frakendirary

Time Machine is Mac OS X’s backup solution. It supports incremental backups. Which is really the way to go. But I avoided it because of the email program I use: MacSOUP. Like most email programs it keeps individual messages in large files. I currently have 2.3 gigabytes of email. The actual implementation MacSOUP uses is to have a file for each mailbox.

My largest mailbox is 600 megabytes. The file grows every time I get email, dozens of times per day. This will cause a problems for me because my backup hard drive is the same size as my main drive. This means the drive will fill up very fast and I will have few incremental snap shots to choose from.

Apple got around this problem for Mail.app by keeping email messages in their own separate files. So Time Machine’s file based incremental backup fits nicely with that scheme.

I recently learned about the new bundle version of Apple’s sparse disk image format. Using this image format can really help keep Time Machine incremental backups from filling up the back up hard drive.

First some definitions. A disk image is a file on your computer that you can mount as a hard drive. It is becoming very common for software to be released on disk images. Like real hard drives, disk images have a maximum amount of data they can hold. A sparse disk image keeps the image file small and it will grow as you increase the amount data stored on the image. A sparse disk image bundle uses many 8 megabyte files to contain the image data. The small files are created as needed and writes to the disk image only modify the individual files that have changes.

This fits very nicely with Time Machine. MacSOUP can use it’s large files to store email and Time Machine has it’s small files for incremental backup.

Tidbits has a nice tutorial on how to create these sparse disk image bundles.

After copying all of my MacSOUP data to the mounted disk image, I made an alias of the MacSOUP settings file. The alias file resides in my documents folder. I then added that alias to my dock. When I click the alias, the system is smart enough to mount the disk image if needed and then open the file which starts MacSOUP.

How did Billy go from being handcuffed on the bench to the inside a Brock’s duffle bag?

To no one’s surprise, I look at my search referrers quite often. Just now I saw someone search for “a1 a1 fb” and actually click on one of the pages I’ve written on the subject.

I thought this was interesting. I’ll leave the meaning of “a1 a1 fb” undisclosed at this point in time. But it is pretty arcane. Whoever searched on this, I applaud you!

The new icon is 1150 bytes while the old one was 1406 bytes. That is quite a bit smaller. Should reduce the load on Google’s servers considerably.

Finally a clear article describing what NBC wants from Apple:

Microsoft May Build A Copyright Cop Into Every Zune

I really like the last bit:

Mr. Perrette said NBC understands the potential resistance. “In the short term, this will not win us a lot of friends,” he said. “In the long term, the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it.”

I have some advice for NBC to ensure their success:

1. Stop giving away their content for free (Over the air).
2. Screw their customers (Filters everywhere).
3. Profit.

The newest scam in the certificate business is EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. If you pay more money, then you get a more “secure” certificate.

But the reality is the certificate is no more secure then any other. All you get is a green tinted tool bar in the web browser. You only get this green tinted tool bar if your browser publisher decides to implement this feature.

This is completely backwards.

The contents of an SSL certificate is really important, it needs to be presented to the user. All web browsers I have used have given the option for the user to view the certificate and this is good. But we need more. I think the chain of trust should be displayed above the web page every time a certificate is accepted by the browser. This section should not be removable or modifiable. No more “trusting” https. No need to buy overpriced certificates.

Here are some videos of my children:

First At Bat
Escaping

And something different:

Hilarious Muppets Bloopers!

It all went downhill after the purple horseshoes.

I don’t understand the need for services such as tinyurl and others like them. They obfuscate links. I pretty much refuse to use them, either as a consumer or a producer.

They seems to have been started because emailing links to web pages caused a lot of problems. Many email programs will insert line breaks on long lines of text. This will usually corrupt the URL.

But they are completely unnecessary in modern email clients. Now I see some forum moderators are demanding URLs to be shortened when posting content. Again, completely unnecessary because most forum software include tags to allow the naming of URLs.

On the CoCoaDev mailing list it was revealed that the MacBook Air’s operating system has it’s symbols stripped. That is an interesting step to take. I can only assume it is because of the small(-sh) hard drive that the machine comes with.