HP 15C emulator for the iPhone

Found this via Cosmic Variance: hpcalc-iphone - Google Code. It's a GPL project, includes the beloved HP-15C. I'll want this one, it will be out with the official SDK.

WD Hard drive - what's the warranty?

I go through hard drives ... like clockwork. Every six months the six work and home machines I maintain need a new hard drive.

None of the brands seem better than any other. I try to pay about $150 - $200 since that seems to the price of reasonably current drives with most of the bugs worked out.

The only other thing I look for is the warranty. Not that I ever bother to use them, but I figure a longer warranty means the manufacturer has a bit more confidence in the product.

Today I had to replace a drive quickly, so I didn't look for a warranty. When installed it, I couldn't find any reference to a warranty period.

I found something on Western Digital's web site when I entered the serial number:

Warranty Check for End User

By default, the warranty date is calculated from the manufacture date. However, if you have proof of purchase, we can update the warranty to calculate it from the purchase date. If you feel that the warranty date needs to be updated from the purchase date, please follow the instructions below.

1. Send us an email from this link:
   http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php
2. Put in "Update warranty" in the subject line.
3. Attach a picture or a scanned copy of your purchase receipt (jpg, jpeg, or gif formats only, max 500KB)
4. Send the email.

The date I was given was 10/2008, or about seven months from now. So I'm guessing the US warranty is one year, but if you don't have a receipt you can still make a claim for a shortened period.

Odd development.

PS. I am getting tired of restoring from backup. I'm planning to at least put NAS storage at home, with a RAID array so I can just swap dead drives without having to do a restore.

Aperture and Time Machine: a joint bug

Apple suggests disabling Time Machine when Aperture is running  :

Time Machine may back up the entire Aperture Library on each run

As a workaround, turn Time Machine off (in Time Machine preferences, in System Preferences). When you want to manually back up, quit Aperture, then choose Back Up Now from Time Machine's menu bar icon (Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later), or by Control-clicking or right-clicking Time Machine in the Dock and choosing Back Up Now.

Translation: We have a nasty bug.

Aperture 2.1 is out -- and the installer is broken ...

I got hit by this bug:

Apple - Support - Discussions - Aperture 2.0.1 doesn't recognize that ...

Aperture 2.0 or later is required to install this update.

The Aperture 2.1 48MB updater doesn't recognize that Aperture 2.01 is installed. I tried various hacks that have worked for others: removing pref files, removing receipts from all prior Aperture installs, removing the Aperture ID file from Pro Apps, deleting Aperture, emptying trash, reinstalling from DVD using an Admin account, etc.

No joy.

Not coincidentally, when I run Software Update I'm not notified of the 2.1 update. On my G5 iMac running 10.4.11 and all security updates there's something broken in the Aperture registration department.

I was able to install the 184MB Aperture 2.1 trial version. It recognized my registration key and it includes the "dodge and burn plugin"

Even after successfully installing 2.1 trial however, the updater still does not work.

Very annoying.

BTW, the sample projects that are installed from the DVD occupy 3GB of disk space. They're stored in Library\Application Support\Aperture.

What Time Machine can and can't do

via DF, I came across a great review of OS X Time Machine backup software. For example:

X.5 Time Machine (Quarter Life Crisis)

...A point that is rather sore as well for me is the fact that Caches folders are completely excluded from backups. By Spotlight’s poor design the Caches folder contains a Metadata folder which applications have to store their data in if they want it to be found in the index. Those metadata files will not be in a backup. As a consequence restoring your system from a backup will leave you with an incomplete Spotlight index until you run all the applications which stored data in the Caches/Metadata folder and make sure they re-create them. Ultimately this is a Spotlight issue, I think, but with Time Machine being made by the same company, they should have had an eye on it...

Quarter Life has an extensive list of critiques: the UI is truly awful, there's no encryption of the backup (!), there's very limited control of what's backed up, etc.

Firewire, USB and SATA performance on Macs

I have an old 3G Firewire iPod and a several USB iPods. The old Firewire iPod is a joy to sync. Extremely fast, instant dismount. The modern USB devices are a pain. My Mac Firewire connected drive feels as fast as an internal drive, my PC USB drives are sluggish.

