Cool Mac Gear

The good news is that I haven't rebooted OS 10.2.6 for more than a week. After my initial rough start, the updated system seems to have settled down, albeit with a little help from maintenance utilities.

The RAM remains pretty much constantly maxed-out, according to Memory Usage Getter. Starting and quitting certain programs frees up some memory, but it shoots back up quickly to about 625 MB - 630 MB of the 640 MB that I have installed.

However, I haven't had a reprise of the frenzied hard disk accessing slowdown that I encountered just after installing the OS 10.2.6 update. Running Cocktail 2.1.1's slate of maintenance routines (again; as I had run them all immediately prior to installing the update) is seems to have been the charm there, although I can;t figure out why.

But after a week of production work, by Monday evening I was getting a lot of pageouts in Eudora and Safari particularly, which was definitely slowing me down. I checked the amount of free hard drive space left, and Get Info told me that it was 547 MB -- down from about 1.15 GB on a fresh bootup. I decided to run some of the Cocktail routines separately to see what effect they might have recovering hard drive space.

First up was "Delete All Caches." Cache files are used extensively in Mac OS X to store and access data and some cache files tend to grow larger and larger over time, eating up disk space. How much disk space? We would see. It took Cocktail two or three minutes to dispose of a week's worth of cache files. A Get Info reheck showed 570.5 MB now free on the hard drive, which amounted to a 24 MB recovery -- not anything to get up in the night and write home about, but a step in the right direction.

Next, I ran "Delete all Archive Log Files." Many OS X applications, as well as the OS itself, generate logs of their activities. These are useful to programmers and possibly to administrators troubleshooting problems, but are essentially useless to the average user. They don't occupy a lot of space, but it's good housekeeping form to get rid of them from time to time.

The third Cocktail function I ran was "Run Cron Scripts." these are clean up script intended to be run by the cron Unix utility on in order to maintain activity logs, update databases, and throw away files that need to be cleared out and/or updated from time to time. This works as it should on Unix machines that are left running 24/7, since the cron utility is programmed to run the cleanup scripts at times when the machines are theoretically at least likely to be in use. There are three scripts, designated "daily," "weekly," and "monthly. " In OS X, the daily script is scheduled to run every morning at 3:15 a.m.; the weekly script at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday mornings; and the monthly script at 5:30 a.m. on the first day of each month.

However, by, like many Mac users, I don't leave my computer on 24/7. In fact, other than the very occasional instance of me doing in overnight software download, my computers are never on at the scheduled times, I put them to sleep or shut them off overnight, so the cronscripts never get run; and files don't get deleted; log files grow; and databases are not updated. Happily, you can manually trigger the cron scripts to run at any time you like using Cocktail, MacJanitor, Macaroni, or Xupport, to name four freeware/shareware utilities that will do it.

Running the Cron Scripts and Delete Log Files after a week's uptime recovered another 3 MB of disk space, so deleting the caches produced the biggest payoff there. Running the cron scripts also freed up some memory, dropping the unavailable memory down from 629 MB to 581 MB.

However, six hours later my free disk space was down to 477 MB, so I'm obviously running up against the law of diminishing returns and I guess it's getting close to time for a reboot.

Something I may try is transferring the OS X swap files (which are presumably what's eating my free disk space) to the next door partition which has (relatively) lots of free space. The downside of that, I'm told is that it increases disk access time, but that may be the lesser evil compared to a disk with little breathing room left.

In general, 10.2.6 is turning out to be better than I had first suspected. It's not as happy a camper on my PowerBook as 10.2.4 was, but it's usable. I think I'll stick with 10.2.1 for a while yet on the iBook however. It's working well, and I haven't encountered any compelling reason to upgrade, especially after seeing benchmarks that showed it's the fastest of the 10.2 versions performing basic functions.

OS X/USB input

From Daniel Knight

I have to agree with you. Mouse and keyboard input is a far cry from where it was under the Classic Mac OS. Here's what I run into:

Select text in Home Page (a Classic app). Cmd-C to copy. Change to textSOAP. Cmd-V to paste. Darn, old text still in the clipboard. Go back to first application. Cmd-C to copy again. Switch back to textSOAP. Paste with cmd-V. Run whatever cleanup is necessary. Cmd-C to copy cleaned up text. Switch to Home Page again. Cmd-V to paste. Darn, that was the pre-cleanup copy. Back to textSOAP, copy again, switch again, paste again.

