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Apple have been providing the ability to securely encrypt your home directory for the last few versions of OS X. The cute name they have for this is FileVault . It’s largely a transparent business, and perhaps useful to have if your data might be found lying around somewhere, so I tend to enable it for portables.

It’s not entirely invisible. During use, your home directory changes to a spiffy modified icon. Logging in, and working with very large files seems to be slightly slower, and it prompts you to reclaim space on logout, which can take quite a while if you’ve recently re-organised a lot of data. And there’s a few more obscure differences that might show up. I was recently bitten by one of these, and perhaps it’s a testament to how seamlessly FileVault is slotted into the system in that it took me a little while to figure out what was going on.

I’d been playing around with some toy code for some co-operating daemons, and I was tweaking a section that might open some files read-write, to check that they would work with minimal access permissions. On a mac I tend to do all my development work inside my home directory, much like I do everything else. So I changed the ownership of my exectuable to a dummy user, enabled the set-user-id bit, locked down my data file’s permissions, and ran the tests. I wasn’t particularly suprised when it failed with access errors. First pass, my code, bound to be wrong.

I double checked the permissions and ownership, files owner only, process owned by the right uid, setuid bit on. I read the man pages for chmod and chown again. Still no joy. I fished out a copy of APUE and wrote the simplest possible test case. It still wouldn’t work. Whatever sequence of library or system calls I tried, the effective user id of the subsequent process was always me.

After a while I figured it out. When you enable FileVault for a user account, your home directory has a binary file called yourloginname .sparseimage within it. This is your FileVault home directory, in the form of a sparse encrypted disk image. When you login to your account, this image file is transparently mounted under $HOME, using the OS X disk image framework. When you logout, it’s unmounted again. You can manually mount it from a shell using the hdiutil tool like this

hdiutil -stdinpass -mountpoint /Users/foo /Users/foo/foo.sparseimage

You’ll get a prompt for the image password, which will be the same as the UNIX account password. You need to type the null at the end of the password, which you can do with C-@ , before you hit return. If you type mount you’ll see the disk image listed in the mount list. You will also notice the default options for disk image attachments is to mount them with the nosuid attribute. This causes OS X to silently disregard any set-user-id attributes of files within the filesystem. This makes a lot of sense as a security measure, and is commnly used for filesystems on removable media. You don’t want foreign filesystems introducing set-user-id binaries into your local filesystem on an ad-hoc basis as they are mounted.

Your own securely encrypted home directory doesn’t really represent a similar security risk, especially if you’re already the main administration account for your mac, and so the precaution seems less useful here. I wondered if it was a deliberate policy decision, or a side effect of the disk image framework. I’m not sure if you can mount disk images without nosuid at all.

When manually mounting filesystems, nosuid is an optional property supplied to the mount command. It seems like it ought to be possible therefore to mount disk images without the nosuid attribute being passed through to mount , but I haven’t yet managed to find a way to influence the mount options passed from hdiutil . Nor have I found where the magical FileVault attach happens, or if there is any way to influence it’s settings. In practice, it doesn’t really matter much, as set-user-id binaries have a very limited use, and probably shouldn’t be encouraged to proliferate.

A week later, I phoned back as suggested. I used the number from the apple store shipment tracking form, as before. I did as I had been told, and read out my incident number to the representative who answered This time, the Apple Store support chap pointed out I was dialling the wrong number for technical support, before offering to transfer me to the right department.

Immediate connect. A reasurring Irish accent enunciating an Applecare support menu. I select ‘other’. Less than five minutes on hold. Nice jazz at a reasonable volume, rather than distorted techno-metal. A friendly, intelligible voice takes the call, takes my case number, and then puts me on wait for another couple of minutes while he digs out the details.

He returns to confirm everything I’d managed to deduce from the UPS number. An order had been created with UPS, and they’d been credited, but no shipment collection had ever been made. He’s checked with the dispatch team, and the battery order is there, ready to go. He’ll chase it up with UPS, and anticipates it should be delivered to me within a couple of days. I explain about the useless tracking number on my battery program confirmation email, and he tells me that these are from an entirely separate order numbering systems to the store, you need to phone technical support. I grumble a bit about the wait time, he’s very apologetic.

