LogMeIn Hamachi - Free for family networks

Hamachi is a shareware VPN application. LogMeIn is marketing a free version for non-commercial use.

Alas, I think it's Windows only.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Time Machine: Fail first, then flaw discovered

At the very end of attempting to restore a 40GB iPhoto Library named “Current” from a Time Machine / Time Capsule backup I got this message [1]:

The Library “looked” ok, so I tried to open it:

Since a backup is only as good as the restore, I pronounce Time Machine to be worthless [2].

Actually, worse than worthless. The inclusion of Time Machine with OS X has largely eliminated alternatives. It’s malign.

I’m not completely surprised. The chaotic state of Time Machine/Time Capsule documentation is a pretty good indicator that the product is troubled.

I’ll count myself lucky this time. I discovered that my main photo library backup, containing about 10,000 irreplaceable images, was worthless.

How am I lucky?

I have two other backups, including a straight file copy that I’ve verified works. So I learned I couldn’t rely on Time Machine at the cost of a couple of hours of lost time. It could have been much worse.

I’m going to next test a restore of this library from my Retrospect Professional/Windows backup.

[1] For Google: “You cannot copy “Current” to the destination because its name is the same as the name of an item on the destination, except for the case of some characters.

[2] This error message could mean anything. Don’t take these things at face value. The fact that it occurs at the very end of the restore is curious. I did try a reboot but I didn’t try rebuilding because even if that had seemed to work I wouldn’t be able to trust that my image library was truly intact

Update 12/31/09: Retrospect Professional did restore my iPhoto Library, so it won this contest. Nice to know one of my backups worked! It does, however, deserve its reputation as insanely difficult to use. It was also exquisitely slow, though it's running on an old XP box and my backups are huge.

I did, however, find a clue that might explain the Time Machine failure. After I did my restore I discovered my "Pictures" folder had incorrect permissions. My user account had read-only permissions for the folder (why? no clue.). So I wonder if Time Machine tried to write something to the containing folder when it finished its backup, that failed due to a permissions problem, and then produced a misleading error message. I may try an experiment to test that.

Update 1/1/2010: My experiment concluded; the Time Machine restore worked. The bug is that Time Machine fails to check permissions on the target folder prior to the restore. It will attempt a restore that almost works, then fails at some critical last step. This problem may only show up when a Package is being restored into a Folder for with the user (and Time Machine?) does not have write permissions.

I filed an Apple Developer bug report: 7504890.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

HoudahSpot fixes Spotlight -- for a steep price

HoudahSpot is, like the now defunct MoRU/FileSpot, a tool for extending Spotlight.

At $30 it's not cheap, most apps of this sort go for $10 to $20. On the other hand, it's not like there's much competition, and it's not like Spotlight is getting much better.

It's crazy, for example, that Spotlight doesn't have a "path" column (folder names). HoudahSpot does. HoudahSpot also plays nice with LaunchBar and PathFinder. On the other hand, HoudahSpot's Help file is pretty crummy.

I've started a two week trial. I'll update this post if I buy the app.

Google's Pages to Sites migration - train wreck

About a year ago Google announced it would sunset their old Page Creator platform in favor of Google Sites. This would have been better received if Sites were a better product, but it's been stuck on "the sick list" for years.

The migration was supposed to happen mid-2009, but our Minnesota Special Hockey site survived until this week.

So did Google use those six months to develop a brilliant migration tool coupled with extensions to Google Sites?

No. Of course not. The result of the migration is a train wreck.

For example, most of the attachment links are scrambled. I think some of our documents (attachments) may have been lost. A large collection seem to exist as "attachments" to the root directory -- but there's no mechanism to link to them.

Thanks Google. Merry Christmas to you too.

Update: When I first posted this I thought Google had merely messed up. The longer and deeper that I look into this the more the fiasco resembles staggering incompetence at a level rarely seen outside of high school and failing corporations. WTF is going on at Google?!

Update 1/6/10: Despite our support contract, Google never responded to an email inquiry. Most recently, I discovered that a bug in their update process deleted a significant page. Turns out that if you had an existing Sites page and a Page Creator page collection, the contents of an existing Site could be wiped out by the migration.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Surprises from an old zip archive

For years my personal data was distributed between DOS/Windows/XP and Mac Classic/OS X environments. It's really only moved to a single OS X share within the past six months, and I'm still sorting out the archives.

Which is why it was only today that I discovered that OS X couldn't open MS-DOS zip files from 1990. WinZip did open them, though it complained of an unspecified security risk each time I opened a file.

The funny bit is that unzipped files came out, total, to about 2MB. Zipped they were about 1MB. So I was zipping them in 1990 to to save 1MB.

No, not 1GB. 1MB, aka a millionth of a terabyte. In those days I guess that mattered.

I've expanded them all now. Most of the documents were written in WordPerfect. I can get the gist of them from a text editor, but Word 2003 opens them pretty well. (Since they go back to DOS they don't have standard file extensions -- back then I used ".LTR" for "letters" and ".TXT" for documents.)

