#!/bin/sh
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

Sometimes when things crash on OSX (biggest offenders: Quicktime, and Safari playing flash movies), a program called spindump fires up. This offensive piece of bad engineering thinks its ok to eat 100% of my cpu and thrash my disk just to catalog what happened.

While this is a great idea in theory, and I’m sure it helps Apple engineers debug problems, it does absolutely nothing for me trying to bring my machine into a usable state. Fighting spindump for resources while I try to kill the hanging program is not fun. And many people on online forums seem to think the same. Most of the time I’m barely able to pull up the activity monitor and nuke spindump before it goes off to lala land never to return. Granted things don’t crash often, but when they do there is hell to pay.

Well, we don’t have to submit to this madness anymore. It occurred to me that I could simply rename the spindump executable so that OSX could not find it. So I renamed /usr/sbin/spindump to /usr/sbin/spindump.disabled. I had to wait for my first crash in order to verify that this didn’t break anything, and sure enough I had a quicktime crash just the other night. The system promptly recovered from the crash and did not slow down as previously. Mission accomplished!

Apple is a company built on user experience. But spindump is one of the worst user experience violations in OSX. I know there may not be an easy way around it, but certainly at the very least changing the priority of this process so that it’s not able to eat all system resources may be a step in the right direction. I hope to see an improvement in future versions of the operating system. Until then, spindump is dead to me.

“But wait!” you say. “It’s important to have options for advanced users who want to tweak their environments!” In reality, it’s not as important as you think.

[...] It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren’t the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things.

Compare any given program on Mac,Windows, and Linux. You’ll notice OS X apps tend to have the least user configurable options, but that some of the choices that the user shouldn’t have to care about have been made for him (and usually in the correct direction, with some thought). On Linux you have the ultimate freedom to change how things work but an overwhelming number of options.

The reason I love OS X now is because of how long it takes me to get from a clean Tiger install to a system that is usable for me personally: about 30-60 minutes including installing several utility apps. On windows this process takes one to five hours. On linux, it could take a week. By limiting my options and making some of the choices for me, OS X makes my life easy.

Good user interfaces are the ones that figure out which things the user doesn’t care about. Sometimes as programmers or designers, it’s hard for us to put ourselves in those shoes.

If you’re using these things, you’ll find you’re very rarely reaching for the dock to launch new apps because it’s just much quicker to ctrl+space and type a couple letters. So the trick I found was to get rid of everything from your dock–just drag it off. That way, the dock becomes a taskbar, containing only the applications that are currently running. This makes it easy to navigate between running windows without having to skip over the other dormant stuff that is usually in the dock. So clear off your dock and get more productive right now.

Stay tuned for another post about making memcache-client work properly with Rails fragment caching, because it doesn’t seem to do so out of the box.