What is up with Mail.app and Exchange?

Posted on 9/21/2012 by Marc

Fired up Mail.app on my work laptop today for the first time in a while.

Outlook 2011, OWA (the Outlook Web interface) and my iPhone all show the same state of my inbox, with a single message in it.

Mail.app shows two messages – the one that the other guys show and one that I filed many hours ago.

Things I tried (all of which failed):

Telling Mail.app to resynchronize
Telling Mail.app to rebuild the mailbox
Restarting Mail.app
Deleting my Exchange account and adding it back (and the rebuilding the mailbox for good measure)
Quitting Mail.app, moving my ~/Library/Mail folder to somewhere else, Start Mail.app, go through the wizard to see up my Exchange account all over again.

Nope. Still shows those blasted two messages. The last one is rather amazing to me. If I moved the folder out of the way, that seems to me like it would be pretty much starting from scratch. If that didn’t work, I can only guess that either the OS is doing some caching that I don’t know about or the message is still on the server and Mail.app is just interpreting the server state didn’t from all the others. Strange.

It still amazes me how much trouble we all have with computers with pretty basic stuff like email, calendars, and addressbooks, and getting it all to sync. I hate crap like this, because it breaks the trust that I have in computers to do the simple stuff for me. But then if I can’t trust it, I don’t know, I might as well go back to pen and paper. Imagine how much time we could free up as a culture if we didn’t have to deal with Exchange, IMAP, ActiveSync, SyncServices, and all of that other crap that sounds nice but then fails in strange ways.

Using TextExpander to expand a sequence of OmniFocus tasks: A failed experiment

Posted on 9/10/2012 by Marc

I recently got turned on to TextExpander by the Mac Power Users podcast.

One of my ideas was to use snippets in OmniFocus to create certain repetitive multi-action sequences. For example, when a project involves emailing someone and then waiting for a reply, it would be nice to type a short abbreviation and then enter a fill-in for the name of the person and then have TextExpander create two actions in OmniFocus; one called “Email ” with a context of “Online” followed by another called “Waiting for reply from ” with a context of “Waiting”. I theorized this should be doable because TextExpander lets you insert key presses like Tab and Enter into snippets.

Well, it didn’t work for me as expected. Strangely, it works with the first action; I get the title and context that I want. For the second action, however, I cannot get it to set the context. No matter how many tabs I insert into my snippet expansion, any text that I try to make it put in the context field of the second task seems to go in the title instead. Strange.

Here is the snippet:

If you get it to work or have any insights, please let me know…

My custom Alfred.app searches

Posted on 9/10/2012 by Marc

I thought others might find a couple of my custom searches and fallback searches for Alfred.app interesting. When I type some text that doesn’t match anything, here’s what I get:

Marc’s Alfred.app custom and fallback searches

The “Jira search” entry searches my company’s local Jira server. You can add one for yourself by clicking this link and editing the URL in Alfred Preferences | Features | Web & URL | Custom Searches (this is in Alfred.app version 1.3.1).

The “OF Inbox” entry uses an omnifocus:// URL to send the text to your OmniFocus Inbox. Here’s a link to add this to your Alfred config.

OS X Lion: Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps

Posted on 8/20/2012 by Marc

I just upgraded my work laptop to Lion recently.

After the reversed scrolling behavior, the next big annoyance was that when I launch apps they open with all of the documents that were open when I quit them. This was particularly noticeable and annoying with Preview.app and Microsoft Word, because I typically open these to quickly look at something and then I quit them.

If you’re wondering how to turn this behavior off, uncheck the box shown below in System Preferences | General | Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps:

OmniFocus extension for PopClip

Posted on 7/24/2012 by Marc

I just hacked together an OmniFocus extension for PopClip

The extension creates a new task with the selected task in the OmniFocus quick entry window. Just a tiny bit of AppleScript.

Installation

Unpack into ~/Library/Application Support/PopClip/Extensions/OmniFocus.popclipext and then open the extension by double-clicking in Finder or using the open command.

