Vita Rara: A Life Uncommon - Mac OS X

Solution for Very Slow Time Machine Backup

Mark — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:33:27 -0500

Tonight I added an additional external disk to my Time Machine managed backups. This leaves me with the following configuration:

Drobo with 2 * 500GB HD acting as the Time Machine Disk
250 GB Internal being backed up by Time Machine
2 * 250 GB FW External Drives being backed up by Time Machine

After adding the second external drive to the Time Machine Backup I kicked off a backup manually. I proceeded to ignore it and do some coding. After a few hours it hadn't completed backing 40G of data. I did a rough calculation and it was averaging aproximately 300-400 kBs. Needless to say that's is quite disappointing. At first I suspected the Drobo. (I'll admit I'm not a USB fan.) After some searching I realized it probably wasn't the Drobo.

OS X Leopard: First Impressions and Installation Solutions

Mark — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:45:01 -0400

I picked up my copy of Leopard on Friday evening and dove into an upgrade on my Mac Pro on Saturday. Things didn't go as smoothly as I would have hoped. I fell prey to two issues that long time users of OS X are most susceptible to.

My current account started out on OS X 10.1, and has been migrated from a G4, to a G5, to my Mac Pro. Accounts that are this old need to have their authentication credentials reset, or they don't work. [Solution]
For some reason I had Application Enhancer installed on my machine, which caused the Leopard Blue Screen of Death/Love.[Solution]

MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo

Mark — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:00:31 -0500

I picked up a new MacBook Pro (MBP) Core 2 Duo on Friday. This is a replacement for my iBook G4 1.3GHz I purchased in the fall of '04. This is my third Apple laptop, and my first professional model. My other one was an iBook G3 700MHz model.

I spent most of Saturday moving into and getting comfortable with the MBP. This is my fourth OS X migration since switching to a Mac. All in all they have gone impressively well, and this one was just more of the same. Boot the Mac for the first time, hook the firewire cable to the old machine and wait. When it's done it's your machine, with all of your files, settings, applications, etc. Apple has really made the process of moving from machine to machine a painless exercise.

Mac OS X RSS Readers

Mark — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:15:37 -0400

I've decided that I need to make my web browsing and information collection more efficient in order to raise my level of productivity. I've been spending far too much time tracking websites of both professional and personal interest that I like. So, I decided it was time to check out RSS readers.

Additionally I've decided that there are a number of Blogs that I'd like to track that don't produce a lot of new content. Just a few articles per week at the most. It doesn't make sense to visit these sites every day, and I don't want to use something like Technorati. I really want to stay off sites that will get me browsing ad-hoc, and stay focused on the information I need to know about while ignoring the rest.

Cute Apple Laptop Feature

Mark — Thu, 3 Aug 2006 15:45:17 -0400

This morning Sylva discovered a neat feature on her PowerBook, it also worked on my iBook. If you hit Control-option-apple-8 it will reverse the video. It basically turns your display into a negative of what it really is. It could be helpful in areas with high glare, where the typical white backgrounds don't work well.

Eclipse

Mark — Wed, 2 Aug 2006 10:15:09 -0400

Yesterday I decided that it was time to check out Eclipse. My development environment for years has consisted of screen, vi, and ant. I have evolved what I feel felt was an efficient system. But, as with all new beginnings it was time to take a look around and see what was out there. The obvious thing to look at was Eclipse.

I tried Eclipse some time ago, in the 2.1 era if I recall. It just wasn't stable on Mac OS X at that time and really put me off of it. My old environment was rock solid. It never quit on me and I could log in remotely, do a 'screen -dr' and have my environment right there.