The BFC Computing Weblog

After coming close to losing a few years' worth of the kids’ digital photos (I had a backup, thank you, rsnapshot, but when I only have one copy it’s close to being lost) I decided to find a good hard drive for the wife’s computer. Hers is a Mac Mini running Leopard, and it has the Time Machine backup system (think exactly like rsnapshot, but with directory-level hard links as well). So, I wanted to find a drive that would be:

• Small
• Quiet
• Easy
• Big enough to handle backup of an 80GB drive
• Reliable
• Cost-effective

Now, there are several drives out there that have the capacity. Most are pretty big (physically), and many of them require an AC wall wart and have fans in them. That I didn’t want.

I usually just head over to Newegg and find a case and a drive and screw something together, but they didn’t have any that met the requirements. By this time I had decided that a Firewire bus-powered drive with a 2.5” 160GB drive would be perfect, and I finally found one at MacSales/OtherWorld Computing. These guys sponsor the open source project XPostFacto which lets you run OSX on hardware Apple has abandoned (so that you can connect to the Internet without being pwned). So, good guys, and they have the 160GB OWC Mercury On-The-Go Oxford911 FireWire 2.5” 5400RPM 8MB Cache Portable Storage Solution, which, while a mouthful, is just the right drive for Time Machine backups. I didn't think I'd buy another PATA drive, but the Oxford 911 chipset is really quite well-proven, a nice feature for a backup drive. The drive comes with a cable and a pleather case:

and a CD that contains some software for something I don't need (it would be a nice green move to be able to leave out pleather cases and CD's if they're just headed to the trash heap). I plugged the drive in, the Mac asked me if I wanted to use it for Time Machine, and a few clicks later the backups started running. Nicer interface than rsnapshot, for normal mortals anyway. Now after all that, there are two complaints. First, it's in a very nice lucite case. But the case doesn't have much in the way of markings on it. There's a 3-position switch on the back, and you have to refer to the user's manual pamphlet to figure out what it does. It's a switch for Bus Power/Off/AC Power. I made a label on my label maker so I could recycle the instructions. The second point isn't about the product but the marketing. The box exclaims, "Fits in your shirt pocket!". Here's how well that works:

This particular oxford (not 911) shirt of mine has bigger pockets than any others, and it just fits. When I hear a claim like that, I think of another 2.5" drive I have:

that can almost fit reasonably in a pocket. This isn't a shirt pocket drive - maybe cargo pants. Better to just call it a really nice drive.

After coming close to losing a few years' worth of the kids’ digital photos (I had a backup, thank you, rsnapshot, but when I only have one copy it’s close to being lost) I decided to find a good hard drive for the wife’s computer. Hers is a Mac Mini running Leopard, and it has the Time Machine backup system (think exactly like rsnapshot, but with directory-level hard links as well). So, I wanted to find a drive that would be:

• Small
• Quiet
• Easy
• Big enough to handle backup of an 80GB drive
• Reliable
• Cost-effective

Now, there are several drives out there that have the capacity. Most are pretty big (physically), and many of them require an AC wall wart and have fans in them. That I didn’t want.

I usually just head over to Newegg and find a case and a drive and screw something together, but they didn’t have any that met the requirements. By this time I had decided that a Firewire bus-powered drive with a 2.5” 160GB drive would be perfect, and I finally found one at MacSales/OtherWorld Computing. These guys sponsor the open source project XPostFacto which lets you run OSX on hardware Apple has abandoned (so that you can connect to the Internet without being pwned). So, good guys, and they have the 160GB OWC Mercury On-The-Go Oxford911 FireWire 2.5” 5400RPM 8MB Cache Portable Storage Solution, which, while a mouthful, is just the right drive for Time Machine backups. I didn't think I'd buy another PATA drive, but the Oxford 911 chipset is really quite well-proven, a nice feature for a backup drive. The drive comes with a cable and a pleather case:

and a CD that contains some software for something I don't need (it would be a nice green move to be able to leave out pleather cases and CD's if they're just headed to the trash heap). I plugged the drive in, the Mac asked me if I wanted to use it for Time Machine, and a few clicks later the backups started running. Nicer interface than rsnapshot, for normal mortals anyway. Now after all that, there are two complaints. First, it's in a very nice lucite case. But the case doesn't have much in the way of markings on it. There's a 3-position switch on the back, and you have to refer to the user's manual pamphlet to figure out what it does. It's a switch for Bus Power/Off/AC Power. I made a label on my label maker so I could recycle the instructions. The second point isn't about the product but the marketing. The box exclaims, "Fits in your shirt pocket!". Here's how well that works:

This particular oxford (not 911) shirt of mine has bigger pockets than any others, and it just fits. When I hear a claim like that, I think of another 2.5" drive I have:

that can almost fit reasonably in a pocket. This isn't a shirt pocket drive - maybe cargo pants. Better to just call it a really nice drive.

I was hopeful that Mac OS X 10.5.4 would address previous versions’ data corruption issues, but it appears they still exist.

According to MacFixit, issues still exist with saving files to servers via at least AFP (are NFS or SMB affected?), system logging issues, firewall problems, and apparently Software Update is still buggy at applying binary deltas.

So, unfortunately I’m still not recommending 10.5 (Leopard) Client for folks who need to use network filesystems. If you’re using local disks only and don’t mind downloading the ‘Combo’ OS updates and applying them by hand, you’re likely to be fine and feature-wise Leopard has plenty to offer.

Hopefully 10.5.5 will finally quash the network filesystems problems, and nearly a year from release the OS will become widely useful.