The take home lesson, of course, is that compressed archives are very vulnerable to data loss. At least a WordPerfect file can be read in a text editor.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Enabling use of a large external USB drive with an older BIOS: disable legacy USB support

This is a pretty exotic fix, but I'm not the only one to run into the problem so I'll pass on what I learned (I found the link after I fixed the issue).

I have a vintage 2003 XP box Intel motherboard with an Intel P4 motherboard. It's needed periodic brain surgery but I make as few changes as possible. This is geriatric computing -- don't mess with things that work.

The most persistent annoyance I've had came when I moved to 1TB external drives for backup:

Gordon's Tech: My review: LaCie 1 TB USB 2.0 External Drive 201304U

... I discovered I couldn't start the system with the USB drive on. I have to restart with the drive off, then leave it off until startup is done. I don't think this was a LaCie problem, I suspect other causes...

I don't restart often, so I've mostly ignored this. I does cause some pain however, so recently I spent a few minutes plumbing the BIOS.

Briefly, I had to disable "legacy USB" support. Once that was done the system starts normally. I spotted this by turning on the BIOS settings to show all startup messages and do a full (slow) startup -- I could see it was hanging at a USB step just after checking the keyboard.

Since I was in the BIOS I made a few other incidental changes. I no longer use Serial or Parallel ports (yeah, old machine) so I disabled those. I also told the BIOS to use PnP (which I see I also did in 2003 so it looks like I reset the BIOS back to defaults sometime in the past six years).

See also:

• Windows startup stuck when connecting to external drive? - Yahoo! Answers
• Vista Boot Hang w/ USB Drive Connected [Archive] - MajorGeeks
• Computer won't boot with USB drive plugged in - Maxtor OneTouch Products - Seagate Community Forum

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Using OS X Spaces, Expose, Minimize and Hide - best practices

I had to take another look at Expose and Spaces when a relative asked me to review their use.

I'm again struck by a perennial mystery. Why don't we have more "I'm an expert, here's how I manage X" type documentation? I'm sure the team that developed Expose and Spaces had clear ideas on how they were to be used. No, not a list of features, but rather an explanation of how an array of possible features are should be used -- and, more importantly, what should be avoided.

For example -- I can't figure out any use for minimizing windows to the Dock. Once you do that they can't be managed by Expose or Spaces, and they can't be closed as a group. Dock minimization feels like an obsolete function that now causes confusion. Likewise, how do the Mac Classic legacy operations application operations of "Hide App", "Hide All" or "Hide Others" mesh with Expose and Spaces?

Expose, Spaces, Hide and Minimize -- we really do need a true power user to explain what they use and what they carefully neglect.

Since most of my real work is done in corporate XP I'm not a true OS X power user - but I can take a whack at the problem. This is what I do at the moment:

• The application-specific Hide functions: I no longer use them. I feel as though they've been replaced by Spaces and Expose.
• Expose: I use "All Windows" and "Desktop". I've mapped Ctrl-D to Desktop because I'm used to Windows-D on XP to show the Desktop (Cmd-D is a shortcut that works in many file menus to set the focus to the Desktop so I used Ctrl rather than Cmd). I want to start using F10 to show all Application windows, but on the newest Apple laptop-everywhere keyboards there are no dedicated Function keys. I think Apple is deprecating Expose:Application Windows.
• Minimize to Dock: I avoid this like the plague. I do find "Close All" (option click on close menubar icon) very useful to clean up a mess of browser windows.
• Spaces: This is useful on my MacBook display, less useful on a my desktop (27" i5 + 21" LCD). I'm trying to get used to using it everywhere however. I'm experimenting with using only 2 screens, and mapping the Finder to one. So one screen has my file manipulation stuff, everything else is in the other screen.

I find typing "exp" or "spa" in LaunchBar is the fastest way to invoke Expose or Spaces; it's more convenient than using a mouse or a kb shortcut.

Anyone have alternative approaches to suggest?

Update 12/30/09: Azendel, writing in comments, tells us that Apple fixed "Minimize" in 10.6. Minimized windows now appear in Expose. That's a relief since "Minimize" is fairly prominent in the OS X user interface; the Leopard Minimize/Expose incompatibility has been a frequent irritant.

Update 1/3/2011: I made a very good stab at using Spaces over the past year. I like giving Aperture its own Space for example, so it could use the secondary monitor without messing up other apps. Over time, however, I ran into more issues with app windows being split between Spaces. I also suspect, but cannot prove, that some App crashes are related to windows being split between Spaces. I now think Spaces is not quite ready for primetime. Since "Leo" (10.7) has a different Finder/Spacers model, and since Apple's newer kbs have "Expose" keys but not "Spaces" keys I think Apple knows this too. I'm going to return to using Expose (improved in 10.6) and experiment with Minimize and Hide.

Update 1/29/11: See Using OS X Spaces, Expose, Minimize and Hide - best practices 2.0

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)