Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!cooper!dasys1!alexis From: alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Extremely weird behavior by Macintosh (computer bites dog :-) Message-ID: <6555@dasys1.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 88 10:48:04 GMT Reply-To: alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) Lines: 77 No, my Mac didn't actually bite a dog. But even so, this is probably the strangest thing I've ever see a Mac do. If any of you have any idea what might have happended, I'd love to know. A freind of mine came in from Israel with the latest Israeli system software. It's a fairly standard system- finder 5.5 with system 4.1.1 (which I have never heard of, but I would guess is like 4.1, but localized in some fashion). I have never seen a Mac doing non-Roman languages before and I was really impressed. My reading knowledge of hebrew is fairly non-existant, but just remembering the menu positions in the Finder was sufficient to get around. Minor Weirdness #1: I had a great deal of difficulty making his system the startup system on my hard disk. I copied it over, removed the finder from MY s.f., removed both the finder and system from his s.f. and then put them right back. This should have made his s.f. the blessed folder, but it didn't. I had to remove both the finder and System from mine, then it worked. Minor Weirdness #2: While trying to switch systems, I tried to cross boot to his s.f., and even though his finder was an earlier version than mine, it successfully switched. Major Weirdness #1: Even though this switch seemed to be successful (it cleared the screen, put the program name ["Finder"] in the menu bar, accessed the disk, redrew the desktop), I was STILL IN FINDER 6.0! That was MY finder, the one already running! How could that be? Ultra-Wierdness: After I got his s.f. to be the blessed folder I rebooted. Remember, his system is 4.1.1, and multifinder doesn't yet work with the Hebrew System. So the Mac starts up, and it show the Hebrew version of "Welcome To Macintosh." At this point, I'm clearly in his system. What's more, I'm just as clearly NOT in my system folder because none of my INITs loaded. Then his Finder comes up. It works fine. In fact everything is working fine, INCLUDING MULTI-FINDER WHICH ISN'T EVEN IN HIS SYSTEM FOLDER!!! And although it WAS running multifinder, the ONLY copy of which was in my original s.f., it DID NOT HAVE DA HANDLER AVAILABLE so I couldn't use DAs. Even granting that it found the multifinder file, why then didn't it find DA Handler??? It's actually amusing to watch a pre-6.0 Finder deal with multifinder. It seems to work fine. The only problem is that it doesn't understand its environment and somehow the cliprect (I think) of the desktop gets messed up by any application which opens windows. So when you switch back to the finder, your windows work, but any icons on the desktop may disappear. It's also sad to see how many applications come so close to being compatible with non-roman systems, only to fail by a hair. Excel, Word, many others- their only failing (on cursory inspection) is that they can't seem to deal with the spacing of non-roman characters. They work fine with the hebrew system. Excel (and FoxBase, too) both use the international sorting conventions in the system file, apparently (although it's also possible that they are just using ASCII values, and the ascii values happen to order properly-- I'll try to check that sometime). Major Weirdness #2: When I got rid of his s.f. and made mine the blessed folder again, the Mac crashed on every re-boot. After some work I discovered that Vaccine 1.0 and On Cue 1.0b5 would both crash the system. Neither of those INITs is faulty, and I replaced them just to be sure. Now On Cue works again, but Vaccine is still dead. Thus it seems to me that On Cue must have been altered some way, since the fresh copy works, and the System File was also altered since Vaccine still dies. The question is how? I never touched any of those files- just moved the System File in and out of its folder a few times. For what it's worth, I'm running s4.2 f6.0 on a Mac II w/4 MB RAM, 80 MB Quantum HD from CMS. MultiFinder always in use, EXCEPT when I'm trying to switch systems as I was. Lots of INITs but none of them had anything to do with tonight's happenings, because they were deactivated the whole time. Any ideas??? ---- Alexis Rosen {allegra,philabs,cmcl2}!phri\ Writing from {harpo,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!alexis The Big Electric Cat {portal,well,sun}!hoptoad/ Public UNIX Best path: uunet!dasys1!alexis