Pervasive Code

I own a 2.16GHz MacBook Pro, which is a little over 3 years old. Over the last year I’ve had an odd problem with it, which has gotten severe in the last few weeks. The problem was that it would suddenly disable the Ethernet port and the USB ports, disconnecting mounted disks and freezing networked services. The only workaround was to reboot or sleep/wake. I finally found the cause and fixed it last week. My guess is that pretty much all MacBook Pros of similar age and design will develop this problem, so read on if you have a similar issue.
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Pretty much every Unix user knows about the kill command, and most know about ‘kill -KILL’ aka ‘kill -9′.

But do you know about kill -STOP and kill -CONT?
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Nokogiri on a standard installation of Leopard is complain-y about a couple of old libraries:

“HI. You’re using libxml2 version 2.6.16 which is over 4 years old and has plenty of bugs. We suggest that for maximum HTML/XML parsing pleasure, you upgrade your version of libxml2 and re-install nokogiri. If you like using libxml2 version 2.6.16, but don’t like this warning, please define the constant I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 before requring nokogiri.”

Aaron Kalin figured out how to fix this if you’re installing nokogiri as a system gem, but I want to use Bundler and keep my system gems down to the bare minimum. I figured out how to do this under Bundler 0.8.5.
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A year and a half ago I installed the excellent PostgreSQL via MacPorts, and had to create a user account manually. Annoyingly, this postgres user shows up in the GUI login screen and Fast User Switching menu under Leopard. I found a fix today.
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I just brought a new project into the world of autotest. I’m not using the Leopard FSEvents “fix” because it’s not necessary (note the sleep and add_exception calls below). I am using the fun and helpful sound plugin, but not the playlist version of that plugin. Here’s my .autotest file.
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