SuperDuper: clones and creates bootable startup disk -- even in 10.4.2

SuperDuper

A very sophisticated approach to recovering data from a dead drive: using a linux utility with OS X Tiger

macosxhints - 10.4: Recover a dead hard drive using GNU ddrescue

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

Read the whole thread, there's more than approach. I've noted this before I think, but it's newly relevant to me.

Good advice on cleaning up after a crash and a force quit

Apple - Discussions - G3 - after the crash

Apple forum advice for recovering from an 'out of drive space' crash:

... it might be that a force quit left behind some huge cache files, making things worse.

If that's the case, you might locate them by asking File>Find to search for invisible files whose size is, say, greater than 50MB…

Either way if you're trying to clear a G3-vintage disk, it probably needs at least 10% of its total space free to avoid exactly this kind of situation.

Also for future refernce - though you may have already tried it this time - when you get the kind of trouble warning you got, then if you can actually clear the warning it may not be necessary to do anything else but wait. When you've used up pretty well all of both disk and RAM, files that normally open quite quickly can take minutes extra, giving the impression that nothing's happening and making force quit too tempting…

Sharing an address book via dotMac (.Mac)

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

This could be of interest for our family, it would be quite handy to have a family address book. As the TUAW notes, it would be better if one could share a subset of an address book. Maybe there's a workaround ...

Konfabulator -- free for OS X

Update: It's funny how catastrophe strikes. You're driving down the road one day, and wham -- someone caves in the side of your car. Or you're playing with a neat widget, like Konfabulator, and the system locks up. You hear odd recurrent drive noises. You can't shut down. You realize you have Classic running, and Konfabulator's just installed, and Fast User Switching is enabled and somehow a network share has been loaded and a remote DMG mounted, and you wonder how much free space there is on the iBook drive and you sweat. You try to kill the apps that are running, but finally you power off. And that's it. The drive is toast. Beyond repair by Disk Utility.

Was it Konfabulator? The app of which I'd just written:

My new iMac runs Tiger and Dashboard, but my old Panther iBook can't. So I've downloaded Konfabulator, which is now free courtesy of Yahoo's acquisition. Depending on how it works on my iBook, the Panther/Tiger/Windows features of Konfabulatory may have me installing it on Panther too.

PS. My last Retrospect backup was at 3 am this morning and it appears to have run properly -- for once! I've restored my data to another machine it it seems intact. So now I'll see if Retrospect will manage a 'full disaster restore' to the iBook.

Update: Apple's Hardware test is reporting an error code of the form: ata 1/6/13 HD 2,0.
I take this to mean the drive is toast. So Konfabulator might have been an innocent bystander.

Internet Explorer & Mozilla / Firefox: what's different

Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla

This article covered common issues web application developers face when they try to get their applications to work in Mozilla-based browsers. When you develop web applications, always consider possible browser differences and be informed about them. In Resources, you'll find two good references that provide in-depth coverage on cross-browser development. Following those guidelines not only allow your web applications to work in other browsers, but also on other platforms.

I haven't dealt with this sort of detail in years, but I can still follow it. This is the most succinct and useful discussion of the 2005 state of the browesr I've seen. IE is darned ugly.