This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Peaceful. This image was taken in Desenzano, Italy. It’s one of the first pictures I ever took on slide film, this time Fuji Velvia 50.
What George W. Bush could learn from Steve Jobs
Combining my two favourite subjects — Apple and taking the proverbial out of Dubya — how could I not post a link to this: What George W. Bush could learn from Steve Jobs.
Backup
Reading this article by David Pogue reminded me of my own search for a reliable and easy backup solution. I came to a rather different answer so I thought it might be worth detailing a little history, the options I considered and the one I eventually chose.
Ancient History
In the olden days — i.e., going back a couple of years — I split the files into four categories:
- System files such as the operating system itself and all my applications
- Small files such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets
- Big files such as movies, photos and music
Category one, system files, I didn’t backup at all, figuring that I had all the discs and licence keys so I could recreate the whole thing if necessary.
I was much more careful with emails. While my archive gets a little spotty in places where I’ve not been able to transfer them from one computer to another, I have some messages going back to 1997 and have no intention of losing them. So I used the IMAP server ((There are two types of email server in common use at most ISP’s. “POP” is the most common and is designed to allow you to download messages but not to store them for the long term. “IMAP” is rather more sophisticated and email programs tend to cache messages that are permanently stored on the server.))provided by Apple’s .Mac service. This had the added bonus of allowing me to access my emails on my desktop, laptop and work machines.
For small files, category three, I also used part of the .Mac service, this time the iDisk. iDisk is basically an online disk ((Technically speaking, it’s just a web server accessed using the WebDav protocol. OS X cached the files so they were available off-line too.)), automatically copying anything saved there onto a server on the internet. Everything was magically and almost immediately backed up. Again, this allowed me to access my files pretty much anywhere.
I backed up larger files on a more ad hoc basis. I copied my photos onto CD (or DVD for larger projects) more or less as soon as they were downloaded from my camera. Usually. As ever, laziness had a tendency to set in and it didn’t always happen for a while after the event; not good. Music downloaded from iTunes followed a similar pattern.
Everything ripped from a CD was not backed up at all. I had no easy way of backing up over 20Gb of data and, in theory, I had all the source data anyway.
What happened next
There are (at least) three problems with this system. First is .Mac’s reliability, something I’ve already talked about. Second is the piecemeal approach, where some things are saved immediately and other things might not be backed up at all. And finally, if my hard-disk did ever die, how long would it take to restore everything?
When I got my new MacBook I realised how long it takes to set up all my applications. And when I wiped the hard-disk of my “old” iMac ready for sale on eBay I found how long it can take to install the operating system and get it up to date. For the record, it took the best part of a day and that was without restoring any data ((First install OS X 10.4.0. The plan was to install iLife and then run software update, but iLife required OS X 10.4.3. Unfortunately, one of the problems with 10.4.0 was that WiFi didn’t work so it took a while to work around that. Then I updated to 10.4.8, which was over 100Mb of files. Then I was able to install iLife, which also required some very large updates. In all, there were over 250Mb of updates to just iLife and OS X.)).
In reality, despite these problems, I was far too lazy to bother changing things. Until I decided on two things: not to renew my .Mac subscription and to get a new laptop not just to replace my ailing iBook but also to replace my iMac. Without .Mac I had no choice but to re-evaluate my options.
I am going to concentrate only on the backup side of things in this article, although that was not the only thing I changed. For example, rather than use an alternative IMAP provider for my email, I decided to move to Google Applications for Domains. My experience there is perhaps worth another post but for now I will move on.
For backups I considered two main approaches, online backups as promoted by David Pogue in the first link in this post and traditional backup software, copying data to an external disk.
