hoakley December 18, 2018 Macs, Technology

Housekeeping for speed and profit

When did you last browse your Mac’s log following a boot? It’s not something that I do very often, but it’s a valuable exercise every couple of months, at least. I did it when I ran my UPS test a couple of days ago, so that I could familiarise myself with the changes in 10.14.2, and any differences in this new Mac.

All I do is open Consolation 3 once my Mac has completed starting up, and view all log entries from around 20 seconds before the last shutdown to a couple of minutes after starting up. I then have a quick look through it before saving it as an RTF file and browsing at my leisure using DelightEd.

There are lots of interesting passages to study in greater detail over the next week or so, but one oddity impressed me in this latest log extract: com.apple.securityd was complaining mightily about a ‘stapled ticket’ in a very old QuickTime extension. Each of these hundreds of entries included one such as:
Error loading /Library/QuickTime/EyeTV MPEG Support.component/Contents/MacOS/EyeTV MPEG Support: dlopen(/Library/QuickTime/EyeTV MPEG Support.component/Contents/MacOS/EyeTV MPEG Support, 0x0106): code signature in (/Library/QuickTime/EyeTV MPEG Support.component/Contents/MacOS/EyeTV MPEG Support) not valid for use in process: mapped file has no cdhash, completely unsigned? Code has to be at least ad-hoc signed.

Some years ago, I used EyeTV with a satellite TV feed, but I hadn’t used that for years. Because the software was old but not included in any of Migration Assistant’s blacklists, the EyeTV support had been migrated from one iMac to the next, and finally to my new iMac Pro. Although it had sat there unused for years, all of a sudden Mojave 10.14.2 had decided to check its code signing, and found it wanting.

Judging by the persistent log activity, this problem over the unsigned QuickTime extension was taking up quite a lot of my Mac’s time and effort shortly after every startup. At the very least it was slowing startup down and diverting attention, when all my Mac should have been doing was completing startup.

I don’t and won’t use commercial ‘app uninstaller’ or housekeeping tools, which so often make a real mess of trying to remove apps and their components. All I did was use Spotlight to find all files and folders with EyeTV in their name, ensuring in its options that it would examine both visible and invisible files, including in system folders.

That enabled me to identify /Library/QuickTime/EyeTV MPEG Support.component and its associated components and put them all in the Trash. They’re gone now, but next time that I start this Mac up I will check the logs again to ensure that nothinng else is causing a similar glitch.

This highlights several points:

Migration Assistant’s blacklist is intended to stop you migrating software which is known to be incompatible, but it doesn’t check for components like this which are old and graunchy and can still slow your Mac down.
macOS is getting better at spotting problems with old, unsigned software.
The unified log may appear forbidding, but it can still be very useful. Just because Console can’t easily browse the log retrospectively doesn’t mean that you can’t do so using other free tools.
You don’t have to understand every entry in the log to make important discoveries.

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1

EcleX on December 18, 2018 at 9:37 pm

Great article. Thanks. It would be even greater if there were applications for:

– List applications that show any kind of error at booting or while using Mac (showing in Console logs, etc).
– Troubleshoot Mac, much as Conflict Catcher did in the past with Mac OS 9.

I know that can be accomplished to some extent inspecting logs as you say, but I meant a true GUI to make it much easier. You know, the Mac way!

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- 2
  
  hoakley on December 18, 2018 at 11:06 pm
  
  Thank you.
  There is a GUI to the unified log: my Consolation 3, which is what I use most days. The snag is that analysing log contents automatically is not easy. If you care to look at the log in the minute or so after startup, there are thousands of errors being reported. Humans can readily pick out patterns which can be very hard to detect robustly using automated methods.
  I am working on a new log browser which will be a better platform for this type of feature. But I need time!
  Conflict Catcher worked wonderfully when the Mac was so much simpler. Even with heavy ML, I don’t see anything approaching it now. The other thing is that these sorts of tools are not commercially viable. I don’t know of any GUI log browser beyond Consolation and Apple’s impotent Console, as there’s no money to be made from such a product.
  Howard.
  
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3

EcleX on December 19, 2018 at 8:22 am

Do you mean machine learning by ML? Perhaps that could be accomplished with new developments on Artificial Intelligence (AI). That would be awesome when computers finally reach the final frontier of simulating human brain and save us time and effort. That will be the next computing revolution.

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- 4
  
  hoakley on December 19, 2018 at 2:11 pm
  
  Yes. I did some AI research back in the 90s (on genetic programming) and am very familiar with its limitations. However there are a lot more tools around – and macOS Mojave is particularly rich in support. I’m not convinced that there has been a revolution in the last few years; current AI/ML is still struggling with the same thorny problems which we tried to tackle in the mid 90s. But it’s a very good way to sell ordinary people technology!
  Howard.
  
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5

EcleX on December 20, 2018 at 5:53 am

A bit off-topic, but related to AI, is there an application to count the number of nodes in an image (jpg, png, pptx, etc) of a mind map? We use them at University, and one way to score them is manually counting its nodes. That is really tedious, error-prone and time consuming, mostly when doing it for hundreds of large mind maps with many hundreds of nodes each. I guess an application could do it in seconds or minutes instead of days of hard manual work as we do it now.

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- 6
  
  hoakley on December 20, 2018 at 6:10 am
  
  In image-based (pixel) graphics files, that is almost impossible to do accurately.
  The best way to tackle this would be to require the mind maps in a standard vector-based, or even better app-based, format. I suspect that most of the better apps to create mind maps should offer this as a feature.
  But trying to trace structures like these in an image is very very hard, and prone to serious error.
  Howard.
  
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7

EcleX on December 20, 2018 at 9:16 pm

Thanks. They are in different formats like JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX, etc, Well, I thought that it was an almost trivial thing, as it is for humans. For instance, 3 nodes here:

· – · – ·

and five here (dots represent actual content like text boxes):

·
|
· – · – ·
|
·

Even a 4-year old kid could count mind map nodes. The problem is that it get tedious –and error prone– with hundreds of nodes on hundreds of mind maps.

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- 8
  
  hoakley on December 20, 2018 at 11:36 pm
  
  Yes – it seems odd. But that 4 year-old child also has a better understanding of language and how to communicate using it, can analyse and respond to changes in their visual environment far better, and can appreciate music much better than any computer can.
  You see those patterns with a hierarchy of lines and nodes. You can tell when lines cross other lines or nodes without connecting to them. It is amazingly difficult for software which is working with a pixel image to even get that far.
  Howard.
  
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9

EcleX on December 20, 2018 at 9:17 pm

Oops! I tried to draw a kind of cross for the five-node mind map above, but this web form removed spaces on the left!

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10

Housekeeping for speed and profit – The Eclectic Light Company – Jerry's Mac Blog on December 21, 2018 at 7:38 pm

[…] Source: Housekeeping for speed and profit – The Eclectic Light Company […]

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