Sneaky Bastard

I went to the Día de los Muertos exhibits last Sunday at the Museum of Ventura County. They had some fantastic art on display, a dance performance by Danza Azteca Cuauhtemoc of Ventura. There was tons of stuff for kids, like sugar skulls and tissue paper flowers. I couldn’t resist getting my face painted. I haven’t yet been to a huge street festival in Mexico, but one day I will. Something about the tradition calls to me. I took a whole bunch of pictures, but none of them really came out well. It coincided with my birthday, which was fun. My folks came down, and we had a fun afternoon with peanut butter birthday cake and The Sarah Silverman Program. God, I love that show so much, I just want to smash it!

Here are some pictures from the event. More are posted on my Google Picasa page.

The Marcel Marceau figure cracked me up. Apparently French mime artists are all the rage these days.

I received some spam from Sys-Con Media today, 9 October 2007. The publication associated with the e-mail is ColdFusion Developer's Journal, which is now defunct. The date on the “news” is 8 August 2007, and the lead story is “It's Here! Adobe Ships ColdFusion 8”.

Really? They're just now floating this gem on the 'net? Imagine if the headline in today's paper was “Iraq War: Not Going Very Well”. I imagine that someone at Sys-Con made a data entry error, creating an e-mail blast scheduled for 10/8/07 instead of 8/10/07. Or maybe their spam server doesn't parse dates quite right. In any case, I would be embarrassed to be associated with Sys-Con.

Yesterday my Mac went to Funky Town. I had about 50 applications open, and I did something to thoroughly anger it. Finder and the Dock quit working. I couldn’t close any windows or save any open files. It was pretty hosed. So, from another machine, I logged in via SSH so I could try to gracefully shut it down. After I killed off most of the user processes, I issued a `shutdown -r now`. I thought it would boot up like usual, and i’d be on my way.

It was not to be.

When it rebooted, the machine forced a fsck, finding problems that needed to be fixed, and then to a blue screen where the normal system service messages would appear, such as “Starting Apache web server.” The boot process wouldn’t go any further. I logged in again remotely (thank God the ssh daemon was started) and rebooted it. I put a boot DVD into the drive so I could run Disk Utility’s repair utility. It said that it found problems and corrected them, but upon rebooting it was still foobared. Taking another angle, I booted in single user mode and ran `fsck -fy` and hoped for the best. It *said* that it fixed the problems, however it still wasn’t booting correctly.

I logged in remotely again to see where it was getting stuck. I found that ifcstart and a LaunchService tool were stuck. I rebooted again in single user mode, removed all the files in /Library/Caches and /System/LIbrary/Caches and tried again. Viola! After my SoftRAID mirror finished syncing, the machine runs well.

So, I wonder if the corrupt cache was the cause of the initial problem, or just a byproduct of whatever the root cause was. This is the first time I’ve personally considered that clearing out the system caches preemptively, as many maintenance utilities offer to do, might not be a bad idea. I don’t have a favorite program, but there are many from which to choose: AppleJack, OnyX, Cocktail, TinkerTool System, and probably many others. If you have a favorite, let me know.