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I know I don't normally do news, but this is quite related to my last MacBook Pro bug post, so here goes...
Yahoo (they've removed the story, as of Dec. 2009) (among others) are reporting that NVidia has admitted that some of their mobile GPU lines have been failing at higher than usual rates; they're cutting predicted revenue by ~150 million dollars in order to fix this; stock price is dropping, etc...
One wonders if one of the affected GPUs might not include, oh, say, the GeForce 8600M GT?
In any case — things are looking up for this problem getting solved, perhaps.
Some Evas news and a little Lispy bonus tomorrow!
Hi, it's Amy again! Our first attempt at making a full dinner together happened around June 17. After going through about a thousand recipes, I compiled a menu for a complete dinner.
The main dish was called Southwestern Chicken Salad—a combination of salad, baked flour tortillas, chicken, corn, black beans and tomatoes. The dressing was a mix of barbeque sauce and ranch dressing. It was very simple and good for the most part, though the beans and tomatoes were rather excessive.
The corn bread muffins we made from scratch came from this recipe. They were quick and easy, but we learned that you should use Pam, not muffin papers. Also, the recipe we used, which we found after we went shopping, used only things we already had.
As for dessert, which is apparently what we're quite good at, we made banana cream pie. Yet again, I had to create a pie crust out of crushed graham crackers—which is never too fun. But, on the upside, I didn't have to whip cream. Instead of using two boxes of vanilla pudding, we had one vanilla and one banana. Mixing the two worked quite well since we only had one banana to slice.
To complete dinner, we made Pink Honey Lemonade. This almost didn't happen because of the lack of strawberries and the excessive simmering that had to be done, but in the end, we got the strawberries and made it work. The lemonade tasted excellent once it was done, but a lot of work had to go into boiling the strawberries. And we sort of failed at the lemonade bit since we only had half the amount of lemon juice necessary.
All together, it was a highly successful dinner that we pulled off in a good amount of time for all of the components. It would have been nearly impossible to get all of this done with only one person since a lot of things had to be done simultaneously.
Hi! I'm Amy and I'm going to be writing about the food adventures that Tim and I are taking over this summer.
After Tim made his fudge, we decided to take on a peanut butter and fudge pie on June 11th. After we found the recipe, we secretly biked to Mazza's and picked up the graham crackers, cream and evaporated milk that we needed.
The first thing to do was figure out how to make a crust out of the graham crackers. That turned out to be my job, and it was quite an experience. When I made the crust, I used the wrong pan, which was too small and made the pie rather tall.
Meanwhile, Tim made more fudge that we used to make a layer between the crust and the peanut butter. Again, he complained about the candy thermometer, which I finally understand. He had to use a cup of water and try to sink the little fudge drops. He layered in the fudge, while I whipped the cream with a whisk—which wasn't easy, but made a great topping.
Tim created the peanut butter filling, which stole half of my cream, and put it on top of the fudge once it had chilled. We were both quite astonished that there was so much cream cheese in the pie, but in the end, you would never have known. At that point, we put the pie in the fridge to cool. I shaved a block of bittersweet chocolate with a carrot peeler to garnish the pie.
We let the pie cool, washed the dishes, mopped the horrendously dirty floor and waited to surprise our parents with our excellent dessert. The pie was great, albeit a bit over peanut buttery in my opinion.
While we were baking, we took some pictures of our creations.
Digg Reddit
Recently, an unknown number of first-revision Santa Rosa MacBook Pros began exhibiting issues with their onboard video cards. After a reboot, or on wake from sleep, the machine refuses to acknowledge the presence of a display, either internal or external. From that point on, the computer never regains its displays — not after a reboot, etc. Subsequent debugging indicates that the machine is misidentifying its NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card as the MacBook's Intel X3100 card. This issue is known to affect at least 50 people — a group of affected users has formed a Google Spreadsheet in order to document and organize cases.
AppleCare is recommending replacing the logic board, which some have gone through with, only to have the machine return to an unusable state shortly afterwards. Compounding the issue is the fact that this problem has arisen only shortly after the expiration of the default warrantee on these machines (this issue seems to only affect machines shipped around June, 2007), thus causing the logic board replacement to cost upwards of 400$ for those who did not purchase extended warranties. If you are experiencing the issues detailed below, please add yourself to the spreadsheet and visit our thread on the Apple Support forums, so we can get a reasonably accurate count of affected users.
Symptoms & Notes
- Blank screen, both on the internal and external displays
- The computer boots; it is accessible over the network or with Screen Sharing
- Target Disk Mode works (this can be used to backup user data!)
- ioreg and System Profiler both report an Intel X3100 video card, which is incorrect
- Affects people even with MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 installed (which was released to fix a similar problem, introduced in Firmware 1.5)
- Seems to be independent of any software updates, hardware changes, etc.
There are a great number of potential fixes floating around on the Apple Support forum thread. These include PRAM/NVRAM/PMU resets, firmware restores, changes in memory configuration, deleting Safe Sleep files, etc. However, none of these appear to be permanent fixes; apparently, even replacing the logic board is not a permanent fix, at least for some!
Someone has mentioned the disabling/deleting Boot Camp might fix things. Replacing my machine's logic board seems to have worked, at least so far!
2008.06.25 in code
Here's a quick Perl script that I wrote to display Guitar chords. Really hacky, really quick, really messy, but I really just needed it for myself!
There's a live version here.
I'll write about NYC later! And pictures! And stuff...
