Archive for July 21, 2010

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The Top Idea in Your Mind

Paul Graham:

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

Rings true.

Interpreting Crash Logs With otx

Karsten Kusche:

So now we have the disassembly of the plugin, but the offsets of the crashlog cannot be found. The offsets produced by otx start at 0×00000f54 and go to 0×000024f3. That’s not nearly close to 0×179d383c. The reason behind that is simple: the plugin’s code is mapped into the memory where the linker things it got some space left. So we need to find out where the plugin was mapped in order to find the right spot in the disassembly.

The stack trace ended up looking funny in the crash log because of double method swizzling. I’ve run into the same issue with SpamSieve’s Apple Mail plug-in. SpamSieve always installs it in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles, but on some Macs another copy is installed in /Library/Mail/Bundles. (No user has admitted to putting it there, and it’s happened enough times that I think there must be some other software moving/copying it there. A mystery.) The plug-in now disables itself if another copy has already been loaded. For this crash, it was evident from the Binary Images section of the crash report what had happened, but it’s good to have otx in your toolbox.