All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

A few words

Allison on 2006-05-10T18:31:14

  • Thunderbird rocks!
  • PGE rules!
  • A laptop that dies (the horrible, unrecoverable hard drive grind of death) less than a week after you switch your life over to it is not cool.
  • Having the old laptop to fall back on is good, unless the reason you were switching to a new one is that the old one was dying.
  • Having an even older laptop (multicolor iBook, circa the late '90s) around the house as a spare is a good idea.
  • ld.so.conf won't help you if exim and subversion are trying to use two different incompatible instances of libdb-4.2.so in two different directories and you're using exim and subversion in the same perl process. But then, there really isn't a good reason for exim and subversion to be using different versions of libdb-4.2.so. Cruft accumulates on older systems, but it's easy to clean up.

Hardware failure?

djberg96 on 2006-05-11T00:32:20

"A laptop that dies (the horrible, unrecoverable hard drive grind of death) less than a week after you switch your life over to it is not cool."

A Mac? Just curious.

Re:Hardware failure?

Alias on 2006-05-11T01:04:23

Fool, the first rule about Mac problems is "You don't talk about Mac problems".

Last OSCON I saw macs fail 3-4 times in a week, with a wwhole variety of problems.

And the common thread seemed to be people telling me "Please don't tell anyone that my Mac broke".

Re:Hardware failure?

djberg96 on 2006-05-11T01:18:05

Funny you should say that. I noticed a few years ago that there seemed to be a sharp increase in the "my mac broke" blog entries. I even mentioned this fact at some point here, though I can't find it now.

I've never really believed the whole "mac hardware is better" meme. Not only that, I've pretty much reached the "mac hardware is unreliable" stage and it's one of the reasons I've avoided buying one.

Re:Hardware failure?

lachoy on 2006-05-11T03:53:27

I used to think that too. But then I got a Powerbook, and the only problem I've had in the last 2.5 years is when I've put third-party memory in, which is a known questionable practice with macs. My impression is that macs (at least Powerbooks) probably break down as often as other high-end laptops do. Sure, there are certain models of macs that have more failures, but there are certain models of all machines that have more failures.

Re:Hardware failure?

jbodoni on 2006-05-11T06:11:47

With the exception of OS versions 8 and 9, I've been dealing with Macintoshes since 1985. I've also been dealing with PCs since the days when the phrase "PC clone" meant something. My exposure to both of these platforms has been both from an end user perspective as well as the screwdriver-turning service and support person.

In my experience, Macs are generally less prone to hardware failure than PC clones. I do realize that there seems to be a disproportionately high number of Mac hardware problems among the use.perl community, though I have no clue why it's happening.

Re:Hardware failure?

Allison on 2006-05-13T23:56:44

I've never really believed the whole "mac hardware is better" meme.

I've been using Macs for 22 years, and the only problems I've ever had are component failure (which happens on any computer), and HFS (regular, Extended, Journaling, whatever) corruption problems. I've repaired lots and lots of corrupted HFS volumes over the years.

The annoying thing is, when you're debugging a crash combined with HFS corruption, you really can't tell if the corruption caused the crash or the crash caused the corruption, because HFS is notorious for getting corrupted when the computer crashes, no matter what the cause of the crash was.

In this particular case, the laptop crashed, I fixed the HFS corruption, it crashed again, and I fixed it again... Finally, it wouldn't boot off the drive, and the drive utilities wouldn't repair the HFS partition. Repetitions like this are a pretty good sign that there's something fundamentally wrong with the hardware: either with the drive itself, or with some other component. Macs just don't crash like that unless there's something seriously wrong. The laptop is fairly old, and it's endured a number of international flights, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if it developed problems somewhere along the way.

(BTW, this is why I hate HFS. The UFS partition on the same drive was fine through all of the crashes. I confess that after all my complaining about Adobe not supporting UFS a while back, I eventually succumbed to the temptation of their tools and switched to a primary HFS partition, with a secondary UFS partition for most of my home directory and things like Fink, DarwinPorts, and my hand-compiled versions of Perl. Guess what my medium-aged PowerBook 12" is now sporting? Yup, a single UFS partition.)

The flaky laptop is now sitting at the Apple Store. I'll reserve judgement on this particular repair experience until they actually fix or replace the laptop, but in the past I've had nothing but good experiences. The techs are knowledgeable, friendly, respectful, and patient. I've even watched them help a grandmother transfer some old big-band music from cassette tapes to iTunes through her boom-box. They weren't just polite and helpful, they were actually enjoying it. :)

Which isn't to say that Macs are perfect. They're subject to the same laws of entropy as the rest of the universe. But, I've taken apart more than my fair share of laptops, desktops, and servers (Mac and non), and for laptops I'll still go with Apple hardware every time. (I prefer to build my own servers.)

Re:Hardware failure?

djberg96 on 2006-05-15T17:23:07

"I've been using Macs for 22 years, and the only problems I've ever had are component failure (which happens on any computer), and HFS (regular, Extended, Journaling, whatever) corruption problems."

So, we're pretty much talking about motherboards, cpu's and hard drives.

Motherboards

I've never had a motherboard fail, nor known anyone who had. The only motherboard failures I've even heard about were caused by lightning strikes or maybe a shoddy piece of hardware bought from an expo, but even that's rare from what I can gather from the blogosphere.

CPU's

I've never had one fail, nor known anyone who had. The only failures I've heard about were caused by AMD overclocking experiments gone awry or fan/HVAC failures. Nothing to do with the CPU itself, per se.

Hard Drives

This is the only component that you typically hear about PC users having problems with, though I never have personally even though I've used cheap ass Maxtors my whole life. I rarely hear about other users having problems with theirs, unless they're Windows users who haven't defragged their hard drive in three years. Even then the drive is usually fine - they just have to reinstall the OS.

Hard drive failure seems to be the main issue for Macs these days, but I've also read plenty of blog entries on various component issues, ranging anywhere from cd rom issues, to weak hinges, to complete LCD failure on laptops.

Re:Hardware failure?

ask on 2006-05-16T03:31:54

"Hard Drives

This is the only component that you typically hear about PC users having problems with, though I never have personally [...]"

Clearly you don't have enough storage then! :-)

If you have ~20 drives you are more likely to have a failure every other year than if you have 3.

Of course who'd be silly enough to have 20+ disks (not counting servers in the datacenter). uuh, nevermind.

  - ask