I was cleaning up my hard drive today and found some screenshots I took of websites on 9/11, in Apple PICT format. Less than 7 years later, those PICT’s aren’t viewable on OSX in the Preview application (the standard image viewer). Seeing as this OS came out in 2005, it was likely abandoned then. At the time I was running the latest version of Mac OS 9, judging by the screenshots.

So, less than 4 years of support for that presumably very common file format.

I’ve converted the pictures to PNG (Using Photoshop 7, which can parse them), which as an industry standard open format ought to be recoverable for some time to come.

This has been reason #687 to avoid proprietary file formats.

Our friend and sometimes subcontractor Dan Grover had surgery today, and we wish him a speedy recovery.

Dan posted a pre-surgery photo today, and finally it makes sense how he’s so efficient at his work:

All the best, Dan.

Apple has gone and done something really wrong in terms of security: they released a critical security update wrapped in a feature update.

So, Quicktime 7.5 is required to be protected from the most recently disclosed vulnerabilities. Problem is, as with every other n.X release of Quicktime, it’s buggy. No doubt 7.5.1 and 7.5.2 will be along in a few weeks’ and months’ time, but until then your only choices are to run with miserable choppy playback or to stay vulnerable to disclosed security problems.

This is a really bad idea. There should have been a 7.4.x rev for security as well as a 7.5 with those security fixes.

It looks like there might be some bad updates out there for TurboTax for Mac. I ran an update, and it hosed the app:

I tried twice more, and it worked on the third try. I’m guessing I got balanced onto a server that wasn’t corrupt, so keep deleting the folder and trying again.

I recently bought a new hard drive for my MacBook Pro and used the extra space to install Fedora 8. However, I found myself not booting into it too often as I have some apps on OSX which are too tied into my workflow.

So, I’ve decided to take the opposite approach for now. I’ve partitioned my drive into 4 parts - one each for Leopard, Tiger, and Fedora, and one for my data directories (/Local under OSX, /home under Linux).

This only helps share data between OS’s, though - what I really need is application compatibility. So, I’m slowly migrating my data to other applications that are cross-platform, and open-source. AppleMail->Thunderbird, iTunes->Amarok, iPhoto->DigiKam, etc. Additionally, I plan to integrate OpenSync with iSync to get my peripherals well supported. Once this is done, then I can run among my OS’s with indifference.

Both The Fink Project and MacPorts are essential tools for getting the open source software over to OSX. Kudos to both projects.

While Apple does make a good OS and great hardware, they’re still a member of the Business Software Alliance, which makes its living off terrorizing small businesses. Were they to quit the BSA I could probably justify the risk of them abandoning their software I depend upon, but combining that with the BSA it’s just too risky for me to bet my business on. Even though I use precious little other BSA software, simply accepting the EULA agreement for an OS update is enough to agree to their invasive audits, a risk I’m keen to remove. Did you know having a license and box and media for purchased software isn’t enough? You need to be able to produce a receipt for all your purchases or you’ll be getting a fine or lawsuit if you’re audited.

This is a good deal if you’re in the market for any of the software packages on the block, and the proceeds go to charity. I was planning on getting three of them sometime, so it’s a no-brainer for me. Act now, this deal ends on Wednesday.

Rough edges:

• Some of the apps have special promotion versions that would be difficult to download again later, one presumes, so I’m going to have to file and back up those special installers.
• And they all have registration codes, which I have to file and protect. This is friction in the shareware economy.
• WingNuts2 is a 500MB+ torrent, and you have to go through their e-commerce store checkout. I got a generic discount code for them - I wonder how they verify that I actually bought @MacHeist.
• As of now, the Tiki Golf download link isn’t working and the registration system for Vector Designer isn’t working yet. I’m sure these are temporary problems.
• CoverSutra is Leopard-only

Neat:

• 1Password uses an image file for a key - presumably some form of steganography.
• MacHeist is adding new apps as they go and mailing new licenses out to those who have already purchased.
• Quarter million dollars for charity so far, with 3 days to go.

Not including the torrent download, it took me 50 minutes to download, install, and register all the apps. I would rather see them all OpenID-enable their apps and see a network & pki-savvy .mpkg file to make this a 1-click process.

Firefox 3 isn’t revolutionary. But it has quite a good bit of evolution in it. I haven’t felt the need to blog about an application beta in a while, but this deserves it.

First - speed. Speed. Speed. FF2 had become a bloated mess on my profile - I keep a year’s worth of browsing history (hey, I have the disk space) but the Mork database engine in FF2 just wan’t up to the task. I had taken to switching over to Safari when FF2 got too slow to bear. FF3 uses the SQLite database instead, and the speed is fantastic.

There are lots of nice touches. The Location bar is actually useful now, is fast, searches on titles as well as locations, and seems to understand which matches it should show first, not just in substring order. Excellent.

The only bug I’ve found so far is that when saving a file it’s necessary to click twice on the folder to get it to show the folder’s contents. That’s a solid beta.

Potential gotcha: SSL page loads will now fail if the SSL certificate fails in some way. You can add exceptions to bypass this, but the default now isn’t warning as it was before it’s failure. This is arguably the right thing to do from a security and PHB perspective.

Potential gotcha #2: I don’t seem to have all my cookies from FF2 under FF3.

There are lots of nice developer bits in there too - better CSS, more Canvas, better SVG, better Javascript, better extension frameworks. Better password remembering, better menu speed, better history searching.

Stop me if you see a pattern. FF3 isn’t ‘amazing’, but it’s clearly ‘better’ in all regards.

NoScript, FlashGot and Slashdotter extensions are working, but most web developer tools haven’t updated yet. Update: here’s Firebug 1.1.

Get your Firefox here.