The answer
I considered a few different online backup solutions. Their pricing structures varied slightly and I’m sure that they all worked, but after I thought about it I realised that none of them were ideal. Pogue mentions the main problem in passing: timing. I have about 100Gb of data that needs to be backed up. How long would that take, even on a broadband connection? Let’s see, 256kbps (the upload speed on my cable broadband connection) works out to around 20k/sec. A little bit of maths ((100 * 1024 * 1024 / 20 / 60 / 60 / 24 = 60.68)) suggests it could take 60 days to upload the whole disk! In the event of a disaster, it would be quicker (download speeds are ten times faster than upload speeds) to download everything but it would still be nearly a week! Even if my maths is bad (very much a possibility), I still think my bandwidth would make online backup impractical.
Note that I think online backup is a fantastic idea in principle, just not one that works for me. If you mainly have Word documents to backup I’m sure it’s cheap and easy.
So, software. I had been using Apple’s Backup software, which is mainly for use with .Mac but also works with external hard-disks. However it was slow and, according to reports on the Internet, very unreliable. The one time I ever needed it I had managed to get back my files but I didn’t really want to risk it another time.
My LaCie external hard-disk came with SilverKeeper backup software. I had a quick play about with it looked overly complicated. Having had to write backup software at work, I did have a tendency to look for “complete” solutions — i.e., get me that file I deleted three weeks ago — but on further thought I realised that I didn’t need anything so sophisticated at home.
Most other software I looked at was just as complicated and, worse, they all had the same failing: they don’t back up the operating system itself. I’d already seen that it takes nearly a day just to restore the system software before you even start looking at the data.
In the past I had played with the Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), software that cloned a whole disk. I liked the idea — as the backup is just a complete, boot-able copy of the main disk — but I didn’t like the amount of time it took to copy the whole disk every time.
In the end I decided on Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper!, which is like CCC except it has a “Smart Update” feature that only copies the files that have changed, making a weekly backup take, on average, less than ten minutes. Nice.
So that’s the system I’m using at the moment. Would something like that work for you too?
Photopress/Lightbox Patch
Ever since I moved over to using the WordPress content management system to host this website I have been using a relatively small number of plugins. One of my most used is Photopress which you can see in use almost everywhere you see a picture.
However, late last year I realised how much one, small part of the functionality irritated me. You could either view a full size picture in a page on its own, but I’d never managed to create a template that worked well for both portrait and landscape images. Or you could have each image pop up in another window. I wasn’t keen on that either.
I eventually decided to “scratch an itch” and implement option number three. I’d found and liked the “zoom” effect provided by the Lightbox JavaScript library, and so decided to use that.
I did offer the patch to the author of Photopress, but I have heard nothing from him so find my changes here.
You’ll need to follow the following few steps to do the same with your own site:
- Disable the Photopress plugin if you already have it installed
- Download the Lightbox Javascript library and install it on your webserver. I put it in wp-content/lightbox ((You’ll need to keep the same directory structure as in the LightBox ZIP file. For example, you should see three directories “css”, “images”
and “js” Inside the “lightbox” directory on the webserver.)). Remember where you put it as you’ll need it again in a couple of steps - Download and install the plugin. If you don’t have Photopress, try this full version. If you already have Photopress 0.9.5, you can download either the only file that’s changed or this patch file
- Activate the plugin
- Go to the Photopress Options screen. Look at the bottom of the screen. Here you can enable/disable the Lightbox effect and point Photopress to the Lightbox Javascript routines
- Also make sure that you have switched off the “Link to Album” feature ((Thanks to Roman Seibel for figuring this out.))
- You’re done
Please let me know how you get on. Hope you like it!
Hiring
Talking about Google’s old and new hiring practices seems to be all the rage at the moment, so I thought that I would get in on the act.
I got through two phone interviews for a technical consultant role here in the UK before being rejected. My second interviewer told me that he’d had fourteen interviews before being hired. That’s just an absurd number. How much holiday and sick leave can you take at short notice without arousing suspicion?! (They were both long enough or required Internet access that I couldn’t do them at work.)
By the end of the second I was in two minds whether to take things any further anyway. I wanted to work for Google, but could I go through fourteen interviews? I was concerned about the money, as no number was on the job spec and big names often offer low and offer options to compensate. I can’t pay my mortgage with stock options! And the work in the consulting side didn’t sound quite as appealing as the kind of thing you hear on the development side.
