Amuyu

OK - now this is an idea that I’ve had in my head for a while and it looks like someone has done it. This service lets you set up “partners” with friends that have big setups to do off-site backups. In essence you set up an off-site encrypted backup at a friends data control facility … I mean home computer setup. The only downside I see is that this is a windows only tool right now.

Anyone out there want to test it out with me?

Zoogmo - Your Online Backup Community: Unlimited. Free. Secure. Automatic:

NetNewsWire has proven itself to be a True Time Saver ™. If nothing else you should attempt to use this and give it a fair shake for a week or two. I won’t go back.

In my never ending search for total nerdery, I came across a quick howto on google adsense. My blog is now adsensified, so if you are so inclined, the few of those of you that come by here, click away on the adds. I’ve tried to make them as unobtrusive as possible.

Hot on the heels of Mac announcing that there’s going to be a an SSD option to their Mac Air, comes the news that EMC is going to offer SSD’s on the Symmetrix: StorageMojo » EMC’s new flash drives. Can’t wait to see what a fully loaded all SSD Symm runs for. My guess is the GNP of Guatemala. However, it should smoke just about anything out there. Finally a good use for all those fancy 4 and 8Gb Fibre HBA’s everyone’s been buying.

Yes! Finally a place to find the newest and bestest quicklook plugins: http://www.qlplugins.com/

My personal favorites so far:

Folder Viewer (now you can see what’s in a folder, not just an icon for the folder)
Zip Viewer (peek into your zip, rar, tar, etc. files without opening them)

The only thing I wish I had was one that let you look at more and older M$ formats. Particularly PowerPoint. Why is it that PPT files are roughly 50/50 on being able to be previewed with quicklook? That’s the format that I use it the most for.

Ever since I loaded up leopard on my mac, I’ve run into a strange issue. Whenever I log in to my account, which was transfered from my original powerbook over to the mac pro via tiger and then upgraded to leopard, I see a long period of disk activity that slows my box down to a crawl for the first 5-10 minutes after logging in. I’ve tried using top to see what’s going on, but all I can find is that a “find” command is being issued by someone. Well, while sitting on a plane ride to Minneapolis today, I stumbled across a shell script I had downloaded a while back. It is a solaris script to run Dtrace and report back on all of the disk activity. I thought for sure that this would help me figure out what’s going on. Well, when I fired it up, it first complained that I wasn’t root. A quick “su -” later and I ran it again. That got me a “: probe description io:genunix::start does not match any probes”. Doh! Being the nerd boy I proceeded to see if there’s a list of the probes that are supported to see if I could modify this script. At a minimum this was going to take me through the rest of the flight.

I was wrong.

Apple developer tools provide you with a cool GUI dtrace under the aptly named /Developer/Applications/Instruments.app!

So, I fired this guy up and figured that it would take another hour or so to figure this thing out. Nope, the very first thing it does is provide you with a wizard where you can select some predefined trace packages. One of them is called “File Activity”. Select that and then make sure to change your selection to “All Processes”

Hit the record button and Voila! All the disk IO activity measurements you’d ever want. Now it’s just a matter of tracing back the culprit and I should have this nailed down quickly. More on this as it develops.

Take a read through all of the “fixes” that they are focusing on in this release patch. Maybe this will make leopard as stable as tiger?

Mac OS X 10.5.2 update to bring endless list of fixes | MacScoop:

OK - So it’s the new year. Time to get back to doing this stuff. Here’s a cool tidbit. Just started using this thing and it looks like it’s going to be a good time sucker and also quite possibly OOTT. I’ll post back on that later. Check this article out.

NetNewsWire For OSX is now free!:
NewsGator announced on Wednesday the release of NetNewsWire 3.1. More importantly for many users, the company will be making the RSS reader available to all customers for free.

For the few of you that read this blog, sorry about the lack of posts for the last few months. No reason other than I just didn’t feel like it.

OK - with that said, how about another back to the future nerd geek thing? For years, when my UNIX/Mac system runs out of disk space or quota, I’ve been doing a manual “du -sk * | sort -n >/tmp/tt” routine to find out what subdirs have the most stuff in them. Then I would iterate through the subdirs until I found the stuff that needed to be whacked. I hate doing this stuff, but I haven’t really found a good GUI/CLI tool to fix this problem. Well, that is until I found NCDU. Joy! It’s a curses based “du” utility with an interactive ability to play whack-a-mole. Version 1.1 has compiled fine on my Macs (intel, powerpc) and my Linuxen. Here’s a few screen shots of what happens:

1) Startup

2) Calculating

3) Time to start digging:

4) Into my pictures directory

5) Some help

6) Whack-a-mole

So now, my time to total space reclamation (TSR) has gone from essentially never, to a few minutes.

Sweet.

ps Here’s a quicky Mac hint. To get the window shots above, I did a command-shift-4, then spacebar, and then a click on the window I wanted to capture. Built-in to Tiger (not sure about before). It drops a PNG file onto your desktop.

For the few of you that read this blog, sorry about the lack of posts for the last few months. No reason other than I just didn’t feel like it.

OK - with that said, how about another back to the future nerd geek thing? For years, when my UNIX/Mac system runs out of disk space or quota, I’ve been doing a manual “du -sk * | sort -n >/tmp/tt” routine to find out what subdirs have the most stuff in them. Then I would iterate through the subdirs until I found the stuff that needed to be whacked. I hate doing this stuff, but I haven’t really found a good GUI/CLI tool to fix this problem. Well, that is until I found NCDU. Joy! It’s a curses based “du” utility with an interactive ability to play whack-a-mole. Version 1.1 has compiled fine on my Macs (intel, powerpc) and my Linuxen. Here’s a few screen shots of what happens :

1) Startup

2) Calculating

3) Time to start digging:

4) Into my pictures directory

5) Some help

6) Whack-a-mole

So now, my time to total space reclamation (TSR) has gone from essentially never, to a few minutes.

Sweet.

ps Here’s a quicky Mac hint. To get the window shots above, I did a command-shift-4, then spacebar, and then a click on the window I wanted to capture. Built-in to Tiger (not sure about before). It drops a PNG file onto your desktop.