My Macbook crashed...

Came back to it and the screensaver was motionless, had to use the power button to force a restart.

Had a look in the system log, nothing useful in there apart from

Apr 22 17:04:26 localhost DirectoryService[11]: Improper shutdown detected

which I already knew .

Just one of those things... but at the end there was also

Apr 22 17:05:28 bill-fords-macbook SyncServer[117]: SyncServer: Truth vacuumed. Next vacuum date 2009-05-06 17:05:28 +0100

What's "truth vacuuming"?

I have no idea, but it sounds like something a sinister government would do!

The Truth is out there

There is, however, a small possibility it will need some interpreting.

Anything here http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8...

In reply to a post by ian_c:

The Truth is out there

There is, however, a small possibility it will need some interpreting.

Thanks... I think

A site search for "vacuum" brought up quite a bit, which I understood even less

That's (marginally!) more comprehensible, though I didn't follow up all the links

Sounds like sort of sanity check, so I'll ignore it.

It would be nice if all error messages were descriptive. May not have to pass the Plain English crystal mark test, but something that describes the error in a useful, concise and helpful way would be good.

I agree, but to be fair I don't think it's an error message, just a log of something that was performed during boot-up.

And I have a horrible suspicion that the programmer thought it was fully informative

Give me 5 minutes with him, and he'll know what "fully informative" means...

What's "truth vacuuming"?

Party political rhetoric?

Truth Database = a kind of database/list used by Cocoa technologies, in this case I think by various apps synching with MobileMe and possibly even by Time machine.

Vacuuming may relate to a cleanup or reading process therefore. These developers and their imaginations!

I think.

Edited by deleted (Thu 23-Apr-09 18:21:42)

Certainly in other databases (such as Postgresql) vacuuming is a process of cleaning the database.

A bit more info: when you update (or delete) an entry in a postgresql table it doesn't actually update it, a copy is made and the change made to the copy, so you still have the old row, this means you can roll back if you need to. The problem with this approach is that over time your database can get much bigger than the amount of data in it would suggest. Vacuuming is the process of removing the old rows so that only the most recent commited changes exist. There are a few other reasons to vacuume but this is the main one in my experience.

Woke up this morning and opened MacBook (leave on standby) and all that happened was the screen flashed. Had to hard reboot. No impressive. Funny thing is I don't even have any interesting apps install for it to mess up like that!

My iMac occasionally does that when it comes out of display sleep. I've found that moving the mouse to the screen saver hot corner then out again will usually get it back, though it often needs two or three attempts before there's no display corruption.

Not 100% sure, but I think it's only happened since one of the early Leopard updates.