the result of age and resource deprivation as I'd supposed, but rather consequent of a gradually failing hard disk. Unfortunately, I learnt this under less than ideal conditions: the machine detected problems partway through an upgrade and refused to continue installing the new OS whilst also declinng to boot the old installation, leaving me in something of a limbo.

Unable to recover the system with either Disk Utility or a single user mode fsck, I've been reduced to runing my system off an SD card while I consider how to back up and move my old data — because, of course, my Time Machine backup turns out to have been almost a year out of date. Annoyingly using an SD card as my boot volume actually seem to be greatly preferable to running of the internal hard disk: both much quieter and much quicker. Which brings me back to my original realisation: most of my recent performance problems seem to have been down to failing IO operations...

Spent the afternoon scraping together a bit of cold to solve a fun little maths puzzle, after which I extracted an old tar file in the same directory, relying on the fact that the directory name in the archive was in lower case and the directory name with the puzzle solution was in capitalised. So imagine my surprise when OS X helpfully extracted the old files into the capitalised directory, trashing my code. And imagine my annoyance when I realised that I'd switched off Time Machine to allow me to shuffle around a handful of transient data files and had forgotten to switch it on again afterwards...

I'm currently trying out Safari 4 — I normally use firefox — and, within limits, I'm impressed. It certainly renders pages much faster than firefox 3, but I'm not sure I want to switch until I can find some way to block adverts as efficiently as AdBlock does.

Yesterday, Software Update upgraded iTunes to 7.7. Now I discover that, when I use it to play a CD, I find that I'm unable to unload it without stopping iTunes. Being an inquisitive sort, I used lsof to check on the culprit and, sure enough, I found a load of open file descriptors hanging around under the /Volume mount point.

Most annoying.

I've finally worked out how to map alt to meta in the OS X terminal emulator. It's simply a matter of picking File->Window Settings... and then, in the Terminal Inspector dialogue, setting an option the keyboard section. If only I'd taken the trouble to spend thirty seconds sorting this out when I first set up my mac, I wouldn't have spent the last three years feeling mildly frustrated at having to use the escape key.

Following on from yesterday's post, I left my consolidate running overnight and now everything is now working as expected. Plus, I've discovered a neat bonus feature: if the NFS share isn't iTunes looks in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music for tracks. Thus it's possible to keep your main library to a remote disc, prune the local copy and still have your favourite tracks available even when you're not connected the network disc. Very nice indeed.

I was amused by the new private browsing facility in Safari 3. According to the warning popup that appears when the option is selected:

Which rather makes me suspect that the feature isn't targeted at political dissidents as porn-browsing family members...

I love the way OS X just works. It took me little more than a couple of clicks (and most of those were to get out of the configuration widget on my phone) to set up iSync to copy my calendar and address book to my cell. I can't even begin to imagine the horror involved in getting either Windows or Linux to do the same thing.