This is the Apple support I’m used to. Ok, someone screwed up, but they’re on to it, and it didn’t take more than ten minutes of my time to let them know. Why so different from last week’s call center hell ? My best guess is that it has to be the valid incident case number. Presumably, if you hand out Applecare credentials or a case number early in the chain you get fast-tracked to a higher tier of support. A further conclusion to draw; for Apple laptops, which in my experience are more likely to feature technical problems than their desktop machines, Applecare should probably be considered a mandatory part of the purchase cost.

There’s a small, persistent chorus of dissent that echoes around the net, a companion to the peculiar cult of Apple worship that purchasing a Macintosh computer seems to bring out in some consumers. “Apple computers are all very nice”, it goes ” but they’re overpriced, and tend to be unreliable” . I’m not really sure how much truth there is to it, but like anything repeated more than three times on slashdot , it’s approached the state of a received wisdom amongst that particular strain of technophiliac. Nerds love dogma.

It’s not a very significantly-sized sample, but I have owned/managed six modern Macintosh systems, and my strike rate for hardware problems is exactly 50%. Perhaps interestingly, it’s been entirely limited to the notebooks. I’m not sure if this spells anything significant itself. I can certainly see how portable computers might undergo more stress as part of their normal wear and tear. One trend I am getting a little tired of is what seems to me to be the plummeting standards of product support at Apple.

My powerbook, the same one that originally started me thinking about questionable standards of support , is one of the lucky models that was sold with a battery that’s subject to a recent safety recall . There’s been a lot of this happening recently, to various brands of laptop . From what I’ve read, it’s all down to contamination in the cells, a flaw at the factory manufacturing the base cells that go into Lithium-Ion batteries. This contaminant means the batteries can get too hot in operation, and when hot, potentially catch fire or explode. The cells in question were produced by Sony for assembly into laptop battery packs for various other computer brands. In fact, Apple seemed to be making a point of this, highlighting the fact that the batteries were made by Sony, and mentioning in a subsequent press release that Sony would be picking up the tab for the free replacement program Apple have set up to handle the recall.

So I typed in my serial numbers into the web form, and sure enough my battery was a dud. I was advised to stop using it immediately, and wait for a free replacement. This might take from four to six weeks to ship. This means my portable won’t be very portable for a month or so, which is irritating. On the other hand, I’m going to get a factory new battery, which will probably have a larger charge capacity than my worn in one. Also I didn’t catch fire or explode. Overall, a net positive I think, with some minor inconvenience.

Nine weeks later, there’s been absolutely no sign of this replacement battery. I’ve been getting progressively more twitchy about this after the minimal four-week period passed. I’ve got a confirmation email about the transaction with a tracking number, which fails to work in their online order tracking system. I don’t ever seem to have much luck with Apple store shipments. This one is now well overdue, and I realise I’m going to have to give them a call to try and chase it up. I’m reluctant, remembering how terrible the last session was, but I’m getting increasingly suspicious that something’s gone wrong with the process, and I’ve had a functionally restricted computer for the past two months now.

So I make the call to the support number offered on the useless web tracking form. The robot reads out a menu, with an option for tracking orders or shipments. I press the indicated number. A robot tells me to use the web tracking form, and hangs up on me. Irritated, I redial, and this time wait and choose the ‘Other enquiries’ option. Five minutes or so on hold and I get picked up. Heavy accented English once again, perhaps an off-shore call centre. I explain I’m trying to track a battery replacement for a powerbook G4. I’m asked if I have a reference number. I give him the tracking number I was originally sent by the email robot. There’s a short pause while he does his thing with the number. He asks ‘Is this a battery replacement?’, sounding a little suprised. Declining to point out that I’ve already explained that it is, I agree. He’ll have to transfer me to another department.

