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New user? Sunday, May 4, 2008
Watching Dallas vs. San Jose, installing software
Check out my Twitter feed for info about my experience with backing up my machine.... short version: backup to USB2 drive failed at about 90% completion after over 10 hours of copying, bought a FireWire 800 drive and finished the backup and verify in 1.5 hours.
I installed Mac OS X this afternoon after finishing the backup, and after a busy day I'm finally installing software. I have installed Xcode/WO, iWork, iLife, and finished all the software updates. Still have to install Office, CS3 and all my other apps, as well as my documents/media.
I'm doing all this while watching the marathon Dallas vs. San Jose game on TSN. It's now intermission between the 3rd and 4th overtime periods. Wow, and I was feeling sorry for myself being on the ice for 4 of Cyan's hockey practices this weekend. Not anymore!
Re: Spam bounces 'o plenty
Here's a new term I hadn't heard before: "Backscattering". That's what the pros call it when you get mail delivery failure messages as a result of your email address being used in spam's "From:" header...
PC World, May 2, 2008: 100 E-mail Bouncebacks? You've Been Backscattered.
Bastards. Someone remind me, spammers have no human rights protection, yes? They're clearly enemy combatants, just waiting for their own comfy cot at Gitmo.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Starting fresh on my MacBook Pro
On Monday morning, I woke up to find my MacBook Pro shut down. I didn't shut it down... when I rebooted, I looked at the crash log, and it said something about an hfs issue with trying to write a corrupted block (or something like that, I forgot to save it).
I used Disk Utility to verify the filesystem, it said it appeared to be fine. But when I started Mail.app it acted like it was the first launch! I used Time Machine to restore my ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file, that fixed that problem. Of course I wondered what other files might be missing or damaged, but that's not an easy question to get the right answer to.
After wasting a couple of hours trying to diff different Time Machine backups, I decided to forget about it for a while because I was too busy. My instinct told me it was time to re-install from scratch because the integrity of my system was compromised, but I ignored that because I needed to get things done.
As I mentioned earlier this week, I've also been having issues with the display not reacting properly when I wake up the MBP. I don't think it's related because lots of other people are having the same problem and I know some of them tried many fresh installs to try to avoid the problem without success.
Then this evening my system kernel panicked. I think I might now need two hands to count the number of kernel panicks I've had on my machines since Mac OS X launched in March 2001. Damn.
I rebooted the machine and it came up fine, but now I don't really trust the system. Something is up, and I suspect it's related to the unexpected shutdown. I'm running a backup of the system right now and typing this on my old PowerBook G4, which my wife uses nowadays.
Tomorrow morning I think I'll likely make one more (non-Time Machine) backup of the hard drive onto an external hard disk, and then reformat and reinstall everything from scratch...
Time-consuming things I have to install:
- Mac OS X Leopard
- Xcode/WebObjects
- iLife 08 and iWork 08
- Microsoft Office 2008 (I bought it earlier this month to write my final papers on, Numbers just wasn't going to cut it for my charting/graphing needs)
- Adobe Creative Suite CS3
- Eclipse and WOLips
And then there's the dozens of other apps I have in my Applications folders. I won't be copying them across from my current Applications folder this time, because I fear they may be corrupted. So I'll have to re-download all of them and re-install them all.
But what about my Documents and Music and Movies and Pictures folders? Not much I can do about those, I think. At least I've got a few months of Time Machine backups if I ever realize something is missing or corrupt, assuming I'll be able to use those old backups on my new installation.
Thankfully I committed all of today's work to my client's Subversion repository at the end of the day, so none of that is lost.
It's days like this I wish I had a Mac Pro with hot-swappable hard drives.
Friday, May 2, 2008
links for 2008-05-03
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It's a good thing I don't have three grand available to blow on something incredibly cool right now....
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Another followup to the JRuby or Groovy piece, I'm glad the Erlang folk are on top of this FUD.
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"For concurrent programming to become mainstream, we must discard threads as a programming model."
Twitter and Ruby on Rails, and Irony
The following tweet by Twitter's Evan Williams is in response to a story on TechCrunch that suggested Twitter plans to abandon Ruby on Rails.
Twitter / Evan Williams: FWIW: Twitter currently has...
When I saw the above link on reddit to Evan William's tweet, I clicked on it. The Twitter web site responded with the correct page. I then clicked on the "Evan Williams" link below the tweet. But Twitter wouldn't respond.
I've been trying and trying to load that page on Twitter while I write this, but no dice. Maybe Evan should reconsider.
Ted Rall says D.C. cops must "Arrest Bush"
Yahoo! News: ARREST BUSH
