The Syncing Apple

Unfortunately today my G5 again rebooted. It was up for over a day. So it has nothing to do with the hard-drive, or any corruption of any file. My next step is to move its mains plug around to another house circuit. There is talk that the PMU will act funny if there are line voltage drops or other issues, and the G5 is particular sensitive to this. I am doubtful however, as I have the G5 plugged into a nice APC SmartUPS 1000, which should be stopping any funny business with this circuit.

Stefan Schüßler has written one of the most incredibly cool add-ons for Mail.app that I’ve seen. If you know anyone with a PC, then you’ve probably seen Outlook 2003. Have you noticed the cool translucent new mail notification it offers? When new mail arrives (it may only work with Exchange mailboxes) it momentarily floats up a little window on the screen with the email info… then it fades away. It’s cool. Well, now you can do it (even better) with Mail.app. Mail.appetizer over at Bronsonbeta.com does it. This software add-on has tons of features… you can resize the popup to whatever size you want, move it to any location on your screen (or screens). Change the font… It now even shows the photo from AddressBook if you have one… it can show multiple messages, pausing a specified time in between each one. Mail.appetizer is managed via the Mail.app prefs.

It’s simply the coolest thing I’ve seen, and has already changed how I read mail. Now I can keep Mail.app tucked away in the dock and recover my 2nd screen. I have two screens, but Mail is always up in one and I’ve tended to leave it alone so as to see my Mail… now I can put it away and let Mail.appetizer screen my email! Amazing.

A really cool open source IRC client for OSX is called Colloquy. It’s very scriptable, has nice features and looks cool. Similar to Adium, this is quite extensible and has a flexible plugin architecture that has spawned some cool stylings for the gui already. Features are: buddy list, DCC support, AppleScriptable, totally open source (they are even using subversion) and a irssi core. Irssi core? The more I look at this, the more it really does resemble Adium in the way they are taking these low-level rock-solid open source core apps and drenching them with killer gui’s that really fit Aqua and the Mac. Adium is built on libgaim, and like irssi, is the acknowledged leader in multi-protocol IM.

This is an interesting and great trend for OpenSource Macintosh software. By taking these tried and true pieces of free code, and building the UI elements that make them an exciting part of Aqua, these developers are really pushing OSX into some interesting places. I never imagined that there would be such a wealth of cool apps coming out of the OS movement… Just don’t forget to throw them a few bucks to keep the updates coming.

My Amiga 500 (and my CD-TV) are both still in my closet, and haven’t been used in years. But long ago I used to work for a store that was exclusively Amiga, back in the early ’90s in Rockville Maryland (Software Advantage if you must know) and had lots of fun with those computers back when they were the coolest thing around. They were also some of the more temperamental machines, especially when you combined them with the touchy Video Toaster. If you crossed your eyes and turned on a 2000 with a VT , chances are you just blew your VT board– and it had to go back to NewTek. We kept spares around, luckily.

Well, now with the porting of the UAE (the Ultimate Amiga Emulator) to PocketPC by Cerial at Pocket Insanity you can play your Amiga stuff again, on your PocketPC. Download the binary for PocketUAE here. It’s slow at the moment, but it does work. You’ll need to track down those little buggers, you know, the kickstart disks– Kickstart 1.3 and 3.1– remember them? There is an ‘official’ licensee of the Amiga Roms now, and they are trying to stop out the free downloads on the net, but if you Google it and move out to about 10 or so, you’ll easily find some for download. Along with about every Amiga game there is.

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So resetting the PMU on my G5 actually seemed to make it worse: it started rebooting about every three hours, instead of every other day. Perfect. I posted to Apple’s boards, hoping for some info but nothing so far. In desperation I cloned my boot disk over to an external FW800 drive. I used SuperDuper! which is a very nice backup and cloning utility that is a steal at $19. After cloning my boot drive and booting from it I was too tired and went to sleep. When I woke up this morning and saw my mac: it hadn’t rebooted. So now I’m going to leave it on this external drive for a day or so, then clone it back onto my internal SATA drive. From this I should be able to determine if it was a random software thing, or is tied to the internal SATA interface.

I found this really cool editor today on What Do I Know’s Sidebar. Peter Borg has written a very nice, small Cocoa edior that has syntax colorization support for many scripting languages. I refuse to pay for the crappy BBedit and Textwrangler, and I was resigned to usingTextEdit. Smultron relieves me of this issue once and for all.

So the upgrade went flawlessly. Other than not being able to back up (you just have to copy your data to your PC, then back) it was smooth. Now I’ve got to do the rounds of getting all WM2003 compatible updates for my software. Missing sync claims compatibility with MW2003, but for now I’m just using it with my XP machine.

Finally, I see this morning on PocketPC Thoughts (Janak Parekh reporting) that Toshiba has released the WM2003SE for my E405. I was resigned to the fact that it would only be released for the big 800s. This should be nice. I’ll try again soon to see how The Missing Sync from Mark-Space will work with iSync. The last attempt was a disaster.

This is driving me nuts. I’ve had this G5 (single cpu, 1.6G) for a few months, and now its started rebooting randomly for no apparent reason. I finally looked in the logs today and found the culprit:

Jul 23 18:56:31 localhost kernel: AppleU3: WARNING: platform-chip-fault expected, but not found
Jul 23 18:56:31 localhost kernel: ApplePMU::PMU FORCED SHUTDOWN, CAUSE = -122

Googling “PMU FORCED SHUTDOWN, CAUSE “ gave me some hits, but there were all for powerbooks and ibooks, and the fix was to reset the PMU. Searching further on Apple’s support site yielded no direct hits on how to reset the PMU on the desktop G5, but they did have an entry for the XServe G5. I’m going to have a look around my G5 tonight and see if I can find the PMU reset button. Its seems overly complicated for something like this…