Most significantly, was the style of interview. They asked brain-teasers, which I tend to think is a lousy way to scope out a candidate. Either you know the trick and can do it instantly, you get lucky or you need a hint. None of these really shows how smart you are, how well you can program a computer, interact with clients or, indeed, any other aspect of the job. The interviewer was also clearly typing away in the background while I was trying to answer the questions, only half listening, which was just plain rude.
Most communications were friendly and personal, right up to the last. The rejection email was signed, impersonally, “Google Staffing.”
So overall I’m not terribly impressed with Google recruitment. Okay, maybe I’m biased against them as they turned me down but as an interviewer I’ve always considered part of my job as leaving a positive impression of the company even with candidates that are not going to be hired. Google failed in this.
Iceland
“Why?” It’s rapidly becoming the question that people ask when I announce my next travel destination, and my Christmas in Iceland trip was no exception.
To be fair I did have doubts. Having spent a winter in Norway a few years ago I was expecting short daylight hours, cold and snow. And it was Christmas so I was expecting a few things to close. But I was also expecting some wonderful, directional light, ideal for photography; I was expecting crisp, blue skies and pristine snow; I was expecting cozy bars and restaurants; and I was expecting to see the Northern Lights.
I had a great time, but not everything went to plan. The one thing that I thought I could rely on — the weather — turned out not to be such a sure thing. My first tentative steps around town were accompanied by the squelching sound of my quickly waterlogged trousers. Ironically, I spent the driest, crispest day in The Blue Lagoon, a geothermally heated outdoor pool.
What follows are a some photographic highlights and light commentary. Click on the thumbnails below for a larger version.
The main shopping street and a lake were just a short walk from the hotel. The lake had many pretty houses along the side, and the main street had pretty much the entire population of Reykjavik (if not Iceland) in a Christmas Parade.
My first venture out of the capital took in a volcano, the site of Geysir, which is where we get the word from, Gullfoss and Thingvellir ((Icelandic has a thirty-two letter alphabet, rather more than my keyboard supports and perhaps more than the typeface on your computer allows. The “th” in “Thingvellir” is more-or-less how it is supposed to sound but actually looks a bit like a ‘P.’ There is also a letter that looks like a ‘D’ with a line through it, which is pronounced “eth.”)).
Gullfoss was famously saved from the hands of greedy developers and is a spectacular sight, even in heavy rain.
Thingvellir looks dark and moody and was the site of the original Icelandic parliament, the Althing, which was the first parliamentary democracy in the world.
Overlooking Reykjavik is a building called The Pearl which holds enough geothermally heated water for half the city, plus a museum and an exclusive restaurant. Unfortunately it was shut when we visited, but it still looks space age and the views down hill show how low-rise the city is ((The guide said that Reykjavik is the size of Barcelona but with a twentieth of the population. This is partly because they have the space but mainly because all the building need to be able to withstand strong earthquakes.)).
For my last full day I decided to head out of town on a bus to Akranes. I had no idea what was there. The guide book insisted that it was pretty but the details were scarce. To cut a long story short, I imagine that it’s a very pretty place in summer but at Christmas you really need to know where you’re going before you get soaked!
Instead, I was rescued by a local couple who gave a tour of the area and then insisted on feeding and watering me! It’s always nice to meet genuinely friendly locals. Somehow I expect to find them in far-flung places but not Europe.
And finally, no, I didn’t get to see the Northern Lights. You need a cold night and a clear sky, and I had neither the whole time I was there. Maybe third time lucky..?
If this has piqued your interest, there are plenty of other sources of information on the Internet. I found the following particularly helpful:
- Official Guide to Iceland. Lots of pictures and ideas.
- Blue Lagoon. A geothermal spa. Recommended! I left my camera in the hotel this day.
- Lonely Planet. As ever, some useful information from Lonely Planet.