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Posts from the ‘Technology’ Category

2
May

Boot Camp and Snow Leopard at the Same Time

I use Boot Camp to play computer games for Windows on my Mac. Recently, I decided to try out the new version of OS X, called Snow Leopard. It hasn’t been released yet, as it’s still under development, so I wanted to keep my existing installation. I had hoped to find a way to get all three systems (OS X 10.5, OS X 10.6, and Windows) installed at the same time. However, Boot Camp requires there be two and only two partitions on the disk. Initially, it looked like I had to choose between Boot Camp and Snow Leopard.

Then I ran across an application called Winclone that will backup and restore Boot Camp partitions. Since OS X supports resizing disk partitions without losing data (non-destructive partitioning), I came up with a solution that allows me to switch between Boot Camp and Snow Leopard fairly easily.

I use the following procedures to switch from Boot Camp to Snow Leopard and back again without losing data on my Boot Camp partition or my normal installation. If needed, I suspect Disk Utility could be used to backup and restore a Snow Leopard partition. For now, I’ll leave that as a homework assignment. I don’t mind a fresh install of Snow Leopard each time.

To Switch from Boot Camp to Snow Leopard

  1. Open Winclone
  2. Choose the Boot Camp partition as source
  3. Click the Image button
  4. Close Winclone
  5. Open Disk Utility
  6. Delete the existing Boot Camp partition
  7. Add an 8GB partition for the Snow Leopard installer (skip this step if you burn a DVD instead)
  8. Add a partition for Snow Leopard and name it something you’ll remember
  9. Use Disk Utility to restore the Snow Leopard installer disk image to the 8GB partition
  10. Reboot and hold down the Option key during the boot process
  11. Select the “Mac OS X Install DVD” partition
  12. Go through the Snow Leopard install process
  13. Install on the larger partition created earlier (be careful NOT to erase your current installation)
  14. Rebooting at the end of the installation will take you into Snow Leopard
  15. If desired, change your default partition in System Preferences under Startup Disk

To Switch from Snow Leopard to Boot Camp

  1. Open Disk Utility
  2. Delete the Snow Leopard partitions
  3. Change the remaining partition (your normal system) so that it fills the whole disk
  4. Close Disk Utility
  5. Open the Boot Camp Assistant
  6. Choose how big you want to make your Boot Camp partition (pick the same size each time)
  7. Click the Partition button
  8. Choose the option to Quit and Install Later
  9. Open Winclone
  10. Select the Restore tab
  11. Drag or select your Boot Camp backup
  12. The destination partition should be called BOOTCAMP (be careful NOT to erase your current installation)
  13. Click the Calculate button to verify that your backup size matches your partition size
  14. Click the Restore button
  15. Close Winclone
  16. If desired, reboot into Windows normally

I’ve gone back and forth now several times without any problems. It takes about 10 minutes to backup or restore a Boot Camp partition, but I don’t mind as I only switch a few times each month.

I do, however, highly recommend backing up your computer before trying this as it is easy to erase the wrong partition. Mozy (use code DANCHERYL for 15% off), Time Machine or SuperDuper! will all work. Because I’m paranoid, I use all three. :)

5
Feb

Mozy Coupon Code for February

Mozy is offering 10% off new annual and bi-annual subscriptions for MozyHome Unlimited and MozyPro this month. Just type FEBRUARY into the referral box when you sign up.

If you’re interested in Mozy’s free 2GB of online backup, just sign up for a MozyHome Free account. I’d recommend using someone’s referral code as you’ll both get an extra 256MB of space. If you can’t find a referral code online, you can use mine which is 56EEVL. But Mozy employees get free accounts so try to hook someone else up if possible.

And Mozy is hiring again too. In addition to the jobs listed, my team is interviewing Windows and Mac developers. Please feel free to ask questions or send a resume to danr@decho.com. We’ll need you to be located in Utah, so apologies up front to all the awesome developers we’re going to miss out on.

20
Jan

Movable Type vs WordPress

UPDATE: I’ve written a follow up after 8 months of use and two articles covering theme optimization and page caching.

About two years ago, I installed Mephisto and started blogging. I chose Mephisto mainly because it was written in Ruby, one of my favorite programming languages. However, I soon realized I was better off using the best tool for writing instead of caring so much about which language the tool was written in.

So I moved from Mephisto to Movable Type and was very happy with the switch. For a while anyway. Recently, there were several things about Movable Type that started to really bother me.

