After the update to Sierra, every 20 or so minutes a small warning dialog flashes on the screen too fast to read. It is very annoying. I found threads on the Internet about this same thing dating as far back as 2010 and attributing this to the Mac OS Firewall. Does anyone know what is going on?
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Warning dialog flashes too fast to read...
- Thread starter Geko21
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If musings (guesses) count...
Brings to mind one of those malware scams that advises "you are infected..." and then tries to panic the user in to buying a fix, but your firewall is precluding that bogus alert from fully loading.
Indeed it does seem strange than an alert only flashes and does not persist until dismissed.
Caveat: I'm not certain firewalls even work that way. Hopefully others will chime in.
Brings to mind one of those malware scams that advises "you are infected..." and then tries to panic the user in to buying a fix, but your firewall is precluding that bogus alert from fully loading.
Indeed it does seem strange than an alert only flashes and does not persist until dismissed.
Caveat: I'm not certain firewalls even work that way. Hopefully others will chime in.
Was this updating to Sierra or High Sierra?
Is it white text on a black background? Only in the top left of the window? Do you also see a progress bar?
Try running the Sierra install again over your install.
Is it white text on a black background? Only in the top left of the window? Do you also see a progress bar?
Try running the Sierra install again over your install.
You could take your phone and record the screen somewhere around the time that the diaglog flashes and play it back frame-by-frame. Might be worth a try to narrow down the issue.
It is a small white dialog in the center of the screen, with a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark inside it at it's top left corner and some text which is impossible to read at this speed. It is the exact same problem reported HERE - in 2011 (!!!). It started after upgrading from El Cap to the current official Sierra release.
Stalking this thing with a camera is not as easy as it may seem. During the whole day yesterday for example I noticed it no more than 4-5 times. It had appeared many more times, but until one has such problem one does not realize how much time while working on a computer we are actually looking away from the screen. This thing flashes for one 25-th or even one 30-th of a second. It is barely visible, even when you are looking straight at it.
Stalking this thing with a camera is not as easy as it may seem. During the whole day yesterday for example I noticed it no more than 4-5 times. It had appeared many more times, but until one has such problem one does not realize how much time while working on a computer we are actually looking away from the screen. This thing flashes for one 25-th or even one 30-th of a second. It is barely visible, even when you are looking straight at it.
You mean "Set up a high-speed camera to record the screen for hours on end and in the very high likelihood that you miss the dialogue, just go over the footage frame by frame and you will see it"?? All right.... you and I are obviously living in different universes, but in my universe (and I am a professional film maker by the way, and this is one of the production studio's Mac's I am talking about) this would be my very last resort. My first line of action would involve something like asking on a Mac forum if someone has experienced something similar. Especially since I have managed to find a description of what seems to be the exact same Mac bug from years ago. Sadly the solution posted there does not seem to work anymore... Anyway, thanks for your suggestion. I would reinstall the OS 10 times before making someone here spend a week to go over hours of 60fps footage (it has to be at least this high) to find this pop-up. For those who are not into the production business maybe it is hard to understand, but going over ONE hour of such footage frame by frame would take a very well trained video editor about 60 hours to do, and this is at a pace (1fps) which can be maintained realistically for no more than 20 minutes. After that the likelihood of missing the needed frame, even if it is there, will reach 90+% very fast and the effort will become totally futile. In short - this will not work.
You don't need a high speed camera to capture it, probably a camera phone will be fine such as an iPhone. Be creative. Find a way to prop up the height of the phone, maybe some books. Turn on the video recorder for an hour and walk away. Go eat dinner. After an hour stop the recording. Now step through the video. Just because you can't read the text fast enough does not mean a phone camera running video can't catch it. Phone video recorders are pretty good these days. This is what I would attempt to do. Not a lot of effort and you don't need to hire anyone to try.
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I told you I work in the film industry and that this is a studio mac and you keep explaining me about iPhone cameras and popping it with some books, really? Jeez... No, your method will not work. No, an ordinary camera won't catch it. No, an iPhone camera can't record long enough in hi speed. Yes, one needs a high speed camera - my eyes are very well trained as far as film/video is concerned and these flashes are on par with subliminals at 30fps (do you even know what this is?). This means that we technically have to go to 60fps to be certain to catch them. One hour of such footage will contain 216 000 individual frames. And no, these won't be static frames, as no one knows what triggers this behavior, as it happens while people are working on the machines. So we won't able to use tools to automatically catch changes. Have you ever in your life been able to go through two hundred thousand video frames manually? One hundred thousand? One thousand? And, no, I don't need to hire anyone to do that - I can put the whole studio working on this if I want to. I won't of course, it's ridiculous.
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If you want to know what is going on than it would be helpful to know what the pop says to posdibily identify where it might be coming from. No reason to be rude. And no I am not a kid.
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There was a suggestion to check the Console for reports from the approximate time that you see that message flash past.
Even if you don't see the message long enough to read (other than some mental flash trick) the message might be echoed in the logs. System.log would be a good place to start, but could also be related to whatever app you might have running at that moment.
And --- not every event gets logged, so good luck even on that quest into the logs.
Even if you don't see the message long enough to read (other than some mental flash trick) the message might be echoed in the logs. System.log would be a good place to start, but could also be related to whatever app you might have running at that moment.
And --- not every event gets logged, so good luck even on that quest into the logs.
Thanks a lot for that. I did check the log file. Very strange things there but I am not sure I can pinpoint the issue. There is one reoccurring theme in the log which is strange and happens all the time, but I can't know if it is related, it doesn't seem to be. This is happening all the time and it is:
Code:
Jul 11 13:51:20 iMac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.edb.launchd.postgresql-8.4): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Jul 11 13:51:30 iMac postmaster[4971]: dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _DNSServiceRegistrationCreate
Referenced from: /Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin/postmaster
Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylibThe database management software PostgreSQL version 8.4 is pretty old -- end-of-life 4 years ago.
There's 7 releases of that software since it was current in 2009, now at version 9.6
If that's something that you use, then you might pursue updating that.
(Can't say if that's producing the intermittent messages, but it might be related)
You can continue to monitor your system, try to note within 5 or 10 seconds of the current time when you next see that "flash". That might give you an edge when checking in your logs next time.
There's 7 releases of that software since it was current in 2009, now at version 9.6
If that's something that you use, then you might pursue updating that.
(Can't say if that's producing the intermittent messages, but it might be related)
You can continue to monitor your system, try to note within 5 or 10 seconds of the current time when you next see that "flash". That might give you an edge when checking in your logs next time.