Douglas vs Tiger

One of the reasons I feel that I can write about Macintosh related issues is that I deal with them on a regular basis. I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t be critical of things that you don’t know anything about or haven’t experienced. For that very reason I’ve made no comments whatsoever on the recent Air France crash in Toronto. Yes, I have my private pilot license but I’ve never acted as a pilot in an Airbus A340 nor was I in the flight deck at the time of the accident. I guess I could speculate, but realistically, no matter how much flying experience you have, unless you were there you won’t be able to say what might have gone wrong. At least not without more solid information and facts (from first hand sources).

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. At Zymeta our content guy, Dean, uses a Macintosh and I spent my first year there moving processes off Macintosh and onto Linux. And at home, I have an iMac that I inherited from a previous job. So, yes, I know Macintosh stuff. I may not be an expert but I have more experience than your average user. So last night I decided it was time to upgrade my iMac from 10.2 to the over-hyped 10.4, known as Tiger.

I actually tried to upgrade my iMac two days ago. But the machine kept spitting out the DVD whenever I inserted the upgrade DVD. No error message. No anything. I figured that either the DVD was bad or that my iMac didn’t meet the minimum system requirements. As it turns out however, this was a bit of stupidity on my part; I forgot that my iMac only has a CD/RW drive. Still, you would think that Mac OS X would give me some sort of error message, something like ’Unable to read this CD’. Even Linux does that.

No problem. Apple will exchange my DVD for CDs… for another fee. Nice. Luckily though, Dean was able to put together an external firewire DVD drive for me. So last night, external drive in hand, I tried again. I won’t go into the details of how the install works but I will tell you that I was trying to upgrade my existing setup. It’s the default option and it is supposed to completely update the operating system, while leaving all the installed applications and users information and files intact. If it works, it’s the ideal situation; you get a new computer but all your files are right where you left them.

Of course, the key phrase is ’if it works‘… it didn’t. Instead, I was shown a message that the install failed and that I should try again. So I did. On the second time, I brought up the install log window and watched what was transpiring. As it turns out, Tiger didn’t even try to update my system as the installed failed while verifying my hard drive. The error log said something about there being an ’incorrect number of thread records’ but the actual user window simple said, once again, that the install had failed and that I should try again. A quick Google of the situation showed that the only success around this that people had was to back everything up and do a fresh install of Tiger. I didn’t dive too deep into looking for a solution as by this time it was close to midnight.

Lucky for me, I have several other machines on which I could backup stuff onto so I tar-gzipped up all the user directories, copied them over to another machine and did a fresh install. It probably needed that anyway. But imagine if your beginning (or average, for that matter) user encountered that. What are they to do? Overall, I would say that my upgrade experience was less than good, especially given how Macs are supposed to be all that.

Update: I clarified my thoughts on speculating on the causes of the Air France crash.

3 comments »

1. By Frank Ch. Eigler about 3 hours later:

   
   
   You wrote: I guess I could speculate, but realistically, no matter how much flying experience you have, unless you were there you won't be able to say what might have gone wrong.. I don't buy that - and nor would the official crash investigators who after all weren't there either. We should not shirk from applying whatever knowledge and intellect we possess toward understanding such events, forming judgements, holding principles. Only those with too little of each would be wise to keep quiet and tentative - but ironically they are often not wise enough to do so.

2. By Douglas about 3 hours later:

   
   
   I agree to an extent; but me applying my single engine, non-high performance based knowledge would be like comparing apples to the PT-6; remotely comparable at best. In any case, while the crash investigators weren't there, they have several advantages over the rest of us. First, they investigate accidents for a living so they have experience with that. Second, they would have easy access to past accidents that may be of a similar nature to which they can compare. Third, they have access to all the data being collected with respect to this A340 crash. I have none of those. All I have is second hand information. As such, I'll reserve my thoughts until after the TSB releases more information.

3. By Frank Ch. Eigler about 4 hours later:

   
   
   That's a reasonable point of view. The initial one however was just too anti-scientific to stand.