Forty-five minutes on hold. Forty-five minutes of obnoxious pop music, too loud for the phone, distorting. So loud I have to hold the receiver a few inches away from my face. Every couple of minutes the volume drops and a voice starts speaking, so I’m compelled to listen closely once more in case it’s a pickup. It’s a robot, telling me a representative will be answering as soon as possible. And then the music blasts in again, deafening. These call queues are a horrible variant on the traditional bus-stop dilemma. Hang up after twenty minutes? What if the mean queue time is twenty-five, and I’m only a few minutes from an answer? I have to make the call, it’s my only realistic avenue of support. What if the next time it’s a forty minute average wait ? Better to stay on the line.

At the end of this ordeal, I’m answered by a female, again an accent, sounds off-shore. She explains helpfully that I’m through to iPod support, asks about the nature of my problem. I’m so stunned I have to ask her to repeat this. She confirms it’s iPod support. I manage to say something about having been put through to the wrong department by the previous operative, but I’m almost lost for words. I think my mood must be detectable from my voice, because she volunteers to see what she can do, referencing other departments. I hand over my details, including all the serial numbers, and the useless tracking number. I’m put on hold for another ten minutes while she looks things up. Thankfully this time it’s just quiet elevator muzak. Not often you find yourself grateful for bland piped music.

She returns with a UPS tracking reference. It doesn’t elucidate any detail other than the information that it was billed and shipped on the 20th of September, with a destination of Bristol, UK. This seems likely to be mine. She tells me that she will escalate this incident, gives me a ticket number, and tells me to call back in a week if it hasn’t fixed itself.

Overall I find this to be a fairly shocking standard of product support. I’m a moderately competent computer user, I wouldn’t bother to trouble the support line for usage or software problems, or anything self inflicted. In all cases I’m calling because I’ve purchased an expensive piece of consumer electronics that has proven to be mechanically faulty as supplied. I can accept that accidents and mistakes can occur, but I’m not sure it makes economic sense to keep purchasing products from a source that seems to guarantee I’ll be spending months waiting for inevitable faults to be corrected (taking into account the previous hardware fault, this powerbook will now have had fifteen-plus weeks of outage/reduced functionality), and spending multiple hours chasing up the state of these orders and repairs.

Another interesting data point is that the first two support incidents I ever reported to Apple were handled magnificently, super friendly support lines, and whizzy next day turnaround on replacements and repairs. Whereas currently, the root of the trouble I’m getting is entirely down to customer service, which although it’s polite, and ultimately helpful, is too unresponsive, and close to incompetent. I’ve got two working theories as to what has changed.

• At the time they were impressing me with customer service, I had valid Applecare for one of the Macintoshes in the house. Perhaps you get a better tier of support if you’re a registered Applecare customer. Unfortunately the only way I can test this hypothesis is by buying another Macintosh, and buying some Applecare, and waiting for a fault, or faking one for test purposes. This plan is both expensive, and perhaps morally dubious.

• Now that Apple have become a mainstream consumer electronics company, selling iTunes and iPods to the Dixons crowd, they’ve had to dramatically streamline their support costs in order to scale to this market size.

Either way, I’m slightly ticked off. I think Apple products are good value for what they offer. I’m a big fan of the software. In particular, I think the modern Mac OS represents the least irritating computer environment I’ve worked in yet. I appreciate that sounds like faint praise, but I think it’s quite a measure of acheivement. I’ve been working with software and computers long enough now, that I appreciate that most of the skill in system design is centered in, for want of a better term, the process of suck-removal . I really appreciate that all the NeXT technologies and principles still have a viable platform, almost twenty years after their inception.

The trouble I have is that commiting oneself to using Macintosh means a commitment to a single supplier. Nobody likes feeling like they’re being peddled a lower quality deal because of a vendor-contrived platform lock-in. The increasingly fashionable anti-Windows grumbling, that Apple are cheeky enough to allude to in their current television advertising , is rooted in a similar sentiment, borne of a peculiar, voluntary form of modern serfdom; indenture to an unsatisfactory software platform in return for maintaining compatability with the status quo. There would be a certain kind of irony in Apple managing to parallel this antagonism by fixing the software, but in turn locking you to a hardware promise they’re not capable of delivering. I wonder how I’ll be feeling about this after the suggested week’s wait.