PopClip resources

iTerm2: How to unsplit a pane back to a tab or window

Posted on 12/19/2011 by Marc

This morning I accidentally dragged an iTerm2 tab and created a split pane in one of my tabs. I searched for quite a while to find out how to move it back to its own tab. Finally, I found it at http://groups.google.com/group/iterm2-discuss/browse_thread/thread/920ff96f710a0a93:

You can already do this by holding cmd-shift-opt and dragging the pane to a
tab bar or away from any terminal window to create a new window.

Don’t be alarmed by super large VSIZE on OS X

Posted on 12/7/2011 by Marc

(Also at https://github.com/urbancoding/jenx/issues/32)

Don’t freak out too much if 64-bit processes on OS X have a VSIZE of 10 GB or more.

    marca@SCML-MarcA:~$ cat macruby_test.rb 
    print "What's your name? "
    name = gets.chop
    puts "Hi, #{name}!"

    marca@SCML-MarcA:~$ psgrep macruby
    USER    PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
    marca 76551   0.0  0.3 10899176  12272 s004  S+    9:09PM   0:00.06 macruby macruby_test.rb

    marca@SCML-MarcA:~$ top -pid 76551 -l 1 | tail -2
    PID    COMMAND %CPU TIME     #TH #WQ #PORTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD RSIZE VPRVT VSIZE PGRP  PPID  STATE    UID       FAULTS COW  MSGSENT MSGRECV SYSBSD SYSMACH CSW PAGEINS USER 
    76551  macruby 0.0  00:00.06 1   0   40+    131+   5640K+ 15M+  12M+  323M+ 10G+  76551 72846 sleeping 346486362 3266+  189+ 234+    115+    254+   157+    35+ 0       marca

What this shows is a ridiculously simple Ruby program (running under MacRuby) having a VSIZE of 10 GB.

OTOH, Activity Monitor shows up a much more sane “Virtual Mem” of 315.0 MB for this process:

http://cl.ly/3F3N0P2M0l2O3q0b280Y

Also, vmmap seems to indicate that most of the virtual memory comes from “reserved VM address space (unallocated)” and it seems to consider this as unimportant:

    marca@SCML-MarcA:~$ vmmap 76551
    Virtual Memory Map of process 76551 (macruby)
    Output report format:  2.2  -- 64-bit process
    
    ...
    
    ==== Summary for process 76551
    ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=68.5M resident=59.0M(86%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=9792K(14%)
    Writable regions: Total=8.1G written=5068K(0%) resident=5164K(0%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=8.1G(100%)
    
    REGION TYPE                      VIRTUAL
    ===========                      =======
    MALLOC                            286.3M        see MALLOC ZONE table below
    MALLOC (reserved)                   7.8G        reserved VM address space (unallocated)
    ...
    ===========                      =======
    TOTAL                               8.2G
    TOTAL, minus reserved VM space    463.3M

                                         VIRTUAL ALLOCATION      BYTES
    MALLOC ZONE                             SIZE      COUNT  ALLOCATED  % FULL
    ===========                          =======  =========  =========  ======
    auto_zone_0x100bbd000                 256.0M      10635       680K      0%
    DefaultMallocZone_0x100b5b000          29.2M      28569      3207K     10%
    DispatchContinuations_0x100bfe000      1024K          1         32      0%
    ===========                          =======  =========  =========  ======
    TOTAL                                 286.3M      39205      3887K      1%

This issue, by the way, is not specific to MacRuby (my initial suspicion). I saw a similar pattern with Xcode, which also has a VSIZE of around 11 GB. I did not see this pattern with MRI Ruby [ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570)], Mail.app, Finder, iTerm, Alfred, Safari, or mysqld — these apps all have a much lower VSIZE of around 3 or 4 GB each. I have no idea why.

OS X appears to “reserve” a large amount of virtual memory for 64-bit processes, but they are not necessarily using it just because it’s been reserved for them.

Marc Abramowitz

Tag Archives: Mac