My doorbell
Ten minutes after backing up and installing 10.4.3, I accidently hit the corner for Exposé, and when I dropped out of it there was a nice obvious graphical error. I was able to repeat the error several times. It stopped once I brought a different app to the foreground. Fun...
I'd been using a semi-recent nightly build of WebCore for daily use, and a fairly-recent snapshot is included with Tiger which should make a lot of casual users happy. Some of those memory leaks were just sick (at the time, every other Mac dev I knew was downloading the source because they couldn't believe the memory leaks), and the snapshot takes care of a ton of them. Loves teh snappy.
Haven't had time to see if the Tiger Text Bug from Hell is still there (or much at all really), but I did see that they've disabled Q2DE (hardware accelerated drawing) when updating, and officially said it isn't a supported feature in 10.4. As mentioned before, from the rumbles I picked up it was starting to break hard, and won't be showing up at all in Tiger.
The graphics system is currently too fragile to go there (changes in 10.4 were too much too sexy) without a whole bunch of core work, so they're just looking ahead to 10.5. Probably a good idea, as it's better to get it right than to push out something half-baked which causes more problems.
The update leaves the Finder enabled.
Posted by drunkenbatmanNovember 02, 2005, at 11:02 AM
Comments (31)
Posted by: Jesper at November 2, 2005 11:30 AM
It makes sense for Apple to disable Quartz 2D Extreme - they've probably got it much better and more stable for Leopard already, but they don't want to dilute it by letting people enable a buggier version in Tiger.
The 10.4.3 Finder shows Architectures for apps, like the Intel Mac Finder does. Neat.
Posted by: James at November 2, 2005 11:44 AM
@jesper,
The 10.4.3 Finder shows Architectures for apps, like the Intel Mac Finder does. Neat. Care to explain for the unenlightened?
Posted by: Ben Reubenstein at November 2, 2005 11:53 AM
I installed 10.4.3 without incident. Then last night I heard what sounded like a jet engine in my office. Both fans on my Dual G5 where cranked to super-sonic speed, and the Apple equivilant of the Blue Screen of Death told me that I needed to power off in several languages. Haven't seen that one in a while. sigh...
Posted by: Jesper at November 2, 2005 12:10 PM
James: It shows you what architectures the program runs on, which is useful if you want to know if the selected program will work on the upcoming Intel Macs.
For example, if it's a so-called "Universal Binary", the Architectures field will show "PowerPC, Intel", meaning that there's a set of bits for PowerPC (the processor in the current Macs) and a set of bits for Intel processors (which will be used in new Macs starting around June 2006), and that it can run on both types. (The Intel Macs will be able to run some PowerPC programs, but only some, and much slower.)
Posted by: Peter da Silva at November 2, 2005 01:55 PM
Personally, I'd rather they left EVERYTHING ELSE out of Tiger and just put all their wood behind getting QE2D working... and working on ALL their currently shipping platforms. It's embarassing having all that OpenGL goodness and then having to wait for the G4 to do the rendering.
I'd also like to see HFS+ curl up in a shrieking ball of eternal pain and UFS step in to replace it, because it's embarassing to have a modern UNIX OS with a filesystem that can irrevocably corrupt itself if your free disk space drops too low.
Posted by: something at November 2, 2005 01:58 PM
Am I the only one that doesn't see anything wrong in the picture DB posted? I feel like I am playing Where's Waldo. Anyone want to point out what I am supposed to be seeing?
Posted by: Tom at November 2, 2005 02:13 PM
"it's embarassing to have a modern UNIX OS with a filesystem that can irrevocably corrupt itself if your free disk space drops too low"
Scary!!!!!! Can you point me to a technical note on this; it's the first I heard of this problem.
Posted by: Diggory Laycock at November 2, 2005 02:22 PM
Something: look at the interface between the email and Safari windows - there's no edge/shadow.
Posted by: Twist at November 2, 2005 03:02 PM
10.4.3 has broken Quicktime playback in Safari for me. I watched a trailer from GameTrailers minutes before applying the update and I tried to show it to someone else about an hour after the update and all I got was the progress/psistion bar and controls with no video or sound.
Posted by: Mark Lewis at November 2, 2005 03:14 PM
Here is my pet-peeve at the moment with 10.4x: Say you are browsing a list in the finder, list view. You are, let's say, looking at a folder of QT movies.