I recently spent the best part of a weekend, back down in ‘astings . As I’ve wandered about over the years, I’ve amassed a credible shortlist of candidates, but this history-rich, cash-poor, coastal resort will always have the best claim for being my home town.

It’s had a rough ride over the years. The BBC online magazine recently ran an umbrella feature on the decline and supposed renaissance of the English seaside holiday. In one of these pieces , they revealed that recently, a government select comittee re-examining statistics from the last decade was suprised to find some of the most disadvantaged areas of the U.K. are outside of the urban centres, in the former coastal resorts. A ‘ring of deprivation all around the coast’. It was no surprise to me.

Living there throughout the 80s, I remember some grim times, routine visits to the job centre to peer at the same handful of sparsely placed little cards , infrequently rotated. Scraping together the money to keep a roof over your head and food to eat, with scant prospects and ambitions limited to either things to do on the coming weekend, or ultimately leaving the town somehow, never to return.

This is not to say that times were unequivocally harsh and miserablist. Balanced against this sour picture there are positive memories of some of the usual teenage joys of hormones, beer, cars and guitars, 8-bit computers and tabletop gaming, and other nerdly trappings. As a background setting, Hastings is peerless in its own way; blessed with character, steeped in a personality that ranges from 1066-and-all-that through the genteel Victorian sea-side craze and the post-war bucket and spade holidays, all of this imprinted wherever you look. There’s also a lot to be said for living through the glory days of the coin-op video game in a seaside town crammed with amusement arcades, if you like that sort of thing. And I do.

So my feelings about the place have always been ambivalent. The locals love to talk about a curse that dooms all of those born there to perpetually return. Unfortunately for me, I was born there, and laughably enough I do still feel compelled to return periodically. And here I am again, thirty-five years later.

To my eyes, the old pile has definitely taken a turn for the better. There’s been talk about regeneration grants , from Europe, and new injections of assistance from government schemes, and of course we’re now looking at the product of a few years of national economic upswing, after a long spell of those bleaker times. For once, I seem to have found a pleasant hotel to stay in. After a comfortable night’s sleep, I sallied forth, “ Forever Changes ” playing on the iPod, intending both to revel in some nostalgia, and get the measure of the changes, and a feel for the twenty-first century Hastings.

I made my way down through Burton’s marvellous St Leonards , now delapidated, once a splendid blooming of the middle class Victorian fad for the coast. Most of the crumbling mansions are now carved up into ’studio apartments’, or have been converted into residential care homes. Here too though, there were tangible signs of regeneration. Lanes that were once contiguous rows of empty, boarded or charity shops now seemed to be busy general stores, and bric-a-brac markets. The public gardens well maintained and colourfully planted, and the seafront properties mostly tidied and painted.

Moving down onto the seafront you step through time, from the height of Victorian pomp, to pre-war modernism , with the ill-placed, looming, shiplike Marine Court , once the tallest residential building in the U.K., and the peculiar, concrete covered-promenade decorated with pieces of reclaimed, coloured glass, locally known as ‘Bottle alley’ that runs the entirety of the sea-front, from St Leonards-on-sea to Hastings proper, linking Warrior Square gardens to Hastings Pier.

I love English pleasure piers. Much like the ’seaside resort’, piers are a Victorian invention, and they combine some of their favourite fads in one slightly bizarre, folly; cast-iron engineering along with proximity to to sea air. Most of the sensible literature tries to explain away the pier as a straightforward solution to the enormous tidal range of the British coast. A genteel promenade right alongside the briny, any time of day or season. I prefer to think of them as the purest distilation of Victorian enthusiasm and hubris. A product of the same mindset as Isambard Brunel’s unfeasibly tall top hat . A wondrous long iron bridge! That leads to nowhere! And on the end we shall place a music-hall and several gin-palaces!