  1. Manual upgrades were annoying as they seemed to take a lot of time, and I occasionally broke things during the process.
  2. I never figured out how to install my own themes. My site looked bland for a long time while I waited for better default themes.
  3. I couldn’t figure out plugins either. I wanted to customize the sidebar of my site, so I ended up spending a lot time changing the theme by hand. After that, I couldn’t switch themes without losing all my work.
  4. Publishing static content just took too long. My site loaded quickly because of it, but I wanted something that wasn’t so annoying to me.
  5. I tried switching to dynamic publishing, but it didn’t work very well. It may have been my web hosting company, but I really like them and don’t want to switch.

TypePad.com

My first thought was to try the hosted version of Movable Type over at TypePad. I’d never have to do an upgrade, and I assume the included themes are much nicer. However I decided that $9 a month is more than I wanted to pay to use my own domain.

Blogger.com

Several of my friends and family use Blogger, which is free, so it seemed a good place to try next. Blogger only includes a few default themes, but adding your own is easy. It feels like thousands of custom themes are available, though I would have to install and maintain them myself.

Blogger does not support uploading PDF or MP3 files, which isn’t convenient, but I probably could have hosted them elsewhere without too much trouble. I also would have lost the ability to have a static page for our family newsletters. But the biggest issue was email. I couldn’t use my own domain unless I switched to Google Apps for email.

WordPress.com

WordPress provides free hosted blogging accounts, so I thought I’d give it a shot next. I got quite far along the road to satisfaction. MP3 files were still evil, but PDF files were okay. $10 to use my own domain seemed reasonable. I found a theme I liked, and there was enough built-in functionality to get my sidebar set up how I wanted.

The biggest win was not worrying about upgrades or performance. WordPress would even import a blog exported by Movable Type. Awesome. Except I’d written everything in Markdown format, which wasn’t supported.

The WordPress guys said Markdown was more demanding on their systems, which sounded fair enough. So I had some fun writing a script to convert my Markdown-formatted blog entries to HTML. During the process, I found several broken links, which I was glad to fix.

But I found that writing HTML takes longer than writing Markdown. Not surprising really. It’s why John Gruber created it in the first place. Then I discovered that embedding YouTube videos required using some proprietary format. And then I realized they had the same email problem that haunted Blogger. I don’t want to switch to Google Apps. Please just add email forwarding as a paid upgrade.

WordPress.org

I wasn’t happy. But after reading a bit more, I stumbled across the fact that the WordPress software could update itself. Interesting. I decided to try installing it myself.

Installing themes and plugins turned out to be fairly easy — unzip a theme into the themes directory, then select it on the Themes page; unzip a plugin into the plugins directory, then activate it on the Plugins page. Wash, rinse, repeat. Some of the plugins put their configuration pages into odd locations, but I was able to track everything down. And once I’d set up a widget in my sidebar, I could change themes without losing anything. It just worked.

Plugins

Well, mostly. WordPress says it supports installing and updating plugins from within the software itself, which would be awesome, except that I couldn’t get that to work. Manual installation was easier. I sigh and shake my head whenever I think about it.

2009-01-21: I got automatic plugin installs to work by following these instructions (member’s only) on NearlyFreeSpeech’s forums:

  1. First I created a folder at the root of my site called “tmp” (for me, it was /home/public/tmp).
  2. Then I added this line to my WordPress configuration file: define('WP_TEMP_DIR', ABSPATH.'tmp');

The problem is that WordPress tries to download stuff to a temp folder before moving it to its final destination, but the system settings had the wrong temp folder listed. Since I’m running with PHP’s safe mode on, WordPress couldn’t read or write to the temp folder, causing the whole thing to fail.

It’d be nice if WordPress added a “Temp Folder Location” setting to their configuration options or just downloaded stuff directly to its destination if the temp folder is inaccessible.

I’m happier now that I can install, update and remove plugins, as well as update WordPress itself, all from within WordPress.

Here are the plugins I’m using right now.

  1. Automatic Timezone because WordPress is too lame to figure this out on its own.
  2. Google Analyticator adds the Google Analytics tracking code.
  3. Simple Google Sitemap automatically creates my sitemap.
  4. KB Robots.txt allows me to add my sitemap to my robots.txt file.
  5. Markdown (of course :-))
  6. Recently Popular highlights what people are reading on my site.
  7. Twitter lets you know exactly what I’m up to at all times. You do want to know this, right?
  8. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin works great and requires no work at all.
  9. Next of Kin isn’t activated yet, but I’m thinking about it.
  10. All in One Adsense and YPN handles the ads on my site.
  11. FD Feedburner Plugin lets me use FeedBurner for my feeds.

I tried these out, but stopped using them pretty quickly.

