Tag Archives: troubleshooting

Solved Another MacBook Fan Problem!

Posted on 12.04.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

En recherchant la cause d'une trop grande activité du processeur (et donc du ventilateur) de son MacBook, ne pas oublier d'afficher "tous les processus" dans Activity Monitor. Sinon, on risque de rater MozyBackup, par exemple, qui a piqué une crise et décidé d'utiliser 99.6% du processeur...

[en]

Remember how happy I was after solving my print-queue-related MacBook fan problem? Well, for the last few days, my fan has been noisy again. I had a vague suspicion the noise coincided with when I reactivated my Mozy account and endeavoured the get my computer backed up again remotely. However, the fan remained noisy even when Mozy wasn’t uploading or being active.

A friend of mine dropped by on IM to help me troubleshoot. I went through Activity Monitor, sorted the processes by CPU, and closed off those that were using the most ressources — to no avail. The highest process on the list was using 4.5% of CPU ressources, and iStat Nano (a dashboard widget I heartily recommend) was still telling me my fan was running at around 6200rpm and my CPU temperature was approaching 70°C. I could also see that the graph depicting CPU activity was showing it pretty active overall.

I bit at loss over what to do next. Clicking around in iStat Nano, I noticed that at the top of the process list there was MozyBackup, using up 99.6% of my CPU! The reason this process didn’t appear in Activity Monitor was that I was filtering “My Processes” instead of viewing all processes, and MozyBackup was running as root.

Activity Monitor

I killed (force quit) MozyBackup, and it popped up again. I killed it again. And again. By that time, my friend had unearthed this article about Mozy Backup going crazy, where I learned that MozyBackup coming back from the dead was normal (it’s a feature).

Thankfully, once I’d killed MozyBackup a few times, it started behaving normally again, and as you can see on the screenshop posted above, it’s now happily backing up my data without squeezing all the ressources out of my poor old MacBook, which is now quiet again.

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Posted in Technology | Tagged activity monitor, cpu, fan, macbook, mozy, mozybackup, noise, problem, solution, Technology, troubleshooting | 5 Comments

Solved the Dreaded MacBook Fan Problem

Posted on 22.03.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Résolu un problème qui commençait à me pourrir l'existence: le ventilateur de mon MacBook fonctionnait à fond tout le temps, même si je ne faisais rien avec mon ordinateur. Solution (voir l'article anglais pour les liens): vider les queues d'impression -- pour une raison qui me dépasse, avoir des fichiers en attente dans la queue d'impression surcharge le processeur. J'en avais qui étaient là depuis des mois!

[en]

For some time now, I’ve had a very noisy MacBook fan. As if it was on full speed all the time. I was starting to despair, and @swinhoe pointed me to the solution: delete any old print jobs which may be sitting in a printer queue.

I sent to my printer list in System Preferences. Out of the four printers installed on my machine (I never print, honest) two of them were “in use”. “In use”? I haven’t connected to a printer in months. I checked the queues, and lo and behold, there were files sitting there. I simply deleted them, and a few minutes later, my fan stopped being audible.

What a relief! This had been going on literally for months, if not longer.

So, if you find your fan is working overtime, your processor is getting hot, your battery life has melted… check your printer queues.

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Posted in Technology | Tagged battery, fan, macbook, printer, problem, processor, queue, solution, solved, Technology, troubleshooting | 39 Comments

WordPress Sandbox Theme Problems

Posted on 18.12.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Deux problèmes avec Sandbox: les menus déroulants qui se déroulent décalés sur la droite dans IE, et l'absence de feuille de style pour l'impression. Toute aide bienvenue.

[en]

As you might have seen, Sandbox is now my theme of choice for WordPress. Diurnal, here on CTTS, is built upon Sandbox, and I’m using it with a client to build a new design from scratch. It’s a nice base to work from, in a CSS Zen Garden way.

However, there are problems. Here are two I’m stuck with on my client site. I posted them to the Sandbox forums, but I thought I’d mention them here in case one of you smart readers had an answer.

  1. No print stylesheet?: does anybody have a print stylesheet handy for use with Sandbox? If I can avoid writing one from scratch…
  2. Broken drop-down menus in IE: I’m far from a drop-down menu specialist, so I’m not sure where to start to fix the IE wonkiness I’ve noticed. The menus in IE do not drop right below the parent menu as shown here, but overlap on the neighbouring menu item on the right.

Thanks for any help or pointers you can bring me.

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged browsers, css, design, dropdown, help, ie, print, sandbox, stylesheet, theme, troubleshooting, Wanted, Weblog Technology, Wordpress | 10 Comments

Mystery WordPress/Markdown Problem: Troubleshooting

Posted on 30.04.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Description d'un vilain problème WordPress avec PHP Markdown Extra. Certains billets refusaient de s'afficher et faisaient tout simplement planter la suite du chargement de la page (donc, pages archives incomplètes, billets disparus). J'ai résolu (plus ou moins) le problème en remplçant PHP Markdown Extra par Markdown tout court, mais je n'ai toujours pas compris le fond du problème. Ce billet donne quelques détails sur les symptômes et mes déductions.

[en]

If you’re a WordPress person and you feel like a bit of juicy troubleshooting, this one is for you. I’ve narrowed down part of the problem, but have failed to identify clearly the cause of the problem. I’ve found a workaround by replacing a plugin by another similar one, however. I’ve made screenshots so that even once this problem is fixed (hopefully very quickly) you can make sense of this post.

Symptoms:

Some posts on the VibrationsMusic website fail to display their content, or display incompletely. When this happens, the page stops loading altogether, resulting in a truncated page. (So we have vanishing posts and incomplete aborted archive pages where they should appear.) No error messages in source, HTML code just stops.

Narrowing it down:

Removing post content makes the post display OK, so I figured it had something to do with the content. Removing the PHP Markdown Extra plugin removed the problem, to. So it has something to do with a combination of certain things in the content and the PHP Markdown Extra plugin. (Removing other plugins didn’t change a thing, so I deduce from that it isn’t a plugin interaction issue.)

Using the “cut-half-out” technique I tried to narrow down the problem to a certain type of post content. At first, it seemed to be caused by either (a) HTML links in Markdown lists or (b) embedded YouTube players (<object>). However, some posts with either (a) or (b) were displaying correctly. In one faulty post, replacing the embedded YouTube video with another removed the problem.

However, it seems more subtle than that. In some cases, removing the other half of the post also removes the problem. => post length? Not really either. In a quite weird case, one post stops displaying right at the end of the content (Technorati tags and closing divs don’t appear) and if changes are made to the next post (like removing its content) then the first post displays correctly (and the second one too).

This seems (to me) to point to some problem in the query-array-manipulation area (but I don’t know how things work well enough in that department to make a more precise hypothesis).

Workaround:

I replaced the PHP Markdown Extra plugin with the “normal” Markdown plugin, and everything displays fine.

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged content, display, Geek / Technical, markdown, phpmarkdownextra, plugin, posts, problem, troubleshooting, Weblog Technology, Wordpress | 2 Comments

Annoying NeoOffice Error

Posted on 10.09.2006 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Un problème récurrent avec NeoOffice. Vous connaissez ce message d'erreur?

[en]

I’ve been getting this error ever since I moved from my iBook to my MacBook. I’ve erased NeoOffice from my Applications folder and reinstalled it. I know we had this error at school, too. It doesn’t seem to create any problems, but it’s just annoying that the first time in a session I save a file I need to click through this (and the next).

Screenshot of error message.

Welcome to Steph’s Troubleshooting Centre, and thanks for your help!

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Posted in Stuff that doesn't fit | Tagged error, message, neooffice, openoffice, problem, saving, Software and Tools, troubleshooting, Wanted | Leave a comment

Slow SSH Login from MacBook

Posted on 08.09.2006 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

La connection SSH vers mon serveur depuis mon MacBook est très lente (je dois attendre plusieurs minutes pour qu'il me demande mon mot de passe). Il me semble me souvenir que depuis ma machine Windows à la maison également, il n'y avait rien de cela. L'autre semaine, j'ai essayé de me connecter depuis un tout autre endroit et la réponse a été instantanée. Idées?

[en]

Well, it seems that writing about my technical problems here is more efficient than bugging people repeatedly on IRC about them, so let’s continue. Welcome to Bunny’s Troublshooting Centre.

I have trouble SSH’ing into my server from my MacBook. Trouble, here, means I have to wait a couple of minutes (no exaggeration) for the password prompt. If I’m quick enough and type my password in before it times out, I’m in.

I logged in from somewhere else the other week and it responded almost immediately. I don’t recall that logging in from home (same wifi/DSL connection) from my winbox was sluggish.

Any ideas? I’ve run SSH with the verbose option on, and it does throw up a few warnings an errors. I don’t really want to paste it all here, but if you tell me what bits are useful I can put them in a pastebin. Thanks for any ideas/help/assistance.

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Posted in Stuff that doesn't fit | Tagged connexion, Geek / Technical, macbook, password, problem, prompt, server, slow, sluggish, Software and Tools, ssh, troubleshooting, Wanted | 16 Comments

Java and FreeMind on my MacBook

Posted on 07.09.2006 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Maintenant que je suis sur mon MacBook, Freemind ne marche plus. Description du problème. Solutions et suggestions bienvenues.

[en]

Ah, well, the Lazyweb was retired, looks like I missed that. We can just go about tagging posts with lazyweb, though.

I used Freemind as a mind-mapping application on my iBook. Unfortunately, it won’t start on my MacBook. I’ve looked in system profiler and it tells me about plugins for two Java versions.

Screenshot of error message. Screenshot of error message.

Suggestions or solutions very much welcome (or nice free OSX mind-mapping apps too).

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Tagged application, freemind, Geek / Technical, java, lazyweb, mindmap, mindmapping, osx, problem, software, troubleshooting | 6 Comments

Links in WordPress Comments not Linking

Posted on 07.09.2006 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Les URLs dans les commentaires de ce blog ne sont pas transformés en liens, alors qu'ils le devraient. Appel aux idées pour résoudre ce problème.

[en]

Lazyweb, hear my call!

When people type URLs in my comments, they aren’t converted into links. WordPress should do this, but it’s not doing it. I don’t know where to start troubleshooting.

Suggestions and solutions will be thankfully tried out :-)

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged comments, lazyweb, Links, problem, troubleshooting, URLs, Weblog Technology, Wordpress | 36 Comments