Personal.X-Istence.com

Bert JW Regeer (畢傑龍)

MacBook Pro Replacement

So here begins my story of what happened and how Apple's geniuses at the genius bar handled the situation.

I started noticing some problems with my sound input on my MacBook Pro as described in my other blog post.

After it came back from Apple, I was sitting at the genius bar and noticed that someone with a ball point pen had put a mark on my LCD screen. Knowing that was not there before it came back, I asked them what that was about and they proceeded to try and remove the mark with some cleaner of some sort. They came back with the bad news that the cleaner had damaged the LCD screen (I could have told them that without trying it out first :P). So I sign the required paperwork for the other repair, and they print me out even more paperwork to have it sent back to Apple to get the LCD screen replaced as they do not do that in store as the parts are to delicate to ship out to the Apple stores.

This time the items that were replaced were: Top case assembly (part with the keyboard), and the sound board. Not the logic board.

So now I have been at the Apple store, once to drop it off, once to pick it up, but not get it, and after waiting another week, another time to pick it up. Everything looked fine. Now the LCD has been replaced. Everything looks good, I sign the paperwork and leave.

I get home, and to my dismay the problem has STILL not been fixed with the charging LED turning off, and the sound coming out of my BOSE speakers (I tested with 3 other speakers as well) is still static. Off I go to the Apple store again.

The laptop gets checked in, and a rush order is put in on the logic board, sound board, and the top case assembly. I brought it in, and they said they would get it back to me by Friday. They did, but since they were unable to duplicate the problem, all they replaced was the power brick that charged my MacBook Pro. I ask him what kind of contingency plans are available in case I have to come back again. He asks me again what my failures were (I had my stack of Apple paper work with me), and he goes off in the back to ask some of the other guys that work on the laptops. He comes back and tells me that since they did not replace any of the parts they said they would replace, they don't want to give it back to me and instead want to check it back in. So once again I come in, and have to let Apple take it for a little while longer.

He has me sign the old paperwork, and sign new paperwork (two different work orders, two different signatures), and off I go again. Still empty handed. I was promised this time that I would have my laptop back by Tuesday night, or Wednesday morning the latest. Luckily I had stuff to do on the weekend, so I was not feeling as sad about it.

After I was done with school on Thursday, I called up the Apple store and asked for a general manager. I had him assure me he would get a genius on my laptop and they would call me as soon as it was done. I let him know my displeasure of having to drive about 30 - 40 minutes from my house in Laveen, to the Apple store in Chandler, and that I had to get it done, as I was leaving the school. Finally at around 19:30 they gave me a call and told me it was done. I off course headed down to the store to pick up my MacBook Pro. Everything seemed to be working fine at the store, and when I got home there was no static to be heard of. Finally it was fixed.

The next day was the LAN party and I had a great time. My MacBook Pro performed perfectly and without problems for the entire weekend.

Comes Monday. I am sitting in 244, one of the open labs on UAT's campus and suddenly while typing a blog post, the computer spontaneously shuts down. Hard core shutdown, not even a dialogue box, no, as if you had pulled the plug and the battery was removed. Just to be clear, it was plugged into the wall socket, and the battery was fully charged and in the laptop. I hit the power button, wait for it to start up, and begin to type to log in. Poof, shuts down again. Thinking it must have been my secondary battery acting up (which I had just received from Apple as a replacement for my first second battery that had died), I pop in my older battery that came with the MacBook Pro. I hit the power button. I hear the Apple startup sound, and I hear it again, and again, again, again, again, over and over. By now, my professor LostboY has started laughing at me as I am always saying that Macs are better than Windows based machines (Your Alienware sounds like a Vacuum cleaner on steroids while angry, take that LosT! :P). I get to class, and I figure that since now I am the laughing stock anyway, I might as well have others join in on the fun, and help me calm down (I was so angry, that I was not really thinking straight until I got down from it). I turn it on, and it would boot up, until I hit some keys on the keyboard. I got it to kernel panic and I always boot with verbose on, and it was asking for a debugger! Hehe.