  1. WordPress.com Stats was annoying because it required me to login to my WordPress.com account every time, which didn’t work reliably. The reports and statistics were pretty good when I could get it to work.
  2. Redirection has a feature where it monitors post and category URL changes and automatically starts redirecting visitors. However, when I deleted a category, it created an endless redirection loop that took down my entire site. Other than that, it worked pretty well at helping me figure out and solve problems with missing pages.

More Good

I recently noticed two more things about WordPress that I really like.

  1. A word count is always visible when I’m writing. I’m happy the final version of this article is a few hundred words shorter than the original.
  2. My comments are automatically highlighted in a different color, which makes it easy for readers to find my replies. Not that you’d miss me in a list of three comments.

The Bad

There are a couple of things I don’t like about WordPress.

  1. Maybe I’m just used to Movable Type’s static publishing, but I’m not sure that’s a valid excuse for WordPress to be slow. Luckily, there are caching plugins that should help a lot. I find I prefer cached dynamic content over pre-published static pages. At first, it didn’t seem to matter, but one is handled for you behind the scenes while the other is constantly in your face. It may be a personal preference, but it makes a difference to me.
  2. The media library is pretty lousy. You can’t rename files, though you can delete and re-upload the file with a new name. I have to be extremely careful when uploading files.

Happy Ending

Overall, I’m very happy with WordPress. There is lots of good, very little bad, and no ugly. The hardest part was trying out similar plugins and picking the best ones to keep.

5
May

MozyHome for Mac is Out of Beta

It’s been a long road, but the Mac version of Mozy is finally out of beta. We released our official 1.0 version late last week, and I am a happy developer. It was almost exactly a year ago that Mozy released it’s first Mac software, which is way too long to be in a beta program. We won’t let that happen again.

We are going to release a business version, MozyPro for Mac, later this summer. And we have a lot of performance improvements and interface changes we want to make. There is a lot of work ahead of us, which is great.

So while I was taking some deep breaths, I got a chance to read up on some of what people are saying about Mozy. iDrive, one of our competitors, just released a beta version of their Mac software, so I thought I’d take a look.

They seem to have done some pretty cool things with their software, but it’s clear that they don’t understand the word unlimited. iDrive includes this disclaimer in small text on the bottom of their homepage:

The concept of ‘Unlimited Storage’ is subject to fair usage of the service. This is to facilitate a low one-price plan to backup a PC’s critical data that meets requirement for high majority of consumers; there may be some limits based on what constitutes fair usage. The current limits include 150GB of total storage and 100GB of bandwidth utilization per day. Do refer to Conditions of Use. Pricing structure for business use varies from personal use.

So you get “unlimited” storage for whatever they decide is “fair.” Not really unlimited. I really like that Mozy’s unlimited service has no restrictions on space.

MozyHome does have a bandwidth cap to limit how fast files are uploaded, but in practice very few people have upload speeds that reach this limit. We are always open to customer feedback, however, and reevaluate this decision from time to time. MozyPro does not have this limitation.

In addition to the whole unlimited thing, iDrive’s comparison with Mozy is incorrect in several places.

Still, they have some good ideas in the design of their software. And it’s good for Mozy to have competition. Keeps us all working hard at listening to our customers.

23
Jan

The Secret History of Silicon Valley

I watched a video recording of Steve Blank discussing the history of Silicon Valley at Google today. Surprisingly, the tech capital of the world has its roots in the electronic warfare of WWII. I’ve loved reading WWII history since I was a kid and the speaker even includes clips from several WWII movies during his presentation.

It’s an hour, but was very informative and enjoyable to watch. Highly recommended for anyone who loves WWII history, technology, or both.

23
Jan

Quote: Brian Kernighan

Words I try to live by.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

19
Dec

iPhone Update

About a year ago, I predicted that Apple’s iPhone would sell really well. A recently released market study by Canalys claims that the iPhone has a 27% market share in the North American smart phone market. 2nd place isn’t bad for a first-time product. Blackberry has a small lead, and Windows-based phones (all of them as a group) are in 3rd place.

It will be interesting to see if Apple can continue their success in the international market. I suspect that they can. I’m still hoping to find some justification for getting one at some point. :-)

15
Dec

Marking Spam as Read in Gmail

I’ve always been annoyed that the link to my spam folder in GMail showed up as bold text because there were unread messages inside. At first, I tried using Greasemonkey scripts or other forms of hacking the style sheet so that the word “Spam” wouldn’t be so attention grabbing. These worked until I’d use a new computer or reinstall my browser (like after my hard drive crashed at work).

