Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Instruments and DTrace are extremely valuable tools for inspecting your software and to track down problems. Be it memory leaks or performance bottlenecks. Let me walk you through a real profiling session here.
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I’ve just pushed out the new FeedbackReporter release. It comes with quite a few changes that deserve the jump from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0. The dialog is no longer modal and the UI a little refined. Access to the framework is now provided through a Singleton. Using a delegate you can now send along arbitrary data on the data submission. It’s now also localized. Current languages are English and German. The source code plus a sample application is now included in the distribution.

Check out the release notes for more details.

Recently I got myself a Time Capsule to give me and the people around me a more effortless backup experience. Unfortunately I found backups sometimes to take quite long. Especially on the hourly backup cycle it feels like constant backups. Occasionally I have seen “Finishing backup” for more than an hour.

It might actually be related to my terrible signal of the Time Capsule. Seems like I need to give Apple Support a call. (*sigh*) On 5Ghz n-only I am not getting a full signal standing 4 meters away from it. I can barely leave the room. Or it shows full reception and as soon as I try to access the web it just drops the connection. On 2Ghz n-only it seems both the Airport Express and the LinkedSys WRT54g still give better reception than the Time Capsule. It seems the g/n mode works best for me while I really hoped for the 5Ghz multi-channel speed. Buy anyway!

I was curious what acutally gets backed up to see why it really takes so long. I found this command line tool extremely useful.

tms snaphots
tms delta 12 11

You first can list the available backup snapshots and then get a delta of what files have been saved. If you are also annoyed by the limited Time Machine preferences you might want to give the Time Machine Editor a try. It lets you adjust the backup schedule to something a little more sensible.

This morning I woke up and “Inbox zero” was already reality. No mail? That’s odd! But then my IMAP account failed and I knew something must be going on. Mail.app told me it can’t log in. Strange - I didn’t change a thing! Checking the web interface revealed a an inbox far from being empty. So I dug a little deeper:

openssl s_client -connect pop.gmail.com:995
+OK Gpop ready for requests from 84.58.54.4 5pf404508eyh.0
USER tcurdt
+OK Backend is offline.  Showing you an empty mailbox.  Sorry. 5pf404508eyh.0

Wow! The Google backend offline?? I tried from a different machine (on a different network). Works! So obviously I was hitting a bad node and Google is doing some sharding based on the IP. Thanks to my 3G modem I got all my mail now …but where to you report stuff like that to? The Gmail help groups don’t really feel appropriate for such an incident.

And again more than 10+ people showed up on the Monday night. (And this is during vacation season!) So I am quite happy. A couple faces from last time but also quite a few new folks rocked up. Glad that again someone from the BigNerdRanch was able to make it.

Stephan’s introduction to the WiiRemote was really interesting. (Thanks!) So much cool stuff you can do with the accelormeter and especially the IR tracking. The WiiRemote immediately made it into my Amazon shopping basket and I am looking forward to play with this myself.

In order to better communicate we agreed on going with mixxt as a platform. So now we have a wiki, a forum and event calendar. (I will still also submit it to upcoming though)

Unfortunately Club Voltaire is no longer available during weekdays. But some of the attendees stepped up and will provide the room for the next meeting. The topics of the sessions are still TBA. But mark your calendars. It’s the first Monday each month. So the next CocoaHeads Frankfurt will be September 1st.

If you feel like it: Here is a list of possible topics. You don’t have to be a Pro to present. Don’t be shy!