Apple Discussions - The User Tips Library

The Apple - Support - Discussions - User Tips Library is an impressive albeit idiosyncratic collection of tips on OS X.

For example: Changes in DNS resolution in Mac OS X ... explained a few things that puzzled me (and reminded me that Apple's OS X engineers seem a bit overwhelmed these days).

I've subscribed to the feed for this library:

feed://discussions.apple.com/rss/rssthreads.jspa?forumID=599
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Choosing a DNS: What namebench showed me

I use OpenDNS for its domain blocking properties and I switch OS X Location to GoogleDNS when I want to bypass the filters [1]. I used to use my ISP's (Qwest) DNS servers.

So what did Google's free cross-platform Namebench DNS Server testing utility show me?

OpenDNS was my fastest option at 72 ms. [2]However OpenDNS is "hijacking" "google.com" and "www.thepiratebay.org". Google didn't have any good explanations of this, but (interestingly) Bing did (first time I've had Google fail and Bing succeed).

The hit Google omitted, but Bing showed, explained that OpenDNS proxies Google because of an evil trick Dell and Google have played on Dell customers for two years. Funny how Google missed that one.

I couldn't find any explanation of OpenDNS hijacking of "thepiratebay.org".

After OpenDNS came UltraDNS then General Mills-MG1 US and Google Public DNS. Google was 50% slower for us than OpenDNS.

[1] Even in Snow Leopard every machine user gets the same Location settings and, except for Simple Finder, any user can change it. Sooner or later the kids will figure out how we are getting around OpenDNS blocks and we'll have to do something else.

[2] There's a meaningless 1ms overhead because the LAN DNS is my AirPort which in turn goes through my Qwest modem.

Update 1/24/10: When I revised some DNS information at Dreamhost, OpenDNS updated quickly but Google didn't.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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