I restored my PowerBook’s hard drive to the state it was on Saturday before it crashed using the most excellent SuperDuper!. If you aren’t doing regular backups (daily), then you are asking for trouble. There are 2 kinds of computer users; those that have lost data and those that will.
Digital Books and Sony Reader
I have a pile of stuff to read on my computer’s desktop (technical stuff) that I just haven’t gotten around to reading. I don’t want to print it out and I don’t want to read it on my computer. I never considered a dedicated “eBook” reader, but the Sony Reader device announced at CES looks like it could meet my needs.
Surgery complete!
I managed to replace the hard drive in my PowerBook with a Hitatchi Travelstar 7200 RPM, 80 GB drive. The instructions from www.pbfixit.com were excellent as well as their screw guide which I used to dutifully place and tape all the screws I removed. The drive is now formatted and appears to work. I still have to wait until tomorrow morning to get my backup and restore it. I completely understand the warning “no user serviceable parts inside”. Replacing a hard drive in a laptop takes time and patience.
Fry’s – The good, the bad, and the ugly
As I had some time to kill today, I decided to go ahead and get a new hard drive for my PowerBook and replace it without waiting until tomorrow. The choices on a Sunday for getting a laptop hard drive are pretty limited, basically only Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s is not my favorite store as their service is not great, return lines are long, and sometimes they try to pass returns off as new (I had bought a monitor from them that turns out had been used and when it broke, it was out of warranty even though it was less than 1 year since I had bought it). However, on the plus side, Fry’s has decent store hours, good selection, OK prices, and carries parts others don’t (where can you find a #6 Torx screwdriver locally?). While I try to avoid shopping at Fry’s, sometimes it is unavoidable.
Hard drive failure
One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I’m a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, “this isn’t a problem as my backup is 2 hours old.” Then my elated thought turned to disappointment when I realized that my 2 hour old backup is sitting in the bank vault where I had just been a few hours earlier to store my backup. The good news is that my 9 day old backup boots my PowerBook thanks to SuperDuper!. So on Monday morning I’ll drive over to The Chip Merchant, plunk down $150 + tax for a new 80 GB hard drive, then goto the bank which doesn’t open until 9 am. Then I have the fun task of disassembling my PowerBook and putting the new hard drive in.
To add to my backup strategy, I’m going to get additional TrayDocks and have 2 backups at home so that this doesn’t happen again.
HTML Email
Yesterday I received a message from the Palm developer program; it looked liked there was nothing in the message, so I poked around and found that it was an HTML formatted email. I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to HTML email in that I completely oppose it. I go to great lengths to only display plain text email in Mail.app. I think my aversion to HTML email goes back to when I worked on Eudora with Steve Dorner. Steve opposed many things and he didn’t believe that HTML belonged in email which makes a lot of sense to me. One of my arguments against it has always been that I don’t want the sender of a message to force how the message should be viewed on me, in particular, the text color, text font, and text size. This argument doesn’t hold much water if you think about it; every website I visit forces me (more or less) to view it how the author intended. However, in most cases, people don’t go overboard in websites to display stuff in 20 point bold, red type, like I’ve seen in email. Why people do this, I have no idea.
I’m sticking to viewing plain text email.
GPS for Running
One of my goals is to eventually run a marathon (not sure if this will ever happen). In my reading today, I came across a press release from Garmin announcing Mac OS X support for their products. This is pretty cool and as I was reading about their support for the Forerunner 305 training GPS, I said to myself, I have to have one of those. It’s pricing ($350 on Amazon), but combined with their web site, you can overlay maps, elevation data, heart rate information, etc. Once they have OS X software, this will be killer. However, in the meantime I think it will be a decent device even if I have to hook it to my Windows box.
Stupid Patents (including software patents)
Today I read that Cingular has patented a way of generating an Emoticon (smilies, etc.). This seems insane that a patent be granted on something that has been in use for years. Cingular may have put a slight spin on it, but the Patent and Trademark Office doesn’t seem to have a clue about what constitutes a new idea. Speaking of patents, I’m not a fan of software patents as a simple idea that a developer codes up one day thinking that he is clever only to find out that he has violated a patent. If I patented every idea I came up with when writing code, I would never have time to actually write code as I solve problems and it really doesn’t matter how I do it in code, so I use lots of different techniques in order to get the job done. Hopefully the Patent and Trademark Office will learn to only patent really clever ideas and not stuff made up to extort money from others.
Bluetooth and the Intel iMac
After I setup the new iMac, I started testing it. One of the things I did was try to send a file from a Palm to the iMac via Bluetooth. Hmmm…didn’t work. Start thinking about this and turn off the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Presto, the file transferred without problems. Turned keyboard and mouse back on and it stopped working. This doesn’t bode well for our software; people already blame us for every problem on their machine, now I’m sure someone will say they can’t sync with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse even though it is quite possibly not our problem. Lovely.
New iMac
I picked up a new 17″ iMac running the Intel Core Duo today to do testing and development. I didn’t realize until I got home that I had the wireless keyboard/mouse model which wasn’t a big deal as it was only $60 more (the box doesn’t indicate this…not even the label, unless you can decode part numbers). Setting it up took a few minutes, but the wireless keyboard and mouse was kind of weird as it took awhile for the Mac to discover the keyboard and mouse after I figured out how to put in the batteries.
As I always use disc images for development so that I can wipe down a hard drive and start over, I plugged in my external 120 GB FireWire drive, partitioned it, booted from the CD and attempted to install the software. It failed. Turns out I had to switch from the Apple Partition Scheme to the GUID Partition Scheme. Yeah, that was an easy one to figure out.
I haven’t played much with the machine, yet, but will do so later after I finish imaging the drive.