Get x404 in your RSS reader
x404
Consolation Prize
Friday, 17 June 2011 10:41 | 
Written by Heather Kay | 
| 
| 
As a rule, I don't shut my MacBook Pro down of an evening. I just put the system to sleep mode, so it starts up instantly when I touch the keyboard in the morning. (Please don't lecture me about the whole "standby power saving" thing. I know I am a bad human being.)
Occasionally, I come into my little studio and find the machine appears to be awake. I press a key, and nothing happens. The screens are off, the sleep light is sort of half-illuminated, but I can hear there's activity from hard drives and whatnot. No amount of keyboard poking will rouse the machines, so I have to do a hard reset, which doesn't make me a happy camper. These days, what with the lack of work and stuff, there's never anything left unsaved or not backed up, but it still makes me annoyed.
Anyway, obviously, something has caused the Mac to awake in the small hours. The usual culprit is one of our cats. They both like to sit on the desk watching me work, and despite my protestations will walk over the keyboard if they feel they have been ignored long enough. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of me, because I observed a speck of feline fluff in the vicinity of my keyboard: the cause was a foot!
(Sorry. I promise no more bad Conan-Doyle puns.)
Simply waking from sleep shouldn't cause the Mac to become unresponsive like that, though. Left to its own devices, it should go back to sleep again after a specified period. There must be something else happening that causes the system to throw its toys out of the pram, leaving the machine effectively frozen solid, but letting the screens switch off after the usual delay.
Today, I decided to go geek, and see if I could figure out what it might be that causing this occasional overnight crash.
As I suspected, wake from sleep was caused by something pressing a key on the keyboard. The system then goes through the normal wake procedure, spinning up drives, connecting to the network, checking for email, performing a Time Machine backup and so on. That was just normal stuff, so something else was causing the system to bog down somewhere. There were no crash logs reported, so nothing actually conked out as such.
A little more ferreting, and I noticed a script being run. It was a Folder Action script, monitoring a folder long since deleted. Its task had been to monitor the folder for new images, convert any new images it found to greyscale, and then tell iPhoto to import them. As the target folder was missing, the script was reporting it was unable to locate any images, but meanwhile iPhoto had been prodded into life and was expecting something to copy. I guess the digital equivalent of a Mexican stand-off ensued, leaving everything effectively frozen solid.
I tracked down the script and removed it. Hopefully this will mean I won't get to my desk in the mornings to find a MacBook Pro in zombie form after a cat-related waking in the night. I don't normally like getting my hands dirty getting under the bonnet like this. Places like Console.app and Terminal.app are anathema to me – I don't do code, as any of my web design friends will tell you! However, just occasionally, it's worth the time spent trying to interpret the messages that live there.
http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/
Not sure if there's a Mac equivalent though, so not particularly useful or relevant. I just wanted to make a rather poor joke. Well done on the detective work. I have just one question though; why did it only run the script when the cat woke it up? It seems unlikely that the cat managed to hit the same keys so often, unless you had a particularly simple shortcat to it?
It would, if it wasn't in desktop mode with an external keyboard and mouse...
Beats me. I have no idea why it didn't run and fall over at other times, although the "frozen Mac" has happened a few times now.
Hopefully I've fixed it (the cat was fixed some time ago, but will still roam wherever the whim takes her, which is usually onto equipment that is nice and warm!).
Best Beloved's MBP was doing that yesterday. We never did work out quite what was tripping it, though a nearby thunderstorm might be a possibility.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Last Updated (Saturday, 18 June 2011 11:31)