Hastings pier is a good all rounder. It owns no records for length, height, age or feature. It’s nicely proportioned, cast iron and wood, with a good mixture of external promenades, and internal structures, observation and fishing decks. Amusements, shops and eateries, arcades, the usual seaside fare. It’s also now closed to the public, as it’s collapsing under its own weight into the sea.

Piers are essentially self-destructive. That exuberant pointlessness, the folly that gives me such joy to contemplate, is also centered about this fact; a large, turbulent body of salted water with shifting, sandy foundations is a tricky place to build a permanent structure. Especially made out of iron which will corrode, and wood which will rot. A bridge thus constructed might survive, but bridges are useful, and can justify the cost of their upkeep. Not so the pier. In the twenty-first century, a sea-bridge to nowhere is insufficiently spectacular in itself to be similarly cost-effective. And so we’ve been slowly losing our pleasure piers as they slip away into decline. Many of them were closed down or truncated in the second World War, mined and bisected under fear of invasion. They’re an accident-prone lot, succumbing not only to freak weather, but collisions with boats, and prone to burning down in fires, which seems a curious thing until you remember all the timber and decking.

Hastings pier has always seemed more resiliant than many. As shabby as the rest of its environs for as long as I’ve known it, run-down but seemingly always sturdy and well anchored right in the heart of what can be quite spectacularly turbulent and stormy coasts. The last time I’d been down for a flying visit, it had recently re-opened, and was celebrating its transfer into private hands, sold by the council for a new lease of life as a commercial enterprise. It can’t have gone very well, as only a few years later, it’s all boarded off and shutdown as structurally unsafe. There’s a definite sag to the last third of its length that you can detect with the naked eye.

I doubt that this will be the immediate end of it. There’ll be the usual charity concern, or local pressure groups. Perhaps a council buy-back, perhaps another optimistic enterprise will snap it up derelict and attempt to make it a going concern. Maybe some lottery money will be secured, perhaps listed status. Or maybe it will just fall victim to some violent seasonal weather, and stand for decades more as a collapsing derelict ghost, much like the West Brighton pier . It’s is hard to think of any useful future for these old things, they’re dead ends in more than just the literal sense.

Lucky for me I never won big on the lottery or made any of those dotcom millions. If I had, I’d probably have bought the lovely, stupid thing myself.

The show I waited ten years for. Back in 1997, excited by their then recent ‘Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot’ album I bought tickets to see Sparklehorse at the Fleece and Firkin . Me being me, it wasn’t until a couple of days after the show that I noticed that I’d forgotten to go. Bummer.

Sparklehorse is effectively a one man band, Mark Linkous accompanied and augmented by associate musicians. The sound is hard to describe. All the albums I have to date ( including the brand new ‘Dreamt For Light Years In the Belly Of A Mountain’ , they’re good at wordy titles ) are clearly drawn from the same well, somewhere between lo-fi americana and the Beatles’ ‘White’ album . There might be banjo. It’s intricately put together work, great for headphones, ranging from engagingly delicate and fragile, to loud and clanging, with a rich variety of timbre and texture, speech fragments and radio static popping in and out on occasion. The sort of records that really reward repeat listening. It’s all stitched together with excellent effected and distorted vocals and guitar.

This time around, I remembered to go. An unfortunately forgettable support act aside, it was an excellent night. The start wasn’t promising. Mark ( surprisingly tall ) was striding around the bar beforehand, looking quite worried, and the opening song crashed ruefully to a halt and had to be restarted. Once they hit their stride it was fine Some of the more delicate songs seemed doomed to fall to pieces at any moment, but this effectively conveyed some of the woozy, broken-radio flavour of the original recordings. It was a rich set, that covered all the back catalogue evenly, as well as the new release. A very partisan crowd, with lots of requests shouted, and audience singalongs cheerfully encouraged from the stage.

The only disappointment for me was the lack of any merchandising. I did sign up an email address with a marketing type who seemed to be doling out promotional badge packs, but he’d run out. Well, I suppose my T-shirt drawer is a little overful. I’d also have really liked to hear them play ‘Cow’. Still, I’m glad to say there was no anticlimax, even after such a ridiculously long wait. Hopefully it won’t be another five years between albums.