After reading Matthew Gallant’s note about how he uses filters to automatically mark his spam as read, I tried it out. After a few tweaks, it’s working great. I only get a few spam messages a month that causes me to open my Spam folder. In one case, it was a legitimate email that I was glad not to have missed.

The basic idea is to create a filter that marks everything in the Spam folder as read unless it contains one (or more) keywords you specify, like your real name. That way, most spam will just be ignored, but misclassified emails will show up as unread which you can then verify by hand. Very nice.

4
Dec

Hard Drive Crash at Mozy

Well, yesterday the hard drive in my computer at work failed. I find this more than a bit funny as I work at Mozy which is company that does online backups. It gave me an opportunity to experience the process of restoring my files first hand.

When arrived at work yesterday morning, I noticed that my computer was freezing for a minute or two at a time. I thought it was some run-away process on my computer, but didn’t think much of it at first. Eventually, it got annoying enough that I decided to reboot my computer to get rid of it. That was the last I saw of my computer.

Eventually, I did manage to get the computer to boot into “single-user mode” which is designed for diagnosing and fixing problems. A few obscure terminal commands later, I discovered that the file systems on both partitions on my drive were badly corrupted. For those interested, the super block and all of its backups were bad on both partitions. Not good.

Apparently, the crash was caused by a power failure or brown-out over the weekend. The company is a bit behind in getting backup power supplies (UPS) to all of their new employees. They have several on order, but it’s going to be a week too late for me. I’d been through 4 brown-outs so far this year and hadn’t had any problems. My luck couldn’t last forever, I guess.

Anyway, since I’d been using Mozy to backup my important files. I got to see how Mozy’s restore process worked and discovered a few things that could help the process go a lot more smoothly. Just after losing a drive, our customers are wondering if they’ll ever see their files again. Getting their files back quickly and easily would make them incredibly happy.

I use the Mac version of Mozy, so I’ll avoid commenting on the Windows version. We try to make both versions similar, but I’m sure there are some differences. So here’s the list for happy customers:

  1. Consistency — get the files back at all.
  2. Accuracy — get the files in their exact original state.
  3. Speed — get the files as quickly as possible.
  4. Usability — having a simple, easy, quick process for doing it all.

Looking at this list, it strikes me that this is probably the correct order in which to focus our attention. The Mac version does a good job on everything, but can improve on #2 and #4.

The current version of Mozy does not backup some types of files correctly, including symbolic links and resource forks. It also has some UI issues with bundles. These problems have already been fixed for inclusion in the next release and are in testing now. They were some of the last bugs necessary for Mozy to get out of it’s beta state.

UPDATE: Version 0.9 (and later) of Mozy supports resource forks, symbolic links, and bundles.

The main improvements needed before restoring files with Mozy can be a joyful process (“Yes, it worked!”) are:

  1. The ability to restore files to their original locations.
  2. An option to “synchronize” a folder by deleting files that don’t exist on Mozy’s servers.
  3. Support for restoring a “backup set” instead of just browsing for files.

Right now, it is possible to restore files to their original locations by choosing the root folder as the destination and selecting all of the highest-level folders for restoration. You get one warning about overwriting files. Since this is probably a very common desire (it’s what I wanted after my reinstall), I think Mozy should make it easier.

I also found that there were some default files and folders on my computer that I didn’t want after restoring. In particular, I had to delete the default files for iCal and Mail before restoring to make things work right. Since I knew that I’d backed up my entire Mail folder, it would have been awesome if Mozy could have restored my Mail folder to be exactly like Mozy’s copy of that same folder. There could even be some type of “merge” process that displays what Mozy is going to do (including files that will be overwritten) and ask for permission to proceed.

When you configure which files and folders you want Mozy to back up, you can choose to back up a “set” of files from a list or browse the filesystem directly. When restoring files, the only option is to browse. Since our website allows users to restore files by choosing from the sets they backed up, it makes sense that the Mozy application should too.

Overall, I was able to get my files back without too much trouble. Since I’m the one responsible for eliminating that “trouble” for our customers, I’ve added these ideas to our list of things to do. I don’t think I would’ve volunteered to destroy all my data just to see what it’s like, but maybe I should have. In any case, I hope to improve Mozy’s restore process soon.

21
Nov

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?

This is a fascinating article about a guy who is finding evidence of a massive flood about 5,000 years ago.

Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat and moisture blasted its way into jet streams and spawned super-hurricanes that pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal event in history.

I’m always tickled when evidence turns up to support a position opposite that of the prevailing theory of the day. This guy decided to investigate why there are so many stories about a major destructive event in the stories and oral histories of so many cultures and is starting to find hard evidence.

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