Timecapsule: every Mac house should have one

About two weeks ago, Alexa's parents were ready to take the Mac plunge. Of course, I offered my help. We decided the 20" iMac was the right fit for them. My brothers in law that are still at home both now have laptops, one of them is a MacBook.

They have had a string of hard drive failures and have almost lost their pictures a couple of times, so I suggested they get a USB hard drive for Time Machine backups. 

They also wanted to put the computer in a more central location, but didn't want all the clutter of having the printer hooked up to it. I suggested that they should also get a wireless print server so they could hide the printer. Their Linksys Wireless-B router was getting a bit dated as well, and I like WRT54GL's, so we were going to get one of those. 

All said and done, we were looking at about $350 in accessories. I suggested that we waited until after Steve Jobs' keynote to order. I figured there may be some iMac upgrades coming. Now I look like a genius because they announced Timecapsule. It's cheaper and less of a pain in the butt than what I was looking to set up for them.

We ordered a Timecapsule and an iMac last night. There's no ETA on Timecapsule yet. I can't wait till it arrives so that I can see how well it works. If it's as good as it seems, I think every multi-mac household should have one. 

Of course, Timecapsule backups don't stop you from losing everything in a fire or theft. I think we're going to set up a smugmug account to get all their pictures 'off site' as well.

An Update to My Safari Crashes

I never got around to updating my Safari Adventure.

About 2 hours after reseting Safari, it started crashing. I reset Safari again, and it lasted about 10 minutes before it started crashing again. I went through various dances, like shut down safari, start safari, reset safari. That didn't work. I tried shut down, start, reset, shut down and start up. It continued to crash.

I gave up. I'm now using Firefox at work and Safari when I get home. As soon as I'm not using a proxy server, Safari is rock solid.

Safari Crashes with a Proxy

I've been using Firefox on my mac. This is mostly because I feel like I can't do without all my plugins for various things. It kinda freaks me out to not have things like the AWS tools (s3fox and EC2 UI), various proxy tools, YSlow, Firebug, etc.

Yesterday I went to start up Parallels, but it was running really slowly. When I fired up Activity Monitor, it was mostly Firefox kicking CPU and Memory butt. I thought I'd give Safari a try.

In Tiger, Safari was useless because it didn't have tabs. I can't imagine working without them. Now that Safari has them, I can at least be someone productive.

It's nice. Safari is very light weight and fast. It also doesn't use 10% of my CPU sitting idle, nor does it each all of my memory up. 

It worked great yesterday, but this morning it was crashing every couple of minutes. One of my colleagues has had the same problem. The crashes were bothering him so much he actually borrowed my Tiger CD so he could downgrade. After restarting Safari 15 times this morning, I can understand where he's coming from.

I called Apple Support. As usual, they pointed out some feature I had know idea about that seems to have fixed the problem.

In the Safari menu, there is a "Reset Safari..." option. Since I did that, I haven't had any crashes.

I'm a little skeptical. I bet that when I get home and I use Safari without the proxy and then come back to work, Safari will start crashing again. With the weekend coming up, I probably won't know till Tuesday :(

MySQL Workbench -- No Mac Till 2008

MySQL Workbench is set to fill a gap in my DBA needs. Unfortunately, no Mac support till 2008, from the download page:

Please note that at this point only the Windows Beta version is available. Linux and OS X releases will be available in 2008.

Boo-urns. I seem to remember a disproportionate number of Macs at the 2006 User Conference. I figured it would be higher on their priority list. Oh well, I suppose I'll just have to wait to buy my copy :(

So far so good, post Archive and Install

It's been almost a week now since I did the Archive and Install, and my laptop is far more stable. I haven't had any crashes and my VPN works fine.

I have noticed that the dock animation is now choppy. I also had to re-install the Cisco VPN client and Parallels, but those are minor issues.

All and all, if you haven't upgraded yet, I recommend doing an Archive and Install. Puts all of your data and apps back into place and you won't have as many issues.

Just Archived and Installed

I've been having random crashes since I've upgraded. It's been ugly. Often, after I reboot, the system would crash over and over for 45 minutes to an hour. Right when I got through to Applecare, it would be working again.

When I called last week, they had me repair permissions. That didn't do anything. Today, they had me do an Archive and Install. So far, no crashes. We'll see from here.

Mac RDC 2.0 Beta

I found it on their webpage. There is some marked improvement, but they still don't get it right.

The main problem is that I can connect to multiple servers, but each one is its own program (alt-tab instead of alt-`). Also, Apple-w doesn't close the window (I suppose that's because it is not really in a window..).

Do the people that write this software even use Macs?

I don't think Microsoft likes Apple

Case in point: the remote desktop client that Microsoft offers. It's brutal. You can only open one session at a time. I've heard there are ways to do multiple sessions, but it's not Apple-N. I'm guessing an intern at Microsoft built it without following any Apple guidelines.

I did find this blog post. There were lots of great comments with suggestions. I tried RDC Menu, and it didn't really work for me.

I did try CoRD, and so far, it's awesome. I'm done looking for a client now :)

Stuck in Calendar Limbo

I'm currently in a world where I have my email on Exchange, a black berry and a Mac. It's not a fun place to be.

Entourage and Blackberries don't play nice together. Entourage deletes one of the header fields that BB Enterprise Server uses to track emails. Apparently Mail.App does too, as my bb doesn't know when I delete stuff. Thankfully, Thunderbird does work. So if I use Thunderbird, I can keep my Blackberry in sink.

Next up is my calendar. I typically use Google Calendar, but one of the main points of Exchange is being able to share calendars in the company. Since I switched to Thunderbird today, I thought I'd look at the calendar. There is apparently no way to sync Exchange at this point.

I did find imap calendar proxy. It looks interesting. The code didn't work for me.

After seeing it, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a IMAP to Webdav proxy server using something like mod_perl. I'd use authbasic to get the credentials and put the imap server as path info. Then any client could connect to it. Maybe I'll toy with this in my spare time.. I'm sure all the perl modules are there for vcalendar, imap and webdav..