5 Days, 2 OSes and 3 different browsers

So it’s been 5 days that the Comments capability on my iWeb/MobileMe blog has been working. I’ve now tried it out using the following computer OSes and browsers;

• Windows 7 and IE 8, Firefox 3.6.11
• Windows 7 and IE 9 Beta
• OS X 10.6.6 and Safari 5.0.3, Firefox 3.6.13

All of these are working.

I also did a search to see if anyone, Apple?, had posted anything about any changes to either iWeb or MobileMe that would indicate that they’d done something to fix the problem but I didn’t find anything. Guess I get to keep an eye on it for a while.

If the Comments continue to work through the rest of this week then I’ll revert my iWeb/MobileMe sites’ Welcome page, rather than having it do a re-direct to this blog.

4 Days and counting

First posted on my MobileMe blog here

It’s been something like four days now with the iWeb Comments capability working. It was failing after something like 8-24 hours before. You can read my trials and tribulations with the MobileMe/iWeb Comments capability on previous posts; Comments not working and Problem with iWeb/MobileMe Comments.

last week I contacted MobileMe support to talk with them about the problem, using chat. I explained what it was that I was seeing and what I’d found out, as I’ve detailed in the post Problem with iWeb/MobileMe Comments. I was informed that MobileMe is only a hosting facility and that the functionality, or lack there of, was an iWeb issue. So I tried to get iWeb support only to find out that iWeb support is tied to your hardwares support. If you don’t have support for your Mac you don’t get to talk with a tech support rep, sort of.

There was an option to dispute this, which I checked and gave them a phone number that they could call be back on, which they did pretty promptly, 10-15 minutes as I recall. I talked with the rep on the phone and explained the issue and she explained that I’d have to pay to talk to a tech support rep, or I could use their Feedback mechanism, which is what I ended up doing. If you go to http://www.apple.com/feedback/iweb.html you can provide feedback to Apple about iWeb. In this case I reported a ‘bug’, the problem with the Comment dialog box not formatting and working properly. I included the information I’d cleaned about the differences in source code, detailed in the post Problem with iWeb/MobileMe Comments.

That was on or about Wednesday of last week, the 2nd February. Since then my Comment dialog box when using Safari, Firefox and IE has been working okay. Perhaps I’m getting lucky and only hitting those servers with the ‘good’ source code, or perhaps the iWeb team has found and fixed the problem? We can live in hope.

Problem with iWeb/MobileMe Comments

First posed on my MobileMe blog.

I’ve having problems with the Comments feature of iWeb/MobileMe. That is, using iWeb to create and manage a web site, including a blog, on MobileMe, at http://web.me.com/stevenjkennedy/Steven_JW_Kennedy

Seems that whenever anyone, well me, goes to the site and tries to add a comment to a Blog entry it’s hit or miss as to whether or not I’ll be able to add a comment.

A previous post, Comments not working!, provides details as to what I’m seeing, along with some screen shots. Now, I’ve been able to look at the source for both a ‘good’ comment and a ‘bad’ comment. That is, the pop-up that displays both when the comment functionality works and when it doesn’t.

I captured the source in both cases and then did a comparison and found a number of differences, which I’ve shown below. I’ve also taken this information and provided back to Apple via the iWeb Feedback site.

What I’ve seen is a number of places where the ‘bad’ version of the source shows the use of “/WebObjects” as part of a URL. The ‘good’ comment source code doesn’t have this as part of the URL. In addition there where three other differences between the ‘good’ source and the ‘bad’ source. I’ve included them below as well. Click on the image to display a enlarged version

One wonders at the differences. Give the likelihood of MobileMe having multiples servers and internet access points, for redundancy and load balancing,  what’s the possibility that one or more of those servers hasn’t been updated properly, especially in the light of Apples move from Mac.com to web.me.com?

I’ve put the text version of the differences between the two source files for a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ comment. Due to the constraints of iWeb I wasn’t able to insert it as a text table, as is shown in the image above. I’ve highlighted the difference in the ‘Bad’ source by highlighting it in red.

Please note! that some of the lines below extend to the right and might be truncated on your screen. This blog theme doesn’t support horizontal scrolling bars. Switch to full screen, or reduce the browser zoom factor to see all of the text.

Line No  9

‘Good’ Source: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/English.lproj/styles/ComposeComment.css">

‘Bad’ source: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/WebObjects/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/English.lproj/styles/ComposeComment.css">

Line No  27

‘Good’ Source: <SCRIPT language=JavaScript src="/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/composeComment.js"></SCRIPT>

‘Bad’ source: <SCRIPT language=JavaScript src="/WebObjects/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/composeComment.js"></SCRIPT>

Line No 34

‘Good’ Source: src="/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/English.lproj/images/comments_header.gif">

‘Bad’ source: src="/WebObjects/Comments.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/English.lproj/images/comments_header.gif">

Line No 73

‘Good’ Source: <div class="leftcolumn"><img src="/i/ma/1/spacer.gif" height="26" width="1" alt="" border="0"><br><div id="verificationImage"><img name="iv" width="188" height="45" id="iv" border="0" src="/WebObjects/Comments.woa/32/wr?wodata=7946055742852725589"></div></div>