I finish class, head out to Apple. The guys at Apple know me by name by now. One of the geniuses walks in, and she says "Hey, why are you here again", "She broke again" "We need to grab you one of those black chairs and engrave your name in it!" "Yeah, this place is becoming my second home!"

I talk to a general manager named Bob. He gets me an appointment at the genius bar. He takes my laptop out back, and boots it just fine, and does not touch the keyboard so he wants to send me on my way. I tell him to watch this. I push the power button. One key on the keyboard, and it sits there at the Apple logo with a spinning cursor for ever, at which point I say to him. Clear my firmware ram eh? Now you can't see it kernel panic and ask for a debugger. I boot it up in verbose mode, push another key and he sees it panic.

At this point I get called up for my appointment, and it is with one of the guys that has already helped me before. He tries to boot it up in target disk mode to check the hard drive, at which point I make a good argument as to why the hard drive must still be good and it can't be failing because of that. He agrees, tries a couple more times to try and see if he can grab my data off the drive. At that point he asks me to check the laptop in so he can do some research on previous cases, and hopefully be able to hand me a new laptop, the next day. Off course, the last time I was there on Saturday (see below, was a small issue) I had bought AppleCare and activated it, which apparently cause the Apple system to go haywire and remove all the previous repairs, which meant I had to drive back home, grab the paperwork required, and drive back out to Apple as this time I did not have the paperwork with me (thinking it was fixed when I headed to school on Monday morning). The next day I get a call, I can come pick up the new laptop, it was approved by Apple corporate (store managers can't decide to hand you a new Apple product as a replacement, that call has to be made further up-stream). Ben also told me that he was going to try his hardest to get my data off the old laptop, at which point I let him know I would appreciate the effort, but if it would not work to just let me take the new laptop home, I have backups of all my stuff.

I head out to Apple and sign some paperwork, and I get handed a completely new MacBook Pro. 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB of ram, Nvidia 8600M GT, 160 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, and a new copy of Tiger that comes with that laptop, which meant I also got a free upgrade of iLife. Now the kicker was that since this was basically a return and rebuy of the same type of laptop, I qualified for the lovely Up-to-date copy of Mac OS X Leopard from Apple for just the shipping and handling for $9.99. Yes, I got a great deal on my laptop breaking, but at the same time the amount of time I was without my laptop was painful, and not only that cost me money in that I was not able to do work for any of my clients, especially since some of them have strict requirements all their data is stored safely in encrypted disk images, or that all mail correspondence is signed and encrypted. (I had not kept a copy of my keys to then re-import into another mail client, only for the fact that I don't have any other machines that I use).

Kudos to Apple for the way they took my complaints and handled them, sure some of them could have been handled better, for instance I was a looper, I came back and yet they would not replace a part only because they were not able to replicate the problem, they would have had me happier sooner if they had done so. On that same Saturday that I bought my AppleCare as well as my Apple keyboard I came in, as to my dismay I had noticed during the LAN party that the top case assembly was bent upwards in such a way that when I rested my arm on the side it hurt. It was raised compared to the plastic strip that runs along the front of it. So when I walk in, one of the genuises comes up and asks me what I am here for, I show him and ask him if they have the part in stock, or if I should come back some other time. He blows me off completely as if I do not deserve his time of day because of the fact that I had made an appointment at 20:30 because it was the only time available. After a few minutes the genius bar turns empty and another genius who recognised me (Dave), sat me down, took a look and immediately took it to the back, removed the top case assembly, put a new one in, and had me sign the paperwork and had me on my way. Little did I know I would be back.

Apple Keyboard

I recently got a new keyboard, you know the sleek aluminium ones that they have now, and this keyboard has made typing fun again. Combared to it's older sibling, it has better tactile response, and the lesser travel certainly has caused me to love typing on it. It has made me type faster, and with more certainty that I have indeed hit the key. I liked the old apple bluetooth keyboard, but this wired keyboard blows it away.

Since it is so thin, I don't need to get a wrist rest gel pad of any sort to be able to type on the keyboard comfortably, and also because it is so low to the desk, it feels more natural, and helps with typing a whole lot. It feels a lot like a laptop keyboard, but the fact that it is titled upwards helps just that tiny bit more than I thought it would. I love my MacBook Pro's keyboard, but this one takes the cake. For school I had to write three papers this weekend, so I did just that. Normally I would have to take a break in between (even with the wrist rest gel pad) because of a numbing feeling on my hands, with this keyboard I had the three papers done, as well as almost 600 lines of code without any problems.

This keyboard has made typing fun again. The last time I was able to say that was when I had bought a Memorex keyboard which also felt REALLY good, and was easy to type on.

Link: http://www.apple.com/keyboard/

Linux Community Ripping Itself Apart?

I sometimes question the sanity of some of the open source developers out there. Mostly because of some of the insane code they produce, or because of the believes they have.

I have seen communities ripped apart because people could not agree with each other causing splits in the code FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD same with NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Just recently I saw a dispute between developers from Novell and Sun about part of OpenOffice. A part the Novell developer wrote, and then released under the LGPL. That way it could be linked against OpenOffice and could also be legally distributed with it. So then Sun wanted him to re-license it under their license so that they could take the code and use it in their StarOffice and release it commercially.

That initself could have been allowed under the LGPL, but instead of accepting the code upstream, they instead chose to deny it, try to get someone to write it in the Google Summer of Code, and then to top it off they announce they are going to rewrite it from scratch, and tell the origional developer that he may join their effort.

So now ooo-build, which is a build of OpenOffice that is used in most mainstream Linux distributions. They include the part that was totally left out by Sun. So now a split in the code will exist, between what Sun provides, making it even harder for people to contribute to OpenOffice in a meaningful way.

The same thing is happening in the Linux kernel community slowly. Just recently Linus wanted to merge in Smack/AppArmour and got a backslashing from members of the so called security community about how adding in another LSM based security module, like SELinux. LSM adds hooks in the Linux kernel before any system call that affects important internal kernel objects. That way a loadable module can be created that adds those hooks and then based on that can enforce the mandatory access on wether that is allowed or not.

Smack is just another one just like SELinux, that uses the LSM "stack" to accomplish certain mandatory access control's. The reason there is such a backslash against it is because security experts argue that LSM itself is not safe and should be removed. LSM adds complexity, and now with Smack in the kernel source tree as well it would result in users creating their own MAC frameworks rather than having one with a proper API set (like for example VFS), and LSM has been a moving target since it has been introduced making it harder for people to develop proper policies for it since it's inception.

The disagreements that stem over these arguments are fueled with debate, but also tons and tons of flames sparking between Linus and the rest of the community.

There was another one not to far back that was also very painful to watch. That had to do with schedulers. Ck had written patches and maintained them in the -ck patchset, that made the scheduler that was included in the Linux kernel source tree work better on the desktop and the server for different workloads.

Then another developer, and I forget his name, introduced an entirely new scheduler known as the CFS or the only fair scheduler. There was an entire backslash against this new scheduler based on the fact that depending on the work loads thrown at it, it would react differently. Then forward came the fact that the CK patchset was not accepted was because he refused to add extra code for corner cases where the scheduler was doing what it was supposed to do, but was not what the people running were expecting since they relied on an flaw in the origional scheduler. That is INSANE. Why would extra code need to be added to keep a flaw that has now been fixed in the scheduler?

It is a shame to see an community getting ripped apart based on the religious believes and views of certain individuals. Linus Torvalds should not be outright taking on the believes of some people and not of others. He should be listening to people in the community and more of a group decision should be provided, or at least come to. Sure it is nice to have one leader that is ultimately responsible for the direction of the Linux kernel, but at the same time that direction is causing people to start flamewars, it has caused people to leave the Linux kernel as a hacking project. It has caused them to publicly leave statements that generally show there is a divide in the Linux development community.

This has to be fixed before serious damage is done. Before it adversely affects the Linux kernel and it's development. Having top quality developers leave projects is a sign that the leader is not properly guiding the project. Maybe the time has come that Linus has outstayed his welcome, and maybe it is time for someone else to step up to the plate, or as a community a group of people should step up to the plate.