To have my data secured I run (almost) daily backups using a custom script to my NAS system. Over there, at the great, little Linux box, runs a script that does daily increments using rsnapshot. There is also another script that keeps a copy on an external WebDAV server up-to date.
Implementing this was not that simple – as the NAS itself does not support mounting WebDAV servers natively I had to use a PHP script, which required patching the PEAR WebDav Client (digest auth, block size, stat entries) but eventually I got it working at a reasonable speed (8k block size does not make sense for a HTTP based protocol!). The big benefits – my computers don’t have to run to upload the data, the NAS is doing that work and it is running 24/7 anyway.

End of story, zero maintenance required.

Until I tried to switch from Bingodisk to Apple’s iDisk.

For some reason the backup on the iDisk always included hidden files, despite the fact that they have not been changed and already existed on the disk. Some simple investigation has shown that the iDisk server simply did not return any file that started with a dot (.). But why?
Packet sniffing revealed that there are some differences between the PHP request and the one sent by OS X, but even after modifying the PHP code there were no hidden files included. Last difference – the mysterious X-Source-Id header – but adding that also had no impact. Eventually, after digging in the source code, I figured the change that is needed – as stated on top of the InitUserAgentHeaderValue function:

IMPORTANT: The user-agent header MUST start with the
product token “WebDAVFS” because there are WebDAV servers
that special case this client.

Clear, concise and exactly what I needed to do – as soon as I sent this header iDisk responded with a file listing including hidden files!
I still have no clue why iDisk makes this difference, but it is good to know how to be able to run full backups including hidden files over WebDAV!

Since the review of Todo and Things a lot of things happened (and I don’t mean the US elections!) and recently a new Todo application has been added to Apples AppStore – the Remember The Milk app for the iPhone. Time to compare it with Appigo’s Todo application, which I use since September and was updated several times since then.

Remember The Milk for iPhone
It was just a matter of time until RTM would launch their own application. And while Todo can also sync with RTM this app is of course highly optimized for the own service. It features everything needed for GTD so I just want to outline the postive and negative highlights:

• RTM supports tags, locations and searching for tasks.
• It even allows saving the searches (“smart searches”) and re-use them at a later time – a very handy feature!
• The biggest drawback is the requirement for a Remember The Milk Pro account which costs USD 25,- per year. So while the application seems to be free it requires yearly payments to keep the service up and running.
• Another feature I was missing is “quick adding”, which is available in Todo. In RTM you have click many more times to simply add a task without further options to the Inbox. In Todo just click the quick-add button, enter the task title and press “Done” to add the task (with the default settings) to the current list. Very handy to take quick notes at any time.
• Also I dislike the blue title bar, which perfectly fits with the RTM corporate identity but makes the app look like any 99 cent todo application out there…

Todo (Appigo)
Since the last review two new releases have been published by Appigo. While the first one “only” contained bug fixes and translations the update to version 1.4 introduced a lot of great new features:

• Todo now supports contexts, which are automatically synced with Toodledo.
• It also syncs tags, which are a very handy way to categorize tasks even further.
• Todo learned searching tasks, unfortunately it does not offer to store the search like RTM does. Maybe this is included in a future release?

Whom to choose this time?
Based on the pros/cons above the USD 25,- price tag for the Remember The Milk application seems a bit high to me. Certainly you get a lot of options and access to one of the best GTD list managers out there. Nevertheless if you already have a working system it is not worth switching and migrating all your tasks, especially because both Appigo and Toodledo are updating their products constantly.
If you start from scratch also check out Toodledo for the iPhone, which supports all features available but yet has to proof that it is working as reliable as Todo.

Happy Foto ist ein qualitativ sehr guter Anbieter von Online-Ausarbeitungen welcher (als Ausnahme am Markt!) auch eine Mac-Version seiner Software anbietet. An sich wirklich sehr löblich nicht nur auf Windows-User zu schauen. Leider lässt sich diese Software auf meinem System aber nicht starten – in /var/log/system.log wird nur folgendes ausgegeben:

2008-10-21 10:28:01.810 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_USE_SETCURRENTCONTEXT_NIL=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE=1
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE_VIA_CG=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER_VIA_ENV=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.872 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting

Sehr lästig, das Programm-Icon verschwindet nach rund 2 Sekunden wieder. Das wars. Keine Fehlermeldung für unerfahrene Benutzer. Grund ist laut Hotline die “ungewöhnliche” Spracheinstellung meines Systems – Englisch. Nun ja, ich verstehe ja, dass Happy Foto nicht alle Sprachen dieser Erde unterstützt, aber das Programm sollte zumindest in der Standardsprache Deutsch starten, falls keine Lokalisierung verfügbar ist.

Der Helpdesk konnte nicht weiterhelfen – “Umstellen auf Deutsch” ist aber nicht wirklich eine Option für mich. Hier also die Lösung für alle die den Terminal starten und bedienen können:

cd HappyFoto-Designer 1.0.app/Contents/Resources
cp -R German.lproj/ English.lproj

Das legt eine Kopie der deutschen Sprachdateien an und fortan startet der Happy Foto Designer für den Mac auch auf einem englischem System. Endlich ist der Happy, der Foto Designer!

A great conference is over! The Ajax Experience took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2008 in Boston and was packed with great talks – sometimes four of them in parallel! So it was very hard to decide between learning about security (beyond XSS and SQL injection!), the newest Ajax frameworks (i.e. Cappuccino – check out 280Slides, it’s worth it!) or performance improvements (Steve Souders had great stuff again!).

So it’s really hard to give a recap of what happened – so much things have been going on. One item I take for me as programmer is about how to improve my designs – it’s all about CRAP.

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A lot of different effects can be achieved by just focusing on these four items and that’s one of the reasons why this Website is now a bit lighter than it was before the conference

Another interesting session has been “Top 10 browser issues” with quirksmode.org creator ppk. On stage with him the persons behind the four major JavaScript frameworks Prototype (Andrew Dupont), Dojo, YUI and jQuery (John Resig).
This session was a pretty good overview about where the projects will be heading and what you can expect from them in the future – because in the end it depends on a single person…

Regarding performance improvements I want to highlight SmushIT.com, a new Web application (and a Firefox plugin) that automatically optimizes images for Web sites. Great, simple and just working. It’s good to see new tools coming up that simplify tasks which had to be performed manually a year ago – another great sample is Hammerhead. Also note that Yahoo added 20 additional rules to their existing 14 “golden” performance rules.

Finally I wanna restate the sentence from the beginning of this post – “A great conference is over!“. It gave a great overview about what is happening in the Web 2.0 world and fostered networking with other developers outside of the own company!

Since the Apple AppStore launched I was looking for a ToDo application – the iPhone itself does not synchronize iCal ToDo’s and it also only offers a simple list. No way to implement GTD with iCal. Until now all free applications in the AppStore turned out to be very basic and a one-way solution. Enter task on the iPhone, view them there, that’s it. But it would be great to have a Desktop app to also manage my tasks, synchronization and an open interface to my data.

Finally there are two canditades which I’m going to review – Appigo’s Todo and Things from CulturedCode. These candidated have been chosen because of their price tag and because they had a lot of positive reviews within the AppStore. Please note that I did the review without actually buying the apps as only the winner will make it onto my iPhone.

Things (CulturedCode)
According to the screen designs a very clean, iPhone like interface is offered; not like some free apps which hinder the workflow and look… Java based. More important, what else is offered?

• Things stores its data as XML which allows to re-use it easily.
• CulturedCode offers a native desktop application for the Mac to sync the data with.
• The data is synced locally and not stored on an external server.
• The costs for the desktop application are pretty high – 49 USD.
• The application is Mac only right now.

Todo (Appigo)
The screen design of Todo looks very similar than of its competition – it’s “just” a Todo application, so there is not a lot of room for innovation (but a lot can go wrong – check out the Freebies!). Lets talk about the unique features of Todo:

• Todo is able to sync its data to Remember The Milk (pro account only) or Toodledo.
• Syncing is done over the air, so it’s not as secure as a local synchronization.
• I had a deeper look into Toodledo – even in its free version it offers a lot of features including a simple, open API, a Firefox plugin, Dashboard integration etc.
• Toodledo is free, the Pro account is reasonable priced ($14.95/year!), but not needed.

Whom to choose?
Based on the bullets above I’m going to invest my money into Appigo’s Todo application. The main reason is the synchronization with Tooledo, which offers an API and seems to have a larger community behind it. Yes, I cannot store confidential information there, but in days of social networks a secured Todo account with a strong password is not that much of a problem compared to public profiles at social networking sites. And I can access my Todos whenever I have a browser available, no need for a Mac. Let’s see how it goes!

I’ll blog more about Todo, GTD and Toodledo in the future, just subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date. And another wish for Apple – would be great to test apps out of the AppStore for i.e. a day without any payment!

This morning I discovered that I have more than 1000 contacts in my “Personal Address book” within Thunderbird. What the he*k? Why are there so many duplicates, addresses from spammers, mailing lists etc. I definitely never added to my Personal Address Book? Seems to be mixed with the “Collected Addresses”, where Thunderbird collects all this crap for me. But why?

I’m using the Sync Kolab plugin to sync my addresses between various computers using IMAP – a smart way of using the protocol to keep contacts in sync. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup Sync Kolab on a new computer – I mixed up “Collected Addresses” and “Personal Address book” which caused the mess. Not a big deal to fix – just change the settings, remove unwanted addresses and sync again. But wait – Sync Kolab does not really sync! It just adds addresses, but it never removes them. It also does not seem to detect obvious duplicates (same name, same address, same fields!). As soon as I start the sync process the locally removed addresses are added back to my Address Book. Not very smart. Resetting all the IMAP data does not work as well – the other computers will again add all the addresses.

So what are the alternatives to Sync Kolab? One option is to wait until Thunderbird 3 is released (end of 2008), as it supports the usage of the Mac Address Book. Which syncs itself using me.com. Which does real syncing including deletions and works flawlessy so far. There are costs involved, but that’s fine as the syncronization between the Macs and the iPhone is really worth the money. Of course then switching to the Mac Mail application is an option as well, unfortunately it does not support everything Thunderbird does – Mac Mail seems to be more “basic” – but I’ll leave that open for a future blog post. In the meanwhile feel free to research on your own.

Do you regularly create backups of your data? Just in case the harddisk decides to die? Or anything else happens to your computer?
I sort of do. “Sort of” means that I used to run a backup only about once a month – then I started iBackup and waited for about 3-4 hours until it finished the backup to my NAS system (which I bought exactly 2 1/2 weeks before Apple announced its TimeCapsule ). Way too long for just an incremental backup. The reason for this lengthy incremental backup is that iBackup uses SMB to connect to the NAS – which means it transfers too much data to just check if it has been changed since the last backup.

Time to create my own script – a bit of Bash scripting, rsync with an exclude file and an Automator workflow – voila, my incremental backups are now executing in about 5 minutes! Perfect for daily backups via cron and way better than the old backup “process” which took a few hours!

Here is the script: rsyncbackup.sh.txt. Feel free to adopt it as needed!

So my recommendation to everyone – review your backup process, it has to be simple, painless and fast. Otherwise you are not going to use it! Which brings up Mozy – why not using this great, unlimited online backup service? My personal reason is that I don’t want my Mac to be running to do the uploads – that’s what my NAS does in the background – and that I already own a me.com account as well as a 50GB Bingodisk account. No need for another service…

Innerhalb von 10 Jahren hat Bechtolsheim aus 100.000 Dollar durch eine gezielte (?) Investition über 500 Millionen gemacht. Durch eine Investition in die damals noch unbekannte Firma Google. Wozu ich ihm und auch Google zum Geburtstag herzlich gratulieren möchte!

Google hatte mit dem 2002 eingeführten Adwords die immer noch schlanke Suchmaschine zu einer Gelddruckmaschine umfunktioniert und legte einen fulminanten Börsenstart hin. Bechtolsheim war um 500 Millionen Dollar reicher und “googlen” wanderte als Synonym für die Internet-Suche in die Lexika und Wörterbücher.

Der ganze Artikel auf Heise Online ist sehr lesenswert!

Migrating an existing, running and working Thinkpad (from Lenovo ) into a Parallels image is relatively easy – just download the Transporter for Windows, install it and reboot. Afterwards select the computer from the Mac Transporter and wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Finally reboot your newly created image. If you are lucky it just boots, if you used a Thinkpad as source computer you might end up with a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) as shown in the image to the right. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. In this case follow these steps to get the issue resolved:

1. Boot the image in Safe mode
2. Open up the Device Manager
3. Enable viewing of hidden devices in the menu
4. Find a device tree called “SM DRIVER”
5. Uninstall all devices (SM BIOS) below that tree
6. Reboot and hope

At least for me this worked fine and I could boot the image. And begin uninstalling all the Thinkpad software.

(Original instructions)

PS: doing the migration over a Wireless connection is no good idea. Will take veeeery long. Instead use a direct, wired connection between the Thinkpad and the MacBook and enter the IP directly (169.x.x.x) in the Transporter Wizard. No need for a router. No need for a cross-over cable, the Mac is capable of auto-sensing.

Discussing about telnet usage in a forum:

> Who the heck is still using telnet? It’s the same as
> with FTP – the password is transmitted in plaintext…

Considering that the wifi connection is encrypted (if using wep/wpa), it really makes no difference.

Outch!