‘Bad’ source: <div class="leftcolumn"><img src="/i/ma/1/spacer.gif" height="26" width="1" alt="" border="0"><br><div id="verificationImage"><img name="iv" width="188" height="45" id="iv" border="0" src="/WebObjects/Comments.woa/47/wr?wodata=-6995371556710623281"></div></div>

Line No 87-89

‘Good’ Source: <div class="SeparatorBottom"><img src="/i/ma/1/spacer.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="" border="0"></div>

<input type="hidden" value="" name="s_wJmF">

<a href="javascript:authenticate(‘s_wJmF’)" style="text-decoration: none;">

‘Bad’ source: <div class="SeparatorBottom"><img src="/i/ma/1/spacer.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="" border="0"></div>

<input type="hidden" value="" name="s_llJU">

<a href="javascript:authenticate(‘s_llJU‘)" style="text-decoration: none;">

 

Line No 94 & 95

‘Good’ Source: <script>var res = 24*4;

document.authform.s_wJmF.value = ”+res;

‘Bad’ source: script>var res = Math.max(Math.sqrt(3*27), Math.ceil(9.01));

document.authform.s_llJU.value = ”+res;

Comments not working!

First posted on my MobileMe blog

I’ve just found out that the comments for my MobileMe hosted blog aren’t working, at least they’re not for me. The comment box opens up and I’m able to fill in the necessary info, including the ‘Captcha’ code but the ‘Add Comment’ link doesn’t work. The comment dialog box also opens far left of the screen.

I’ve done a quick look but most of the posts I see seem to indicate that it’ll clear up on it’s own. That remains to be seen. In the mean time I’ll keep looking.

 

Update (1/23/2011)

Okay, ‘Comments’ came back on Thursday. Seems they just ‘fixed’ themselves, maybe. As my posted comment shows I did do a ‘Publish Entire Site’.

Having said all of that I just went to add another comment, to a different post, and Comments weren’t working again. As you can see from the screen shot below it’s fairly obvious when the Comment isn’t going to work. The dialog box is not displayed properly. The screen shots below show firstly a ‘bad’ Comments dialog box followed by a ‘good’ one.

 

The case of the missing disks

I have a Mac Mini which has a 1.5TB external disk connected to it. Every now and then, I go to do something on my Mac and find that the disk is no longer mounted. I have un-plug the power and plug it back in which re-mounts the disk.

I’ve had a look around various forums but haven’t seen anything directly on point. Some stuff out there to do with AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule etc. but I’m not using either.

My actual setup is;

• Mac Mini Dual Core 1.66GHz, 2GB RAM (model macmini1.1)

• OS X 10.6.6

• Boot ROM: MM11.0055.B08

• External disk

• Seagate FreeAgent 1.5TB

• Partitioned in to two (2) partitions, 1TB and 500GB

• The 1TB has iTunes and iPhoto files on it. the 500GB partition is used for files that I don’t use much. That is it’s not accessed on a regular basis.

Formatted MAC OS Extended (Journaled)

Direct USB cable from the Mac Mini to the Seagate

When I encountered this issue in the past I went through a number of troubleshooting steps that included swapping out the USB cable and moving the disk from a USB hub to a direct connection to the Mac Mini. None of these ‘fixed’ the problem. This issue seems to come and go. It’s not something that I can reproduce at will so when I make a change, like swapping the USB cable I have to just wait to see if the problem re-occurs. The problem also seems to occur in groups. That is, it wont happen for a while, then it’ll reoccur and it’ll occur sporadically for a few days or a week or so and then go away.

I have found the following in the system logs, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t tell me much, just that the disk, the 1TB partition, isn’t available.

I did just look at the previous log entries, based on the time stamp of when I lost access to the external drive and notice that it seems to have a problem with a USB device plugged in to Port 6 of a USB hub.

Which begs the question, how do I identify what device is plugged in to port 6. I do have a hub connected but it’s only a 4 port hub (powered). I have the following plugged in to the 4 port hub;

1. ✦ Dell monitor, ie. another USB hub – nothing connected allows me to connect USB thumb drives via the monitor

2. ✦ External disk drive, 2TB that I use for my backups

3. ✦ USB hub, the Belkin hub with firewire that matched the Mac Mini, nothing plugged in to it.

4. ✦ iPod USB cable – iPod wasn’t connected during this time

Or does the Port 6 refer to the Mac Mini’s USB port, which would be odd as well as it doesn’t have 6 ports either. Having said that in looking at the information from the System Profiler and the log file it would seem that my USB High-Speed Bus has a Bus Number of 0xfd, the same prefix as is reported in the log, 0xfd600000. In addition the system profiler shows my Seagate as having a Location ID of 0xfd600000. So does this mean the prefix of 0xfd indicates the USB High-speed bus and the 6 indicates port 6? If so that would seem to point to the external Seagate disk as being the problem.

I’ll keep plugging away at this to see if I can identify the cause of the problem. If I find anything then I’ll post a comment about it.