Category computers

[Cross posted to and …]

Anyone want to chip in some advice on this weird problem? It seems that for the last while, each time I wake my PowerMac^† from sleep, it plays some jazz. Good jazz, but unknown jazz.

And yes, I’m serious.

What happens is that a few seconds after waking up I start hearing some quality jazz being played out of the normal audio out. Then, just about 10 seconds of music play before it suddenly stops and the machine functions as normal.

Because I’m so confused / flabbergasted by the problem, I made a video of it happening. Feel free to download the video from here. It’s a 5.9MB h.264 video just simply dumped from my camera then encoded…

Running apps that could maybe do this are iTunes (it’s not playing, and there is a different kind of music currently queued), QuickTime (nothing open), iChat, and some Vidi (TV tuner app, but the audio isn’t the currently tuned channel on the external tuner).

I’m going to go attempt to nail down what it is, just because I’m really, really confused. Google’s turning up nothing, and I don’t have a single piece of music that is the same as what’s being played.

^†Original Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5 / 2x 160GB disks / 1.5GB RAM / OS X 10.4.1

UPDATE: Problem solved. It seems that RabbitRadio, a poorly functioning Dashboard widget for streaming NPR stations, was the cause. See, I installed RabbitRadio and had some issues with it not working for more than a brief period of time. Well, it seems that each time I wake my machine from sleep, it (while running in Dashboard) was firing up and playing my selected NPR station (WDET) until it crapped out — for right about 10 seconds.

Conveniently when I was doing the sleep-wake-sleep-wake cycles and killing off apps, one of the periods of audio happened to be Ed Love‘s (scroll down) distinctive voice, whom I immediately recognized from WDET. It just so happens that the times when I wake my computer since installing RabbitRadio have happened to all be after 7pm on weeknights, during Mr. Love’s show.

I still don’t know why RabbitRadio doesn’t work right for me, nor why it would actually start playing whenever I woke my Mac, but the problem has at least been solved. Part of me is rather disappointed, though. I was sort of hoping there was some deep mystery or easter egg which caused my Mac to spout forth really quality music. Ah well.

I don’t know if anyone who reads this actually cares, but while I was initially taken back* by vinum‘s non-functionality on FreeBSD 5.4, it turns out that gmirror is quite a bit snazzier and thus far seems far, far easier to use. I’m also looking forward to combining it with gstripe to do RAID0+1 once I have the ability to hook four large disks up to this machine all at once.

gvinum exists as a replacement for vinum which hooks into geom, but it isn’t documented very well yet, and (at least in this case) I can’t see a reason to use it.

If anyone is interested in giving it a try, this simple series of steps shows just how easy it is to get a geom/gvinum-based mirrored root disk is. Gone are the days of installing to one disk then using this to bootstrap two more with vinum, a faked disk label with an ‘a’ partition that overlapped the vinum partition, etc.

After this finishes writing the mirror to the second disk I might try the standard tests… Pulling a disk, bringing it back into a sync’d mirror, etc. Or maybe I’ll go to bed.

At least this is getting done.

* I gave up on things for almost a week, thinking I had some weird hardware quirkyness because every other time I’d do a ‘vinum start’ the machine would dump core.

If there is anyone who reads this who knows anything about writing widgets for OS X’s Dashboard, could you take a look at this widget and let me know why it’s not working?

I really, really just don’t know why.

Or, I guess if you just want to try it and see what happens, that wouldn’t be a bad idea either… For me it just.doesn’t.work.

Thanks!

http://www.nuxx.net/files/Liz%20and%20Steve.wdgt.zip

Yeah, I forgot how long it takes to upgrade the package database on a FreeBSD box.

This also means that I can’t do *anything* towards getting IMAP working right now. Guh.

And for some reason courierlogger didn’t compile/install before, so courier wouldn’t start.

Eh, I’ll just keep hammering on it.

Yay, I just trashed the OS install on my PowerBook and dumped a bare 10.4 install on there. Time to reinstall everything.