I do this several times a day. I may be copying a URL from Internet Explorer or Safari, and sometimes cmd-C just doesn't copy it to the clipboard. We never had it like this in the Classic Mac OS, and I don't think USB is a factor.

My old Commodore VIC-20 running at 1 MHz was more responsive than this. So was my 8 MHz Mac Plus. But OS X seems content to ignore keystrokes whenever it feels like it, making a mockery of my 400 MHz G4 processor.

Let's hope Apple addresses this one in Panther.

Dan Knight, president, Cobweb Publishing, Inc.
http://lowendmac.com
http://digital-views.com
http://lowendpc.com

Hi Dan;

Absolutely! That's the sort of stuff I've been bitching about here for months. Input response in OS X is plain horrible -- more lame and flaky than I've encountered in any other OS.

Here's my latest horror story anecdote. This morning I had just finished marking up a lengthy html document. I then clicked in another window and toggled a "srtip html" macro. However, *&%*&&^% OS X misfired the mouseclick, and the macro proceded to erase my previous 20 minutes work in the other document. If this has ever happened to me in OS 9, it's been rare enough that I don't recall it. The misfires happen all the time in OS x, although I usually notice them and double pump. However I get nailed like this about once a month or so. It does not fill me with warm fuzzy feelings for OS X or those responsible this steaming pile of substandard input support.

USB is a factor in the support of tandem mouseing, which is a particular bugbear of mine, but I agree that it's not the main issue in the erratic input support in OS X because OS 9 is very responsive, positive, and reliable using the same USB devices on the same machines. USB devices themselves are inclined to losing their connection with the system in either OS, but that's another movie.

Why Apple hasn't addressed this flaw in OS X is beyond me.

Charles

Subject: OS X 331 - More Griping And Reflection On OS X's Crummy Input Device Support -- USB Solution

From John Schofield

I recently read the above article and was struck by how much your problems with unreliability in USB devices in OS X were like problems my clients had with their USB devices. In many of the cases, it turned out the culprit was an un-powered USB hub. Switching to an externally-powered hub solved their USB gremlins. You probably already know this, but I figured better to tell you something you already know then not tell you something that could help.

(Unfortunately, I have no ideas on using two USB mice at once.)

Hope you're doing well!
John Schofield

Thanks John;

I appreciate the tip. However, I have a powered Keyspan 4-Port USB hub connected to the iBook and an older powerable but unpowered USB hub connected to the PowerBook. Input device performance in OS X is, if anything, worse with the newer, powered hub and the iBook.

In both cases, input performance is slick and reliable in OS 9 using the exact same hardware and hookups. As Dan Knight said; it's OS X that's the problem -- not USB.

Charles

Allergies

From: Matt Schultz

Hi Charles,

I read your recent article about input devices & OS X and I wanted to tell you to try a spray drug called Astelin.

It's better than these other up-the-nose treatments for seasonal allergies in that unlike Flonaise and other drugs available, Astelin doesn't have any perfumes or steroids. It works great for me and has really helped my wrists and fingers from becoming their typical swollen and painful selves during this season.

FYI,
Matt

Thanks Matt;

Sounds great. I'll check it out.

Charles

Where is?

From John Dennis

I was wondering where I could find my intray in OS 10.2.6. I would like to save it to Zip disk as I will be loading YDL on my Wallstreet. I want to back this up so I can then load it on my iMac so I do not lose any of my mail.

Hi John;

If you're referring to your OS X Mail app. email files, check the Mail folder in the Library folder of your Home folder.

Charles

It semi works

From John Dennis

Well I found my intray. When I tried to open it on my other machine it opened mail, but added the inbox to an email. I did not have any thing open at the time and when I double clicked on my intray this is what happened. I know I can send my emails to myself, but I was hoping that I would not have to do that.

Hi John;

In Odessey 102, Michael King wrote re: converting Mail email boxes to Eudora:

1. Extract the mbox file from the mailbox to be converted.
2. Rename it (if converting more than one, so that you do not get confused with more than one file named "mbox").
3. Open up the utility MailConverter. This is available from Fog City's website and runs fine under OS X Classic mode.
4. From the File menu, select Convert File.
5. Follow the prompts and open the mailboxes created with Eudora.

They open up perfectly, though I should note that I did not have success transferring over attachments -- the messages are fine, but the attachments themselves become converted into texts.

