Dec 86 Mousehole
Volume Number: 2
Issue Number: 12
Column Tag: Mousehole Report
Mousehole Report 
By Rusty Hodge, Mousehole BBS
Sysop Speaks
Rusty Hodge
Merry Christmas! This Christmas season the new Apple //gs should be a big hit.
But in January we should be seeing the first of Apple's exciting new line of Macs. The
"Aladdin" will be surprisingly similar to Levco's Prodigy, including a DMA'd SCSI port.
(DMA = FAST)
Speaking of the //gs and the new Macs, look for Apple's Desktop Bus to start
popping up in the Mac family. This means your mouse will plug into your keyboard,
among other things.
This month we're featuring a segment on "Pascal Wars". Who wins? Decide for
yourself. As of this writing, Turbo Pascal was just released, so it's getting a brief
critique, not one based on experienced use.
Finally a few months ago, someone mentioned that QUED had a 32K limit on file
sizes. The authors dropped me a note about this. QUED actually doesn't have a limit
(aside from the amount of RAM in your Mac). I put together the report using QUED this
month. It is a very fast text editor, had no trouble dealing with a 100K or so long file,
and I think I'll start using it as the basis of comparison with other editors. (If you
switch editors and have a lot of files created with the old one, get Text Ranger, an
application that will change the creator of all text files to whatever you specify, i.e.
QUED.)
Disk First Aid
The Atom
Don't know about anyone else, but Disk Express told me my Dataframe had too
many blocks allocated and thus wouldn't compact the desktop or prioritize files. But this
great Disk First Aid program solves that! Just run disk first aid on the HD, then run
Disk Express. No errors and no more fragmented files! (Of course Disk Express still
takes 2 hours on a 20-meg HD to prioritize and unfragment).
Also, if you haven't gotten it yet, the release of the Dataframe print spooler 3.0d
is out. Registered owners should get it soon. Also with the spooler is a head parking
program you can run before you transport your hard drive anywhere.
TextEdit Problem (New ROMs?)
Go
I can't seem to get a blinking cursor when I type characters in my program's
TextEdit window. I call TEIdle in the main event loop, and I make sure the port is
active, and when I click the mouse (TEClick) it starts to blink, but as soon as I start to
type (TEKey) the cursor vanishes! I've noticed the same problem in my friend's editor
and the MockWrite DA, so I know the problem is not unique to my program. [This is a
bug in the new ROMS. A call to TEScroll with dh and dv both 0 results in loss of the
insertion point. See Tech Note 22 and only call TEScroll when there really is something
to scroll. Compare your event loop to this month's Text Edit Demo, which does not have
the problem. -Ed]
Deep Folders
Jim Reekes
Late one night Rusty and I were backing up 20megs to another drive. I've done
this many times in the past without losing a file. This time I think we discovered a
nasty problem with HFS. There was one folder that had several folders within folders.
I think it was about 10 or so deep. When we attempted to copy this folder, it wasted the
directory structure. Ouch! Kinda like the problem ProDOS has if you've got 15 or more
sub-directories. Look out for this bug. Oh yeah. After copying a few hundred or more
files, you MUST reboot the Mac. It doesn't do much of anything right after a mass file
transfer.
Folders and Mouse Freezing
Cpettus
Some time ago I remember a message in which a downloaded program was accused
of causing a "deadly folder" to appear on a hard disk: the mouse would freeze and the
system lock up when this folder was opened in the Finder. It just recently happened to
me, but in entirely different circm- stances, and I suspect the actual culprit is the HFS
directory information not being correctly written out to disk when the system crashes
(because it's still sitting in one cache or another). The Mac is supposed to go through a
rebuild procedure on a volume which was not correctly dismounted when it encounters
it again, but this is apparently not as robust as it could be. [If you have confirmation of
strange Finder problems like this, please write to MacTutor so we can present them to
Apple. -Ed.]
LoDown Problem
Burrill Smith
For those of you who are looking for a fast HD at a reasonable price, as I was,
think twice before considering LoDown. Three days after I got mine, the controller
board went out. OK, not their fault, these things happen. However this was three weeks
ago and I'm supposed to get it back today. It took them a week to send me an empty box
so I could send it back to them (their rules, no LoDOWN box, no warranty). If you plan
to become dependent on your hard disk, I suggest you find a supplier who offers
service, which LoDOWN doesn't seem to. [I can add a good story to this. We got a
20-meg LoDown box at a place I worked once. It never seemed entirely on the ball and
was the loudest HD I'd ever heard. One day, it began to whine more loudly, then to
screech, and as we raced to unplug the thing, it was screaming. SMOKE was actually
coming out the back. We uh, returned this evaluation drive. -- Laurel
Galvan-MacLean]
All's Fair in Love & War
David Smith
I couldn't let the previous post go by without commenting on our experience with
DataFrame. We bought two DataFrame 20's. One had a microsci drive in it that was very
quiet. Couldn't be heard over my LaserWriter. The other had a seagate drive in it that
sounded like an aircraft carrier. It was a definite hum over the LaserWriter. Plus it
was dead on arrival. The microsci DataFrame has worked without any problem or data
loss for several months. A problem we reported last month with our Mac was due to the
Referenced by (2):