BUT… I noticed an annoying thing: if you activate the mobileme syncing of calendars, in iTunes you have no option anymore to select which calendars you want synced to your iPhone. I don’t want all my calendars on my iPhone, I have a whole bunch of them that I especially don’t want beeping when I’m away from my desk, like backup reminders and such.

So I decided to deactivate mobileme calendar syncing on the iPhone. But when you do that, it ERASES the calendars from the iPhone, and you’re left with nothing until you synchronise it back through iTunes… in theory.
Because when I connected the iPhone to iTunes, it still said that my calendars where automatically synced over the air through mobileme. Damn. I forced a sync, but nada, nothing, still empty calendars on my iPhone.
I tried everything, including resetting the SyncServices folder as recommended by Apple.
Nothing, iTunes still tells me my calendars are handled by mobileme.

So in the end I restored my iPhone to its original state.

What a mobilemess…

[UPDATE: while trying to figure out this mess, I tracked the console messages during the iPhone's restore process and found this hidden gem of Apple-dev Star Wars humor:

25/07/08 00:15:32 [0x0-0x24024].com.apple.iTunes[269] MobileDevice: AMDeviceConnect: This is not the droid you’re looking for. Move along, move along.

At least, it made me laugh at 00:21 while I’m waiting for the restore to complete… I need the phone ready by tomorrow morning, dammit!]

Are iPhone app devs getting a raw deal? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

We mentioned yesterday a rumor that Apple won’t cut a check for iPhone application developers until the dev’s share of the sales tops $250. [...]
From the (indie) developer’s perspective, this stinks. They’ve already paid at least $99 just to participate, and now they have to wait until they make (potentially) hundreds of sales before they see a dime from Apple. Will the high barrier for entry discourage truly good app development?

Hmm, let me see… $99 a “high barrier”? Well, maybe, but let’s see how many of these Indie Devs have a PS3 or XBOX360, for which a single GAME is $60 at least? And how much do they spend on Starbucks?
In any case, the fact that an Indie dev might desperately NEED $250, like, right now, is ridiculous! If you develop apps for money, then I hope you plan on earning a bit more than just $250… and if you just want to make a quick $250 to buy your next iPhone, then maybe it’s better if the “high barrier” discourages you from entering the iPhone AppStore system.

Seriously, I don’t know a single dev who would create an app just to get $250… might as well make it freeware.

And now, this is what Dell has come up with:

Dell Dock Puts a Little Mac OS X Into Vista Studio Laptops:

Sweet, uh?

Newsweek.com:

That photo of 11 weirdos in ’70s clothes you may have seen on the Internet really is the original Microsoft team, snapped Dec. 7, 1978, on the eve of the company’s move from Albuquerque, N.M., to Seattle. Almost 30 years later, a few weeks before Bill Gates’s departure from Microsoft, the group (looking better) reconvened.

“looking better” ? OMG!

Anyway, this is a major hasard, especially when you use your laptop on a plane equipped with power plugs on each seat.
So as soon as I came back, I called Apple’s Tech Support. After a rather longish wait of 9 minutes (which, I must admit, I was warned of by the voice server) I got on the line with a young lady speaking French with a heavy Dutch accent (I live in France…) who told me, after pulling out my file, that, of course, they would send me a replacement power brick (the MBPro is still under guarantee) and that I’d just have to return the old one in the box the new one came in.
This was yesterday at about 11:30 am. At 3pm the same day, I received an email informing me that the new power brick had shipped and I could track it on UPS.com.
I went there and effectively the item was marked for delivery tomorrow.
So, same day expedition for a 48hrs delivery? For a REPAIR*? All I have to say is, no wonder Apple’s Customer Support gets the highest ratings.

—
* I already knew Apple’s online store was superfast, like ordering something on monday morning and getting it delivered the next day at noon, but this is different, you PAY for what you order.

Walt Mossberg on Samsung’s Instinct:

Also, the timing of the Instinct is unfortunate. It was designed to go up against the first iPhone. Sprint even has a Web site (nowisgood.com) comparing the two devices. But the Instinct will go on sale only three weeks before Apple and AT&T start selling the new 3G iPhone, the second-generation model announced earlier this week.

…and I caught up on the news… my take? Forget about iPhone 3G, forget about GPS support and the AppStore…

THE big thing? MobileMe.

This is THE MOBILE COMPUTING dream everybody has been prophesying for years… the famous CLOUD COMPUTING.

.Mac was a sad affair, but it was a good stumbling step in the right direction… now if Apple can get their acts together and put the resources to make MobileMe efficient, then they have the KILLER NEXT BIG THING.

