Saturday, September 18, 2004

Photokina: toys for boys

Introduction: Photokina 2004 Show Report: Digital Photography Review

A bit odd -- this show is every 2 years -- not yearly. Manufacturers currently track it with their releases. So the next giant leap in digital photography will be Sept 2006.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Macintouch: DataViz MacLink Plus announcement

MacInTouch Home Page: "DataViz released MacLinkPlus Deluxe 15, the latest version of its file conversion software. This release adds text extraction from PDF files, a new graphics translator for Photoshop, improvements to other graphics translators (BMP, JPG, PICT, TIFF), conversion of word processing and PDF files to text and transport to an iPod or iPod mini, decompression support for StuffIt X, and updated translators for Word 2004 Mac, Excel 2004 Mac, and WordPerfect 12 for Windows. MacLinkPlus Deluxe 15 is $79.95 for Mac OS X 10.2 and up."

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Enough storage to load most of Microsoft Office 2020 ....

Sun Microsystems - Feature Story - ZFS File System
Sun engineers wondered if the 64-bit capabilities of current file systems will continue to suffice over the next 10 to 20 years. Their answer was no. If Moore's Law holds, in 10 to 15 years people will need a 65th bit. As a 128-bit system, ZFS is designed to support more storage, more file systems, more snapshots, more directory entries, and more files than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future....

... To efficiently use all of this capacity, file systems grow and shrink automatically as users add or remove data. Administrators can set quotas to limit space consumption and reservations to guarantee future availability of space. ZFS also provides compression to reduce disk space and I/O bandwidth requirements.

Logically, the next question is if ZFS' 128 bits is enough. According to Bonwick, it has to be. 'Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.'

When you need to think outside the trap

Normal For Us: The Miller Twins - About the Film . OPB

Ok, so these are not "average" parents. Maybe most of us can't rise to this level. On the other hand, when one feels trapped and doesn't want to "take it any more" ... here's inspiration.

If you can't win, then change the rules.

Jon Udell: LibraryLookup: place library order via Amazon page

Jon Udell: LibraryLookup (Build your own bookmarklet)

Jon Udell is brilliant. I've been a fan since the glory days of BYTE where he was a senior editor. Now he's got a bookmarklet that orders library books from Amazon pages. Jon has always written that we've yet to fully leverage the web opportunities that we've had since 1999 or so -- here he again proves his thesis.

(Bookmarklets, are coming into their own, probably because most browsers now finally support a core portion of JavaScript -- the new universal cross-platform language. Brendan Eich (sp?) must be very amused.)

Very big Dantz Retrospect bug (OS X)

MacInTouch Home PageJust a quick warning to Mac OS X users running Retrospect 6.0.178. If you're backing up an entire drive and hope to restore it one day, do NOT do an incremental backup. This version of Retrospect doesn't recognize when symbolic links have changed the file to which they point. So it doesn't back them up.

This is unlikely to cause problems for personal home directories and such, but it has a disastrous effect when restoring a complete Mac OS X install, if you've done any software updates after your first backup in the set. You'll need to reinstall the OS.

The easy solution (until Dantz issues a fix) is to force Retrospect to backup ALL files, not just changed files.

(The technical reason for the problem is that when Apple updates frameworks in software updates, they update symbolic links named 'Current' to point to the new version. Retrospect backs up the new version, but fails to back up the updated symbolic link. Thus, on restore you end up with the new version, but the old symbolic link -- pointing to a no-longer-present version.)
Wow. I wonder if this is true for older versions too. Maybe I should give up on using Retrospect for a full system backup -- and focus on a data only backup. I can use CarbonCopy Cloner to do a clone periodically, and otherwise only backup the user directory.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004