You click on the first one in the list. Yep, gotta move that one. Next you use the cursor keys (down arrow) to check out the next one. Yep, gotta go too. So on, so on. You get to item, say, 15.
You now know that you want to select the first 15 items in the list, en masse. Item 15 is highlighted. YET(!) if you take the mouse and, holding shift, click back on item ONE, it highlights and NOTHING IN-BETWEEN DOES. Why is this broken? No idea.
Have I missed something here? Seems like the cursor key is causing the mouse to "lose focus" or something, so the click you make on item 1 with shift down SHOULD extend the selection, but instead just "selects" the first item. Makes file management of this type a PITA! Sorry, just interjecting my own Mac OSX rant in the confab. But I feels your pain, brutha!
Posted by: at November 2, 2005 03:23 PM
Something: look at the interface between the email and Safari windows - there's no edge/shadow.
I had that problem in 10.4.2, and perhaps earlier versions, though I don't recall for sure.
Posted by: ab at November 2, 2005 03:57 PM
correct me if I'm wrong, but Quartz 2D Extreme wasn't there in the first time: it is disabled by default, but you can enable it using quartz debug.app. and, as of my just-updated-10.4.3, you still can, at least, nominally.
so i don't really get why did Apple decide to mention it just now?
Posted by: systemsboy at November 2, 2005 04:11 PM
I think I just got the Tiger text bug for the first time ever... In 10.4.3. So I guess it's not fixed.
Posted by: Pascale Soleil at November 2, 2005 06:16 PM
Something: drunkenbatman is sneaky that way. You have to click on the illustration (which for some reason he usually crops so as to NOT show the thing he's complaining about to see a larger version that has a problem.
Hope this helps.
Posted by: Peter da Silva at November 2, 2005 07:41 PM
Tom: If there's not enough free space on the disk HFS+ can corrupt the catalog. And if there's not enough free space on the disk, the file system checker (fsck) can't rebuild the catalog.
It's a catch-22 situation.
I found this out when I started getting odd behaviour on my Powermac, and syslog errors:
hotfiles_evict: err 1celocating file
This led to the discovery of a typo in an error message in the kernel (using the OpenDarwin sources):
printf("hotfiles_evict: err % relocating file\n", error, key->fileID);
This should obviously have been something like:
printf("hotfiles_evict: err %d relocating file %d\n", error, key->fileID);
Digging that out gave me the alarming message:
"Try to keep at least 15% of any HFS+ volume free. If the volume is more than 85% full and becomes heavily fragmented, irreparable damage to the disk directory may result."
Links to:
http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=570808
http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=techissues&Number=620840
"It is simply an observable fact that if the Catalog B-Tree or Extents B-Tree needs to grow, and sufficient free contiguous disk space is not available, an earlier piece of this crucial file is overwritten. I know some people find it hard to believe, but the experiment is repeatable. "
So I ended up sitting at my console watching "fsck -r" tell me there wasn't enough free space on the disk to rebuild the catalog file damaged by my not having enough free space on the disk.
Hadda swap disks, reinstall to a freshly formatted drive, copy everything back, swear at Apple...
Posted by: kurisu at November 2, 2005 08:25 PM
The "no shadow / flat front app" is not a new bug, I've been experiencing this with the boxed 10.4.0. At first I thought it was a bug confined to my TiBook (1GHz) but I've seen it on my Mac mini at work as well.
Dunno if it only affects ATI cards or if NVidia-equipped machines display this bug too ??
Posted by: something at November 2, 2005 09:10 PM
"Something: look at the interface between the email and Safari windows - there's no edge/shadow."
Buuuuuuut... since I had to look so hard, I'd say there are much more pressing bugs for Apple to be working on. My two personal favorites are:
1) When you are browsing certain pages in Safari, the scroll bar disappears. It's still there, but you just cant see it. If you drag where the blue capsule should be, it will show up again as you drag it up and down the length of the scrollbar. I can't figure out what triggers it, and atm, i can't remember any of the pages where I saw it, but if I find one, i'll post a follow up.
2) When you use fast user switching, there is a long pause after you hit enter before the rotating cube thing kicks in. Judging from the sound of the jet engine coming from my G5 during this pause, something is chewing up CPU cycles pretty bad. So far, I have been unable to figure out what process it is, because by the time the user switches, it's already over. Anybody know how to make top or Activity Monitor log CPU activity of each process to a file... or is there some other tool that can do this?
Posted by: something at November 2, 2005 09:16 PM
Re my last post... Meant to mention...
I have seen #1 in all versions of Tiger so far, and I can't remember about Panther.
I have seen #2 in all versions of Tiger, but it definitely did NOT happen on Panther.
Posted by: Arden at November 2, 2005 10:05 PM
Is this becoming the unofficial Bug Reports thread? If so, I'll contribute... Here's something that can happen after playing around with (and restoring) user interface resolution in Quartz Debug: http://arden.moonlink.net/files/menu_madness.png
And as far as something's #1, I've seen this a few times with text boxes. Occasionally, the text overflows the bottom of the box very slightly, causing it to scroll when I rotate the wheel over the box, but there's no scrollbar. It'll go from a few pixels to maybe a whole line. Rather odd.
Posted by: cameron aka desk003 at November 2, 2005 11:18 PM
This is completley unrelated, but:
1) I love your email addy db. It just flows so well, and looks so sexy.
2) May I suggest you get a plugin for MT (or switch to WordPress, which is so much better) that lets users subscribe to comments?
Posted by: aaron at November 3, 2005 10:12 AM
Cameron - I think if you donate to the site [paypal link on left] the full feed is available.
It's a dated post but you can read about DrunkenFeeds at http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000351.html
Posted by: Damien Sorresso at November 3, 2005 02:37 PM
I've never experienced the text bug described by DB. I use Courier 14 as my Terminal font though, so who knows. The more annoying terminal bug in Tiger, which still remains unfixed, is clearing the screen when you resize a window containing a process drawing an interface.
Try this. Type `pico' in your Terminal window. Now resize it.
...
See that? Where did pico go?! It's gone! No way to get it back. At all.
Posted by: Peter da Silva at November 3, 2005 04:18 PM
Did you try control-L (^L, refresh)?
OK, what's SUPPOSED to happen is that when you resize the window, Terminal sends a SIGWINCH (window change signal) to the process group for the window, and each program that's drawing into it is supposed to check the terminal size and adjust.
Be interesting to know what ^L does.
Posted by: Jon H at November 6, 2005 01:43 AM
something writes: "Anybody know how to make top or Activity Monitor log CPU activity of each process to a file... or is there some other tool that can do this"
Use top from the commandline.
for example top -u -s 10 -l 10 > top.output.txt
-s 10 means to take readings 10 seconds apart.
-l 10 means to take 10 readings
-u means to sort by cpu usage and then by processing time.
'> top.output.txt' tells it to direct the output to a text file named 'top.output.txt'.
You could also use just 'top -u -s 5 -l 0' in Terminal, which will cause samples to be taken ever 5 seconds, until you type control-c. The results will be in the Terminal window, which you can see when you switch back to the first user.
Posted by: Jon H at November 6, 2005 03:03 AM
"Be interesting to know what ^L does."
On my machine, it did nothing.
However, I found that if I zoomed the Terminal window, then started pico, then shrank the window, pico continued to work normally. And when I zoomed the window, it still continued to work normally.
It appears as though pico continues working as long as you don't resize to something larger than you started with.
Posted by: Stefan Seiz at November 8, 2005 08:58 AM
However, I found that if I zoomed the Terminal window, then started pico, then shrank the window, pico continued to work normally. And when I zoomed the window, it still continued to work normally.
Try resizing terminal windows running pico (or less or such) on a 30 inch screen and watch everything fall apart. Guess Unix is a tad too old to know about the existence of 30 Inch screens ;-)
Posted by: Peter da Silva at November 8, 2005 05:24 PM
It appears as though pico continues working as long as you don't resize to something larger than you started with.
Hmmm.
What about vi?
Try resizing terminal windows running pico (or less or such) on a 30 inch screen and watch everything fall apart. Guess Unix is a tad too old to know about the existence of 30 Inch screens ;-)
I've done it on a 38 inch screen (single X11 desktop stretched over 4 19" monitors) with no problem, so that's probably not UNIX' fault. (struct ttysize) uses (unsigned short) which should allow a window up to 16384x16384 characters... if you have a 2000-inch monitor THEN you can start to worry...
Posted by: Peter da Silva at November 10, 2005 07:53 PM
I've never touched a pheem in my life.
I'm just interested in whether the problem is related to the application or not.
heh