Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Southwestern Chicken Salad Plus Sides

June 29, 2008
in Fooding

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.

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Peanut Butter and Fudge Pie

June 29, 2008
in Fooding

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.

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MacBook Pro Santa Rosa: A Fatal Flaw

June 27, 2008
in Personal and Thoughts

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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!

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Chord Diagrammer

June 25, 2008
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…

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A Problem with Kaylee…

June 17, 2008
in Personal

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.

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Fudge

June 17, 2008
in Fooding

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!)…

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TextPlayground

June 17, 2008
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:

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Friday the 13th Evas_Quartz Update

June 14, 2008
in Summer of Code

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.

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