betting on the wrong horse

Apple M$ technology

Years ago when both Microsoft and Apple decided what to put into their next operating systems they had to look into the future. Picking arbritrary one from each company makes for an interesting comparison: Vista got a feature where a memory stick could be used by the operating system to speed things up. Harddrives are 10,000 times slower than memory. USB2 still 10 to 40 times faster than most drivers. Makes allot of sense. It is probably a very tricky thing to implement: the user can remove the stick at any time, and things still need to work. Trouble is: Internal memory got dirt cheap. So a complicated and expensive idea that has no future net gain.

Compare that to “TimeMachine”. The actual concept of a backup is nothing new or innovative at all. But Time Machine makes it possible that people back up easily. External drives are inexpensive and easy to use. Makes 100% sense. The TimeCapsule rip off lets show apples dark side again. But at least they did not extend it to normal drives. The value of a working backup is huge. Once people have stories to tell that TimeMachine saved their Live they are sold for good and forever to run only Macs. Maybe if hey will backup to Memory Sticks in the future …

Astrovlog

technology

If you ever wondered what those astronauts are doing up there:

vloging

TimeMachine and the curse of Version1

Apple OSX

minutes after raving about the current Spotlight install TimeMachine throws a fit. It is actually pretty stupid. From my syslog:


Apr 29 08:40:09 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Starting standard backup
Apr 29 08:40:09 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Backing up to: /Volumes/300GB/Backups.backupdb
Apr 29 08:40:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 58.48 GB requested (including padding), 184.42 GB available
Apr 29 08:40:18 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (/Volumes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexAddOids:Caught mach exception. Fun Fun Fun.
Apr 29 08:41:18 99-204-104-71 login[3737]: USER_PROCESS: 3737 ttys001
Apr 29 08:41:51 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (/Volumes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)(Error) IndexGeneral in notify_lowspace:low space for device 234881029 (/Vol
umes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)
Apr 29 08:41:51 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (Error) Volume: LOW DISK SPACE device:234881029

Apr 29 09:29:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Error: Flushing index to disk returned an error: -916
Apr 29 09:29:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Copied 27544 files (48.3 GB) from volume 232.
Apr 29 09:29:26 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 471.6 MB requested (including padding), 135.99 GB available
Apr 29 09:29:26 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)
...
Apr 29 09:35:41 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)

last line looping forever, so I stopped it and got:


Apr 29 09:46:08 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Copied 0 files (0 bytes) from volume 232.
Apr 29 09:46:08 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Backup canceled.

spotlight to find purchased music

Apple OSX

A while back people sold music with DRM. Don’t ask. It turns out that it is terribly easy to find these files:


mdfind kMDItemContentType == com.apple.protected-mpeg-4-audio

in a terminal window will list all purchased music. Apple did with Spotlight what Microsoft was known for in the 90s: Releasing a great concept. Hardly working / usable in it’s first Version, but then getting it right in the later updates. Spotlight is actually quiet useful under OS X 10.5.

golden dragon

misc

no backup will get you

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

Douglas the movie No idea what it was. Looks like allot of work is gone. That can happen.

Digital is binary:

Your data either can be 100% safe. Safer than anything before. Ever.

Or it goes away. Completely. Nothing left.

The real world operates only in matters like life and death on such a binary pattern. Otherwise there is often stuff left. Something to be saved, recovered. Not so in digital.

Google App Engine Error: Over Quota

internet technology

After reading a couple of intro pages I suddenly get this error message at 7:20 am Pacific:

App Engine Error

Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

I have not even created an application yet. Actually I am glad I did not: I would have blamed myself for this. Probably would have panicked, thinking that my application would have caused all sorts of trouble.

I wonder how many applications will be built based on this offering. It is tempting to have all those resources. But being 100% depending on one vendor is a strange feeling. No matter what the legal stuff says, you always are depending on Google. Who else would be able to build a competing infrastructure?

Nature – human one

daily life

The wrong Craigslist add can cause allot of damage.

Interesting here I find the people in the truck that rejected to give the owner his stuff back. It would be short sighted to say “those people” and how “they could do such thing”. Fact is, everybody wants to believe in personal gain. Much more attractive than reality it seems. Lottery tickets are the same deal. And such was the Bush Bubble Boom. People wanted to believe that their house made them more money than they could have gained via serious work. They wanted this to be true. After all it was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. It’s human nature. The Fed and the administration failed to act while the bubble was building. They actually encouraged it with their monentary decission. “The economy is strong” said the man from Crawford. What a moron. Some people got rich. Super filthy mega rich. It was Enron all over again. Just that it was not one company but the whole country. Quiet interesting if just printing dollars as fast as they can will get things corrected. Doubtfully so .

But human nature is also to settle for simple fairly tails instead to look at the grim realities. So let see who will be blamed for the disentegration of american wealth.

a better place

daily life misc

The world would be a better place if people looking for a free spot in a parking structure only wait for a car to exit after that car is showing the lights indicating that it is in rear gear. If those white lights are not on yet then you just pass it. Simple.

people, programmers and bosses

history technology

Paul Graham writes about people, programmers and bosses. I agree. He left out to mention much came from the Google 20% projects. It does support his theory.

I often wonder myself how big companies can actually stay in business. There is real work. When stuff gets done. The core. Things get made. Be it a line of code or a shoe. And then there is all the work around it: To pay the heating bills for the building that the bean counter sits in that supervises the expenses of the health care plan of the person that buys the spare parts for the forklifts that move the pakaging for the shoes from one side to the next.

Since technology can facilitate inter company communication and collaboration it might be that we will see allot of small companies that work one project. As long interfaces between these unit remain efficient they can keep the initiative of a small group and still work on a project that is of larger size. In an ideal world these groups would compete on clearly defined terms which would optimise everything very very fast.