Michael D. Allen wrote:

mboxes created by OS X Mail application are packages (hidden folders) not files. That's why your ResEdit trick didn't work. If you control-click on any .mbox icon the popup menu will display "Show Package Contents". If you chose this option, the package will open to reveal four files: Info.plist, table_of_contents, mbox, mbox.SKinde. If you drop the file mbox onto TextEdit it will open. This file looks exactly like a standard mailbox file used by Unix mail readers. This format is almost exactly what Eudora wants to read. All you have to do is convert the Unix newline (lf) characters to carriage return (cr) characters. In Tex-Edit, I did this from the Special menu by choosing Quick Modify, LFs->CRs (UNIX->Mac) and saved the file as the original mailbox name minus the ".mbox". You can just drop it into or save it directly to ~/Documents/Eudora Folder/Mail Folder/ and Eudora will be able to use it. You don't even have to change the Creator code unless you want a Eudora specific icon. This is a pain in the butt, if you've got a lot of mailboxes to convert. If I was going to return to Eudora, I'd write a application to convert all my files or put together a shell script to do the job from a terminal window. Hopefully, Qualcomm will add Mail to its Import Mail menu in a future release.

I hope this information will help. I don't use the Mail app., partly because it's not backward compatible to an OS 9 version, so I have no hands-on experience with these conversions. If you can get your mail into Eudora, you could then presumably re-import it back into Mail.

Charles

Carbon Copy Cloner

From Kevin.Larson

Hello Charles

In your response to James Rae Smith, you wrote:

--However, I have as yet, had no immediate requirement for Carbon Copy Cloner., or at least any I have perceived.

and

--It may please you to learn that I am currently testing SubRosaSoft's DiskGuardian utility for review, and it incorporates what I take to be a similar function to that of Carbon Copy Cloner.

In Odyssey 329 Anonymous sent you tips about downgrading back to 10.2.4 by using Apple's archive and install feature, and you replied with:

--I have a complete collection of OS 10.2 udaters (including ones I never installed) as well as a 10.2 install CD set, so the process you describe should be doable.

While the process is doable it is also quite time intensive and requires that your files are manually restored to your "new home directory".

And here a quote from Odyssey 328 where you wrote:

--Anyway, downgrading to OS 10.2.4 from 10.2.6 would be a much more formidable proposition, and one that I simply don't have time to --mess around with right now.

Here a product discription from Mike Bombwich developer of CCC:

---Have you ever wanted a simple, complete, bootable backup of your hard drive? Have you ever wanted to upgrade to a larger hard drive with minimal hassle and without reinstalling your OS and all of your applications? Have you ever wanted to move your entire Mac OS X installation to a new computer? Then CCC is the tool for you! CCC makes these tasks simple by harnessing the Unix power built into Mac OS X. In addition to the features that CCC has provided in the past, version 2.0 offers synchronization of the source and target as well as scheduled backup tasks. Now you can setup a regular backup regimen that occurs in the background, even if you are not logged in! Version 2.0 also offers enhancements for lab administrators, including the option to run pre and post-flight shell scripts, the ability to modify the list of items to be removed at the end of a clone, and the ability to create a disk image on the fly. One of CCC 2.0's most exciting features is the ability to create a NetBoot image from a fully customized Mac OS X installation. Version 2.1.1 offers the ability to create ASR-ready disk images and includes some minor bug fixes and improvements to the documentation.

CCC can be found here:
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Charles when using CCC you can install updates, upgrades, new drivers, and programs knowing that for what ever reason you can simply roll back your system. By using CCC you can mirror your computer's hard drive to a firewire drive,(even mirroring both of your laptops with each other) and boot from it knowing that everything is the same. (A great tip for all those who cannot or do not want to use sys 9 for disk and file repairs).

Once again your response to James Rae Smith:

--However, I have as yet, had no immediate requirement for Carbon Copy Cloner., or at least any I have perceived

You keep mentioning requirements over and over again, even those that you have not perceived.

Yours truly
Kevin Larson

Hi Kevin;

Please see Shareware Beat and New & Notable today.

I think you misunderstood my comments to James and Anonymous. The key qualifying phrase is "immediate requirement." In the latter case I was speaking theoretically about downgrading. Obviously, if I were to downgrade, CCC would be a great help (or DiskGuardian). I certainly perceive that. It has just not been a "requirement" for me up to now. If and when I ever do try a downgrade, I'll definitely avail myself of one of these utilities.

However, as yet, I have never downgraded my OS X system other than when I reformatted and partitioned my iBook hard drive, and it was still running a pretty virgin OS 10.2.3 anyway. I just reinstalled 10.2.1.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear