2011 27" iMac

I just finished upgrading the Intel processor in my iMac from a 2.7 GHz i5 to a 3.4 GHz i7. There are a few guides on how to tear down your iMac on the web, one of the best courtesy of the folks at iFixit.  Enough has been written about the process that I’m not going to try and write it down here.  However, I will share some lessons learned while doing the upgrade.

• You can’t differentiate between the left and right speaker connections.  Make sure you label at least one of the channels to avoid having to guess.
• Check all the motherboard connections.  After you have reinstalled the display panel (a 15 minute job) is not a good time to realize you didn’t connect a heat sensor or fan.
• Remove and reseat your memory.  It is very tricky to reinstall the motherboard, as the bottom edge needs to fit into four slots.  You will most likely knock your DIMMs around trying to fit the motherboard in.
• Make sure your memory matches, and don’t use cheap bargain memory.  I installed Corsair memory in addition to the stock Apple memory, and had apps crashing continually.  Remove the Apple memory and all is good.
• If you can, wear rubber or surgical gloves when handling the display, otherwise you will have fingerprints behind the glass.

Going from the i5 to the i7 gives a nice boost.  The i5 has a 6 MB cache, while the i7 has 8 MB.  A larger cache does help with the speed, but not as much as multithreading.  The i5 has four cores, each with one thread; the i7 also has four cores, but it has two threads per processor and supports hyper-threading.

I didn’t think that there would be a massive boost, but the multithreading does a great job.  You can see for yourself by viewing these Geekbench benchmarking results:

• 2.7 GHz i5 benchmark results
• 3.4 GHz i7 benchmark results

Well, that’s all for now… I need to go and open my iMac up again.  My optical drive fan is going full speed because I forgot to connect the heat sensor.

Maybe I should follow my own advice!

If you’ve seen TV commercials from Microsoft showing how easy it is to edit, store and share pictures and videos online, then you’ve probably heard of “the cloud”.

What exactly is the cloud? Why would you want to use it? Starting in April, I will be writing a series of articles to answer these questions and more. I will also highlight some of my favorite software that uses “the cloud” to share data between computers and mobile devices.

That’s all for now… visit again in April for new cloudy goodness!

In order to get the blazing internet speeds that Shaw offers, I had to swap out my old Motorola modem and replace it with a new Cisco DPC3825 residential gateway.  The DPC3825 is essentially a DOCSIS modem combined with a wireless router.  For a new Shaw customer, this is a great combination because a separate router purchase isn’t required.  Previous Shaw internet service offerings only provided a cable modem, so a router was a must.

If you added your old router to the DPC3825, you could experience double trouble; not due to any shortcoming of the hardware, but to the way networking works.

Cisco DPC3825 Wifi Router

When you connect a router to a cable modem, the router gets a single external IP address.  The router provides internal IP addresses to any devices connected to it.  When you visit a web site with your browser, the request is sent over the router, through the modem to the server and back to your computer again.  What happens if you have multiple computers on the router?  Remember, the router only has the single external IP address.

This is the magic of network address translation, or NAT.  As data is sent out to the Internet, the router translates the internal IP address to the external address, and keeps track of how to route the incoming data back to the correct device/computer.

Back to the DPC3825… it has a router that is already doing NAT.  Adding an additional router means a double NAT, resulting in the source and destination information being modified twice.  When data is returned from the remote server, the routers generally get confused.  In this situation, you will probably only be able to browse the web, and not much else.

So what was the fix?  It was quite simple, after an hour of web surfing; the DPC3825 had to be placed into bridged mode.  The DPC3825 needed to have firmware downloaded, so the only way to get bridge mode was to contact Shaw and request the change.  Fifteen minutes later and I was up and running with my old router.

So, if you are experiencing the same issue, ask Shaw Customer Service Representatives to make the change for you.

As an aspiring leader, I found the message that it is okay to be wrong particularly interesting.  When applied to a team dynamic, it’s an great approach to working together.  If you can accept that it’s ok to be wrong, and that being wrong doesn’t mean you’re stupid, you can avoid the friction that can often occur in a team.

The King of all Nerds, Bill Gates, was quoted as saying ”It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”  Getting worked up over being wrong often keeps us from an opportunity to learn from failure.  Embracing wrongness is just the first step getting it right next time.

Then again, I could be wrong.

After reviewing logs using the Console app, I determined that it could have been one of two issues. The initial segmentation fault always seemed to occur during initialization for either the Kodak Easyshare drivers or the Dropbox timer.

The Kodak Easyshare drivers have been removed; Dropbox is still running. My second display has been connected via the minidisplay port adapter, and has been running for several days without loss of audio.

Reminds me of Windows… if in doubt, remove the offending drivers!

Update: February 19, 2012

It has been almost two weeks since I removed the Kodak Easyshare drivers, and I have had no trouble with audio at all.  Looks like these Kodak drivers, specifically the AIO 5300 series, should be avoided.

The last few days I have had issues with audio on my iMac. The symptoms were quite odd:

• The volume control on the menu bar is greyed out
• Launching System Preferences and opening the Sound preference panel indicates there is no hardware available
• The entire system ran extremely slow, yet Activity Monitor didn’t show any excessive CPU usage
• Looking in Console revealed a number of System Diagnostic Reports files, labeled coreaudiod_yyyy-mm-dd-hhmmss_localhost.crash
• The System Log Queries in Console contained reports of com.apple.audio.coreaudiod crashing and restarting the process every 10 seconds

There didn’t appear to be any obvious issues to identify in any of these files. In the end, I found a web page (will post when I find it again) that suggested that a corrupted iPhoto library could cause coreaudiod to crash. After deleting the library and restarting, my audio was back. I have since lost audio and restored it following the same procedure.

I am going to continue to update this post as I look for a root cause for the audio/iPhoto issue.

Audio still flaky.  Reviewing Console logs.  First segmentation fault of com.apple.audio.coreaudiod occurs in two places; after starting timer for Dropbox client, and after initializing com.kodak.BonjourAgent for Kodak EasyShare printer.