Last night, I was having a slight issue (mouseDragged: only got called once for each entire drag). I talked to some people on IRC who suggested spaces might be the culprit (?!?), so I checked, but it was off. So, I rebooted... since then, I haven't gotten video back... Mac OS comes up, I can log in, get to a terminal, and "say" things (this was how I was debugging before I got SSH on), but the display never comes up for real... not an external display either.
So, if people need to get ahold of me, either call me, or make your subject line really blatant so it stands out on my phone. I'm going to set up my old PowerBook tomorrow, get evas and Xcode and textmate running... but I really need to find out how to get Kaylee back! Any ideas?
One nice thing would be to be able to get a hardware listing from the command line. Anyone know how? There's no lspci or anything... (EDIT: I had forgotten about ioreg!) But none of my 3 operating systems nor rEFIt get the video card up...
LATER
So... apparently some people think Firmware Update 1.5 is the culprit — there's numerous other people on the Apple Support forums with the same problem, but they say 1.5.1 fixed it! I already have 1.5.1, and have no way of reflashing/trying to go back to 1.4/whatever, because Apple only seems to support going forward with firmwares.
I'm also beginning to wonder if it's really reasonable for it to be the firmware, since I would have installed 1.5.1 when it came out, in late April! Which leads me to believe it might legitimately be a bad "logic board" (Apple's terminology for motherboard, which just so happens to include a soldered-on Core 2 Duo)... I just really wish it were something else, because that's mighty expensive to replace, my warrantee having expired less than a week ago. Literally. Amazing, right!?
Evas development can go on, I'm going to steal time on Amy's iMac when she's not using it, booting from Kaylee's disc with Target Disk Mode. That at least will prevent me from going through the hassle of trying to get everything working with reasonable speed on this PowerBook G4, which I'll use, I guess, when I'm not here... or something!
I guess I should feel lucky that this wasn't a data loss issue, but I'm not happy! Also, I hadn't realized how much the change from this machine to Kaylee was ... so. much. better. *WANTS MBP BACK SOON, PLZ*
FRIDAY
My machine's now at Smalldog, and is apparently getting shipped to Apple to get the logic board replaced. It had better not happen again, is all I'm saying...
Also Apple (of course) refused to extend my now-6-days-expired warrantee. Oops.
Amy and I have decided we're going to make things more often (cooking/baking/whatever) especially since Mom always does all of the cooking, and that we should write about it somewhere, and keep a list of recipes that seem to have worked. So I'm going to add that as a new thing here... this blog is completely doing-it-wrong, a random assortment of literally everything, but if you don't want something, don't subscribe to that category! :-D
The random cooking this summer started with peanut butter fudge I made, around March 28th. It worked out well, though a candy thermometer would probably have made it a bit easier. I don't have any pictures, sadly, but I'd say it was pretty good. It's possible that making it without chunky peanut butter would have been a better idea, too (whoops!)...
2008.06.17 in code
I've hacked up a small program that lets you play with CoreText attributes, mostly as a way to learn my way around the API. I'm going to clean it up and post it in a few days (check back here!), but for now, here's a screenshot:
The past few days have been very productive! I've implemented images and fixed up the text code a little bit (more importantly, I found documentation on things that'll let me make it work correctly, in a few days). There's screenshots and notes for all, after the jump!
Note: This is Evas_Quartz, not to be confused with Evas_GL_Quartz. This is the meat of the project.
The intro part of the test is looking nice! One thing that's missing is adjustable opacity on the images. I'll get there, and I think I see exactly what needs to happen in order for that to happen! That means that the logo doesn't fade in/out...
The most obvious thing missing here is clipping! One of my next puzzles is to work out how clipping works in CoreGraphics — I think I've used it maybe once before, so it can't be too hard! Also... you only get reasonable performance here if you turn image smoothing off. Well... it's not unreasonable with smoothing on, it's just a slight bit imperfect. I have an issue in that Quartz wants to know if an image is going to want to be smoothed when it loads, but to Evas, that information is only relevant when you're drawing. I haven't figured out how to modify it at draw time, so right now smoothing is off everywhere...
Test 1 works really well. Also, all of the informative text seems to draw. The biggest text issue right now is everything is drawn in Bitstream Vera Sans. This was because, up until today, I didn't know how Apple's whole font system interacted with itself. I wasn't sure how to load a font from a file, activate it, and use it — then I found this! So one of these days, I'll get around to that, and fonts will work properly!
Test 2 is bizarrely glitchy. Something about drawing 0-width images, though fixing that doesn't actually fix the problem... I have to look into this!
Ha! Quality! Right! So — this is where the whole not-smoothing thing comes into play. FIXME! But the zooming is nice and smooth...
Lines draw, but apparently not in color! I must have set fill instead of stroke. Whoops! This'll be all better tomorrow!
Even polygons draw now! I was somewhat surprised to find that Evas had its own linked list implementation — I guess I assumed that would be somewhere higher up the chain (though there's not much higher up the EFL chain than Evas...) — but it's proved very useful so far!
While I may be getting ahead of myself, and I've certainly got a large number of roadblocks ahead, I'd say that this is going pretty well! I can't wait to see it all working. So. Cool!
I was just working on various things when I noticed a slight problem with my computer:
Yep. See that nice bar at the bottom? That's all I've got left. And this is pretty cleaned up. Up there at the top is my Aperture (left) and iTunes (right) libraries, consuming approximately 55% of my disk. Yeah.
Not entirely sure what to do! Time for a purge? *do not want*
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