Everybody has been talking about accessing your data anywhere, anytime, but it has been all theory… Now what Apple announces is basically IT. And with PUSH SYNCH they avoid the pain of having to synch your data… You create content (emails, contents, pictures, whatever) and they just magically synch over the air and become available to ALL your devices…

“It’s a kind of magic”.

[UPDATE: I just signed to be notified when MobileMe becomes available and heres is the post-signup screen:

the NEXT big thing is always UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

On Monday, while TM was doing it’s hourly thing, there was a power outage in the house. When it went back live, I found out TM couldn’t backup my MacBook Pro anymore, it threw an error saying that it could not find the backup disk. I checked and could see the TC alright on the LAN, and the sparsebundle for my laptop was clearly there… So I rebooted the TC, but to no result. Them I tried to mount manually the sparsebundle: the Finder grinded away for a loooong while before giving up and throwing an error stating that the image had “no filesystem”. Yikes!

I went and had a look in my system logs and here is what I found:

May 28 08:29:14 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of rangiroa/Backups.backupdb
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Error: (6) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.SnapshotState path:/Volumes/Backup of rangiroa/Backups.backupdb/rangiroa/2008-04-29-102105
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Error: (6) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.SnapshotContainer path:/Volumes/Backup of rangiroa/Backups.backupdb/rangiroa/2008-04-29-102105
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Error: (-36) Creating directory 2008-05-28-083117.inProgress
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Failed to make snapshot container.
May 28 08:31:17 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Error: (-36) Creating directory rangiroa 2

[...] 998 of them [...]

May 28 08:31:18 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1607]: Backup failed with error: 2
May 28 08:31:30 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1635]: Mounting disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/rangiroa_0017f2cb63cb.sparsebundle
May 28 08:31:30 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1635]: Failed to attach to disk image, returned: 35
May 28 08:31:30 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1635]: Failed to mount disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/rangiroa_0017f2cb63cb.sparsebundle
May 28 08:31:30 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1635]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.

So the Finder could not attach the disk image, nor mount it…

And you know, there is no way to directly access the HD in the Time Capsule, meaning you can’t simply do a disk utility check on it. Wai you’ll say, you can use Disk Utility to check and repair a disk image, but to do that, said Disk utility first tries to mount the image, which, of course, failed in my case… So no luck with Disk Utility.

So I copied the 160GB sparsebundle to a USB HD, and went on trying to fix it… I did a lot of googling for the problem, but all I found was loads of complaints, but no solutions, until I stumbled on this post over at macosxhints.com. It says the guy managed to repair his sparsebundle using some terminal wizardry involving the use of the hdiutl command:

sudo hdiutil mount -nomount -readwrite /path/to/sparseimage

So I tried it: I launched Terminal, typed the correct command and path to the image, at which point I got a huge CPU spike while nothing happended in the Terminal, indicating that some process was running but giving no feedback. Looking at the Activity Monitor showed a process called fsck_hfs using about 60% of one CPU. fsck_hfs does, according to OSX’s man page (”man fsck_hfs”) , an HFS file system consistency check.
Funny thing is that I left it running for quite a while (we are dealing with a 160GB image, with hundreds of thousands of files), and after a couple hours, it failed! Argh!

But then, out of pure luck, I checked Disk Utility, and there in the sidebar was my sparsebundle showing that it contained an unmounted disk image called “backup of rangiroa”… I then decided to launch a repair on it, which started and after about 30 minutes started founding a whole bunch of errors, and fixing them:

/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs run at Tue May 27 15:47:11 2008
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** /dev/rdisk2s2 (NO WRITE)
/dev/rdisk2s2: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM DIRTY
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs run at Tue May 27 15:47:11 2008
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** /dev/rdisk2s2
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Extents Overflow file.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Catalog file.
/dev/rdisk2s2: Keys out of order
/dev/rdisk2s2: (4, 89246)
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
/dev/rdisk2s2: Invalid record count
/dev/rdisk2s2: (4, 785)
/dev/rdisk2s2: Invalid node structure
[... thousands of them]
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Rechecking volume.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
/dev/rdisk2s2: Invalid B-tree node size
/dev/rdisk2s2: (8, 0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Volume check failed.

ARGH!
but then it went on:

/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs run at Tue May 27 16:19:39 2008
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** /dev/rdisk2s2
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Extents Overflow file.
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Checking Catalog file.
/dev/rdisk2s2: Keys out of order
/dev/rdisk2s2: (4, 89246)
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.

/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs run at Tue May 27 17:32:47 2008
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Detected a case-sensitive catalog.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extents Overflow file.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (1 %)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Catalog file.”,0)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (40 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Keys out of order”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Rechecking volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Detected a case-sensitive catalog.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extents Overflow file.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (1 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (2 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Catalog file.”,0)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (45 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Incorrect number of thread records”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking multi-linked files.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Incorrect number of file hard links”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Catalog hierarchy.”,0)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Invalid directory item count”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”(It should be %@ instead of %@)”,2)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 11692
/dev/rdisk2s2: 11690
/dev/rdisk2s2: (85 %)

/dev/rdisk2s2: fsck_hfs run at Tue May 27 18:27:13 2008
/dev/rdisk2s2: ** /dev/rdisk2s2 (NO WRITE)
/dev/rdisk2s2: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM DIRTY
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Incorrect folder count in a directory (id = %@)”,1)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 19
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”(It should be %@ instead of %@)”,2)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 11692
/dev/rdisk2s2: 11690
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extended Attributes file.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Overlapped extent allocation (file %@)”,1)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 9899556 /.HFS+ Private Directory Data
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking multi-linked directories.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Incorrect number of directory hard links”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume bitmap.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Volume Bit Map needs minor repair”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume information.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Invalid volume free block count”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”(It should be %@ instead of %@)”,2)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 84245711
/dev/rdisk2s2: 80893131
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Volume Header needs minor repair”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (100 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Repairing volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Previous ID in a hard link chain is incorrect (id = %@)”,1)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: 1
/dev/rdisk2s2: 2
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”Orphaned directory hard link (id = %@)”,1)
/dev/rdisk2s2: 9787044
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Look for links to corrupt files in DamagedFiles directory.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Rechecking volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Detected a case-sensitive catalog.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extents Overflow file.”,0)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (85 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (E,”HasFolderCount flag needs to be set (id = %@)”,1)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: 25
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extended Attributes file.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking multi-linked directories.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume bitmap.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume information.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (100 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Repairing volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Rechecking volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Detected a case-sensitive catalog.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extents Overflow file.”,0)
[...]
/dev/rdisk2s2: (85 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking Extended Attributes file.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking multi-linked directories.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume bitmap.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”Checking volume information.”,0)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (100 %)
/dev/rdisk2s2: (S,”The volume %@ was repaired successfully.”,1)
/dev/rdisk2s2: Backup of rangiroa

Yes, “The volume %@ was repaired successfully.” That took about 4hrs…

I then double-clicked on the sparsebundle in the Finder and, ta-da, IT MOUNTED!

I then right-clicked on the Time Machine icon in the Dock, chose “Browse another Time Machine backup…”, pointed it to my repaired image, and the TM browser launched successfully!

I then copied back the repaired sparsebundle on the Time Capsule HD over the LAN, and launched a Time Machine backup… which did find the backup disk and hang there display a “Preparing backup” status for a long time. A bit scared I went and looked in the backupd log to find this message:

May 28 22:40:35 rangiroa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[411]: Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|

So all it was doing was actually rechecking for file changes because it found out that the databse that stores all the file changes notified by Spotlight was “untrustable”, probably because the repair had found a number of orphaned hardlinks and such…

So I decided to let it go and, after about 45 minutes, it started doing the actual backup.

So, now all is back on tracks and working fine.

My conclusion? I hate disk images for storing files. If the container image gets corrupted, you cannot access ANY of your files. That is the reason why I will never use FleVault. At least, with regular Time Machine backups to external HDs, you can access your files manually, but with the sparsebundles… also, it sort of sucks that there is no guarantee of integrity on said sparsebundles. Finally, if you have a problem, you will have to be patient and let the processes take their time, which might be hours.

Oh, by the way, as indicated in the post I linked to, I tried using DiskWarrior, which is THE best disk repair tool out there, and which saved me quite a number of times (I bought it back in the days of the dreaded “The Thing” bug in OS9). But this time, it would crash silently after a few minutes of checking the sparsbundle…)

So, yesterday, after reading that the 10.5.3 update “Addresses compatibility issues with Aperture 2.” I decided to give it a go: I removed my Aperture Library from Time Machine’s exclusion list and let it get backed-up (that’s about 37GB). As soon as the first backup was done, I launched Aperture and let it open until the next backup started. After the second backup was complete, I quit Aperture and had a look at the backupd logs for the third backup… and voila! it only backed up a couple new pictures I had added to Aperture.

Thanks Apple, it took you an awfully long time to fix this (and why the bug was there in the first place, when they control the whole OS/apps/hardware???) but finally it is fixed.