Retrospect Professional 8 backup of VMware VM corrupt on restore

I've been using Retrospect Professional 8 to backup a Windows 7 machine. That machine has VMware VM running.

There have been no backup errors.

Recently I had to do a restore of the VM. All seemed fine. The size was right. When I ran it, however, the VM was corrupt.

The VM is made up of many large files. I think Retrospect backed some up at different times, depending on metadata changes, file locked, etc. Normally that would be fine, but they all had to be the same version for the VM to work.

Fortunately I had a completely separate manual all-at-once backup done when VMWare was turned off. It was a few days old, but we didn't lose anything significant. Sometimes paranoia is a good strategy.

A cautionary tale! Virtual machine backup is tricky.

Curious OS X bug with audio CDs - missing track names on most machines

I have a CD-R containing music that, when inserted in a 10.5.8 machine shows track names. When I insert the same CD in a 10.6 and a different 10.5.8 machine I don't see the track names.

The machine that shows the track names is running iTunes 9.1 and is very old. The machines that don't show them are running 9.2.

It's 100% repeatable. I think it's either a bug with the new iTunes or something to do with old hardware.

Very strange.

Grandma's iPad stand

I wanted a stand so Grandma's iPad could show family photos while it charges.

I picked up the plastic frame shown here for $6 from a local hardware store. The iPad is in the $25 Griffin case (yes, it blocks the rotation lock, the power switch is beneath a tab so I just push on the tab) folded back on itself. The power cord plugs into the right side.



It works well. It's easy to add and remove the iPad without removing the case.

Accessible iPad - the best apps are web apps

I'm getting to the end of configuring Grandma's iPad, but I'll call out one finding early.

For someone with low vision, Safari is the killer app. It has full screen reader support, and you can expand many (but not all) web pages with a pinch expand (spread apart).

This isn't true of all standalone apps.  For example, the pretty but limited NYT Editors' Choice for iPad doesn't seem to work with the screen reader and you can't change the small font. The NYT web site though, is a pleasure to navigate using Safari.

Alas, not all web sites are Safari zoom friendly. The iPad optimized Gmail site can't be zoomed, so it ends up being relatively inaccessible.

As I configure her device I'm adding several web sites that are pinch-zoom friendly. Ironically, these have to be generic sites. iPad optimized sites are much less low vision friendly.

iPhone OS Calendar deletes Exchange server recurring appointments if you delete an instance

Mind blowing bug that's been around since 2008 ... Apple's Potemkin iOS exchange support - the problem with being a peripheral customer.

MarsEdit 3 - you're no Windows Live Writer

I bought MarsEdit 3. After a couple of months of use I'd give it a B+. It's much better than anything else on OS X for publishing to Blogger, but it's a weak shadow of Microsoft's (abandoned) Windows Live Writer (Win only).

The image handling is particularly weak. On the other hand the bugs aren't too awful and the customer support is superb. I'd love to see Red Sweater study WLW and emulate as many features as possible.

The real competitor on OS X is Google's own web based editor. If Google were to put their A team on blogger I think MarsEdit would get squashed. They're not going to do that though, and the current team can't even get paragraphs working. So there's an opening for MarsEdit. I hope they squeeze through ...

Update 8/7/10: I threw MarsEdit off my drive after it produced a complete hash of a post. It looked fine in MarsEdit's wysiwyg editor, but it was a mess in Blogger. I had to fire up an XP VN and use Windows Live Writer to repair the damage. Using a rich text editor as a proxy for a true HTML editor is a bad idea.

Apple’s antenna calculations, iMac and Dell capacitors, and the Anandtech iPhone review

When I wrote that it's best to buy an iPhone in September, I didn't know of the antenna and proximity sensor malfunctions.

Since then we've learned that iPhone 4 has problems with its proximity sensor; it fails to turn off the screen when it's held by a caller's face, so it's easy to accidentally disconnect. We've also learned of an antenna design issue.

The antenna problem was thoroughly discussed in one of the best iPhone reviews (see also: Gruber, Pogue, Ars)

Apple's iPhone 4: Thoroughly Reviewed - AnandTech

... The main downside to the iPhone 4 is the obvious lapse in Apple's engineering judgment. The fact that Apple didn't have the foresight to coat the stainless steel antenna band with even a fraction of an ounce worth of non-conductive material either tells us that Apple doesn't care or that it simply doesn't test thoroughly enough. The latter is a message we've seen a few times before with OS X issues, the iPhone 4 simply reinforces it. At the bare minimum Apple should give away its bumper case with every iPhone 4 sold. The best scenario is for Apple to coat the antenna and replace all existing phones with a revised model.The ideal situation is very costly for Apple but it is the right thing to do. Plus it's not like Apple doesn't have the resources to take care of its customers....

The reviewer has an engineering background (the description of the camera sensor technology is the best I've seen) and he hacked a way to measure the iPhone 4's antenna performance. Turns out that the iPhone "bars" display is almost meaningless -- anything less than 4-5 bars is a very marginal signal. Apple isn't the only company to cheat this way.

More importantly, there is a real problem with Apple's antenna design. On average it's mostly better than the iPhone 3G/3GS antenna, but to get the best results you need a case, like Apple's $30 bumper covers, to keep fingers away from antenna junctions.

The Anand team speculates that Apple goofed up on design or testing, or that they don't care. I doubt it.

I am sure Apple engineers knew about this problem. Maybe it was always a known problem, or maybe there was supposed to be a coating applied that ended up being unavailable. Most likely a problem came up not far from the release date, otherwise I think Apple would have come up with a fix of some kind.

Apple's management tried the phone, looked at the analyses, and decided to launch without a mitigation strategy. Maybe they'd been studying the Dell Way. Maybe they figured most people buy a case, most of the rest are in areas with non-marginal coverage, and AT&T customers are used to dropped calls.

They might have gotten away with it, just as they got away with blown Nichicon capacitors in the G5 iMac or the loose video cable in my i5 iMac, but the problem turned out to be even worse than they'd expected. It went viral.

Apple's still trying to tough it out, following a service script ...

1. Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important…

2. Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns…

4. … ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.

5. We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.

The pressure is building though, so I think Apple will do something to appease us. I think they'd be fine if they offered to sell the bumpers with an iPhone for $10 instead of $30, and give a $20 App Store voucher to current i4 owners. (They may not have enough bumpers to go around though.) Really the phone should ship with the bumpers, but they don't look so good in demos.

By the time I buy in September, I expect Apple will have fixes for the antenna and proximity sensor bugs. Honestly, September is the time to buy.