Gigabit ethernet connected drives, in my experience with my CPUs in heavy use, are much faster than local USB drives and even comparable to local Firewire 400 connections.

This, of course, contradicts the theoretical performance figures for USB drives. It makes me mourn the lost beauty of Firewire 400.

So I really enjoyed this discussion of Firewire, USB and SATA on Macs, with Windows specific footnotes.

AppleInsider | Exploring Time Capsule: theoretical speed vs practical throughput

USB has a faster theoretical maximum than Firewire 400 (400 Mbits/sec; 50 MB/sec), but Firewire 400 is actually much faster than USB because it uses smarter peer to peer interface hardware rather than pushing low level work onto the PC host's CPU as the simpler master to slave architecture of USB does.

On a Mac, Firewire is typically around twice as fast in real world transfer rates, with USB hitting around 18 MB/sec and Firewire reaching 35 MB/sec throughput. Windows' implementation of USB has historically been faster than Mac OS X's, with Windows' USB reaching throughput closer to 33MB/sec..

Firewire on a Mac is far faster than USB on an XP box, I suspect Firewire on XP is comparable to Firewire in OS X and also much faster than USB in real world use (ie. when the CPU is loaded down with other tasks, and so unable to respond to USB demands).

Given my experience I'd expect a USB drive on an gigabit wired Airport base station to be significantly slower than a SATA drive inside a wired Time Machine.  I hope that will be tested in a future post.

The case of the vanishing Outlook Navigation Pane Shortcuts - and how to backup and restore.

On Friday March 21st my customized Outlook 2003 Navigation Pane Shortcuts were fine. On Monday March 24th I they'd vanished.

This has happened before. It's bad, because I really depend on these things.

I don't know why they vanished, though I suspect an update of some sort triggered an old bug. These things are known to be fragile in Outlook 2003. I resolved to come up with a way to restore and back these up, and with a bit of Usenet help I did manage that.

Here's what worked for me.

1. Find out where Outlook stores this data: Microsoft kb: Outlook file locations [1] mostly answered that question. It says these customization are stored in: "drive:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.xml". There's an error in the kb though, the file is not named "outlook.xml". When Exchange Server is in the picture the file is named by the Exchange/Outlook profile. In my case that's "Default Outlook Profile.xml".
   
2. I used our corporate backup software to find the most recent backup prior to when the truncation occurred.
   
3. I saved the last 19KB file to a local folder and used a text editor to extract the portion with the tags: <userdefined> from the backup. Then I exited Outlook and copied it into the current version of this file.
   
4. I then launched Outlook and added ONE new Shortcut to a store in my PST File. If you don't do this you get a "messaging error" when you try to use the old Shortcuts that point into local PST files. My guess is adding a new one forces Outlook to update some binary cache file it won't otherwise update.

I still don't know why my Navigation Pane Shortcuts vanished. They may have been a casualty of something that damaged another part of the "Default Outlook Profile.xml" file. I'll see if it happens again, but from now on I have a backup and an easy way to restore them when they get wiped out.

-- footnotes --

[1] It's astounding how long and complex this list is. Outlook is a very old and rickety piece of software. Slipstick also has a good reference list.

[2] Example:

<userdefined>
        <linkgroup name="PIM">
            <wdLnk>
                <ltype>shortcut</ltype>
                <reckey>2B1967ED1BF9A2489BE8AFD510569E6E</reckey>
                <eid>0000000038......000000000</eid>
                <rootfold>1</rootfold>
                <name>Outlook Today</name>
                <storeid>1</storeid>
                <urlhint></urlhint>
                <clsid>0078060000000000C000000000000046</clsid>
                <icondata></icondata>
            </wdLnk>
            <wdLnk>
                <ltype>shortcut</ltype>
                <reckey>000....E750000</reckey>
                <eid>000000002B1967ED1BF9A2489BE8AFD510569E6E0100BB4E71E8D95434469F02C78FF25B3D85000000981E750000</eid>
                <name>Calendar</name>
                <storeid>1</storeid>
                <clsid>0278060000000000C000000000000046</clsid>
                <icondata></icondata>
            </wdLnk>
....
</userdefined>