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I’ve been using Apple’s .Mac Backup since it came out, and although it is a tad slow, it has been usable. Until recently. Now, it’s insisting on spitting out disks halfway through the burn, suggesting there’s something wrong. I can burn disks just fine using Toast or the Finder, so the drive and media are OK. .Mac Backup does take a LONG time to back stuff up (especially to CD or DVD) – there is the initial “how big is the backup” scan stage, followed by the “OK – really backing up now. let’s list all of the files” scan stage. Followed by the “OK – I’ve got the file list, let’s start copying them over to the disk image” stage, followed by “OK – files are copied. I’m actually going to burn a backup now” stage. Followed (finally, if it gets this far) by the “Let’s verify the backup” stage. Takes for freaking ever. When it works at all.

So, I’m looking for options. I had been using a hand-rolled script in Terminal to copy a set of files over (ala rsync) to the disk image for the blank CD or DVD. That works, but I’d rather not have to maintain a script by hand.

What do people use? Do I have to shell out for Retrospect or something similar? Carbon Copy Cloner seems to want to just clone entire drives, so that’s out… Anything else useful and reliable (and hopefully cheap/free)?

I just printed off a set of maps from maps.google.com to help navigate while driving from SFO to Sonoma State University (via downtown San Francisco to pick up Tim at SFMOMA). Incredibly detailed and easy to read maps, with great easy-to-follow descriptions.

I ended up printing off about 6 different maps, for different portions of the trip (zoomed appropriately). Much better than having to lug around a big “Bay Area Streetmap” atlas.

For example – this view of the 101/280 interchanges south of downtown, with the offramp that will get us to SFMOMA (or this cool alternate view using satellite imagery to help get landmarks straight).

I’m just cleaning some files off of my desktop (computer, not physical – although I should really do that, too…) and came across the brief OmniOutliner file I started during the Finding Stuff session at MW2005. Here’s my lame/brief notes, posted here so I can find and remember the acronyms later…

• Searching and museums
  • Sculpteur project (european)
    • CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) semantic representation of items in a collection, and the relationships between them (object is a painting, created by a user, who lived in a city, which was home to these other painters…)
      • Semantic representation of properties and relationships
      • Much richer descriptions than Dublin Core
  • CBIR
    • context-based searching
    • find things with a similar colour/pattern to this one…
  • SRW
    • z39.50 search protocol for interoperability

Not sure if/how I’ll use this, but FreeTag sure sounds cool. It’s a PHP/MySQL magic widget that lets you add folksonomies and tags onto existing MySQL databases…

[via ::schwagbag::: Folksonomy-enabled plugin for database tagging]

Of course, now that tag clouds (folksonomies) are the new mullet…

Kris Krug posted a link to The FlickrVerse, April 2005 – a beautiful poster generated from a subset of Flickr users, and their relationships.

The map isn’t a complete view on the Flickrverse, but on 2367 users – I’m not in there, but Roland Tanglao is.

It seems to validate this research from IBM’s Almaden Research Center that suggests that a map of links between nodes on the web roughly forms a bowtie shape.

The weblogs.ucalgary.ca service is now a full-on podcasting server. It’s so unbelievably easy to publish podcasts using the new Drupal 4.6 software!

The one minor nit that I have to pick is this: If a post with an audio attachment/enclosure is later updated (text added to the blog entry, etc…) then the audio file is downloaded again. This is related to the lack of a <guid /> element in the <item /> element – something simple like using the URL of the post as a guid would work, so aggregators don’t key on the pubDate element – which is updated with subsequent edits to the post, hence the re-downloading of enclosures. More info here.

UPDATE: I hacked my Drupal installation to properly generate the <guid /> element for RSS items in the feed. Simple fix. Add this line after line #717 of includes/common.inc :

$output .= ' <guid isPermaLink="true">' . check_url($link) ."</guid>\n";

(that’s all one line)

I just finished adding the last round of users to the Pachyderm account database. We’re up to 118 beta testers, spread all over North America (and a handful of European and Asian representatives as well).

I got to add each account manually, so I hope I didn’t mess anyone’s names up… Let the bug reports fly!

I just went through the first round of updating the Drupal installation on weblogs.ucalgary.ca – not as seamless as updating a Wordpress installation, but perhaps I’m a bit spoiled there…

If I hadn’t been using any non-stock modules or themes, it may have been a trivial update, but I had to tweak a whole bunch of MySQL tables used by modules (and re-install many of the modules themselves) in order to get things working.

Things still aren’t running 100%, but it’s close. I still need to figure out why the buddylist.module refuses to list the actual buddies, even though it can list the buddy’s posts…

While digging through the list of modules and themes that were updated for Drupal 4.6, I came across the Leaf theme – very nice. Kubrick-esque, but a bit cleaner for the amount of sidebar blocks that are being used in Drupal. I’m using it as the default theme for now (partially because it’s so much cleaner looking than SpreadFirefox – and being overly complex was the biggest single source of feedback I’ve received – and partially because SpreadFirefox still has issues with CSS clear declarations, and I don’t have time to go in and debug the theme at the moment).

I’ve been using SubEthaEdit as my primary text editor for a while now, and have come up with a list of things that would be nice to have in SEE.

• multi-file searching. I just had to revert back to BBEdit to do this so I could modify a whole bunch of XML files. It would be cool if I could perform searches across entire directories (with the option of running recursively…)
• Highlight the current line a bit better. JEdit does this quite nicely, and it makes it very easy to track what I’m doing if I have say 4 open documents. Just have a subtle border, or slightly different background colour on the line containing the text insertion cursor.
• Reformat text. This would indent XML, stylize java, etc… Bonus points for having per-language options like inserting stub javadoc comments into java code, and fixing/flagging invalid XML/HTML

That’s really about it. I had some minor difficulties doing a funky regex-based search, but that speaks more to my (lack of) experience with regex, rather than SEE’s ability to handle proper regex…

UPDATE: As was pointed out in the comments for another SEE-related post, there is a service called “Tidy Service that provides HTML/XHTML reformatting for any Cocoa app. It works perfectly! (especially when you add the optional config file to tweak the layout of reformatted pages – documented here)

Now… what can reformat java source…

If you’re looking for me today – I’ll be out of the office. I just got a call from Janice. Her father was just rushed to the hospital for some unknown (yet) reason, and is in critical condition in the Foothills Hospital. I’m heading home to watch The Boy so she can be at the hospital.

If you have any karma to spare, please send it his way.

Update: Looks like he’s not in critical condition any more. He’s parked in a hallway, so it may be less serious than they initially thought.

Update 2: He’s home now. They have no idea what happened, but he’s on a 24-hour heart monitor to help sort it out…

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