disk warrior oddity
 

i found something weird when using disk warrior 3.0 in 10.2.6.

in the automatic diagnostics section under hardware the check for malfunction drop down menu lists only unsanity apps. it lists fruitmenu.ape, cleardock.ape and windowshade.ape. weird? i just noticed it and i know there were different options the last time i checked a couple of weeks ago. i think a sendmail option? not sure...

trashing the prefs didn't help, too lazy to reinstall right now, but any suggestions on how this happended would be cool. i contacted alsoft and they never responded to me.

thanks

[ hardware ] / automatic diagnostics \

check for malfunction: ( option )

the options here should be:

hourly
daily
weekly

ahh, thats what was there last time i checked! now only the .ape apps i mentioned.

why is this happening? it's really bugging me.

The obvious answer seems to be:
- it's happening due to the use of the Insanity hack.
And so the obvious fix is to uninstall that hack. I wouldn't expect Alsoft to support systems with third-party system-software modifications.

unsanity apps have a bad habbit of screwing things up. I pretty much only use the shadowkiller, and that stops running the moment you launch it so it can't really interfere with anything.
I think the post above mine is right, get rid of the unsanity and try again..... or try running diskwarriro from cd and see if it fixes things.

thanks all!

I just set DW to check hardware weekly. I assume that's a good thing to do.

I have APEs for clear dock and Ichat. If they mess with my DW I guess I will sacrifice them.

Strictly speaking APE doesn't modify the system software, rather it patches apps on the fly. I guess you might want to argue that this doesn't make much of a difference though ;)

It installs a kernel extension which has system-wide effects. (As opposed to something which merely supplies a driver for a mouse, etc.) That is what I refer to (in a short-hand way) as a "system-software modification".

Re: disk warrior oddity
 

APE v1.3 ?

yes, its v1.3

I realise you know way more about the guts of OS X than I do but I thought that APE ran the aped process which, while it is system wide, is not the same thing as a kernel extension (kextstat doesn't reference anything to do with APE). I'm not disagreeing that it can mess with your system but just want to get my head straight about exactly how it works and what it is.

it's not causing problems for me, not that i'm aware of anyway. i like my uninsanity stuff, and i think i can deal with that. diskwarrior checks my drives weekely also and according to the system logs, it's doing just that.

the only thing that appears to be happening with diskwarrior is when running top -u -s3 20, i find that dw is pid 583 and when i quit, it says in the console:

sh: kill: (600) - No such process
DiskWarrior App: shell: 256

just found it weird...

If your APE for iChat is for the multiple lines during text input, you can get rid of that one. The new iChat does it automatically.

I chat message window APE
 

Thanks. That's good news.

alsoft just got back to me, this is what they had to say:

This is a problem with Unsanity product not DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior is
calling its own resource to populate the menu and your Unsanity product
is mucking with this resource. You may try contacting folks at Unsanity
and see if they can resolve this.

I'm running ClearDock and WindowShade, but not FruitMenu, and I don't have this problem. Try disabling FruitMenu and see whether the problem persists.

disabling application enhancer elimates the problem, disk warrior sucessfully displayed daily, monthy, and weekly, huh...

APE mechanism
 

Okay, I have to retract what I said above about APE installing a kernel extension. I thought I remembered that was how it worked but now that I have gone and read more about it I see that I was wrong.

It does indeed work by means of a daemon (aped) that watches for application launches and modifies the memory space of a newly launched app to include the "application enhancement" code. Sorry to have been misleading in my earlier statement. But I would still call it a "system-software modification" since it functions as if it were part of the system software.

Re: APE mechanism
 

Perhaps this is just an echo of the good old/bad old days of OS 9 when there were plenty of things that did directly modify the system-software. I suppose I was just quibbling over your terminology; i.e. APE doesn't modify system-software, it modifies apps as they launch thereby acting as though it were a part of the system. The distinction probably isn't all that important as the end result is the same.

Thanks, Bustthis, for bringing this issue to light. Would any of you commenters have any thoughts on this related thread?