As I write this, I plugged in my external hard disk so that Time Machine on my MacBook Pro can do its work. I do make it a point to backup my MacBook Pro, although it is not such a mandatory routine that I always plug in the external hard disk whenever it is within. Honestly, I don’t even do it every day. It’s something that, in my mind, I know I should do and it is something I want to do, but then, I’m not (yet) making that conscious effort to make sure that it happens at least once every day.

I think Apple deserves credit for making backup simple, straight-forward, and convenient for users. Many more people are backing up their data now than before simply because of Time Machine, a backup feature that was introduced with Mac OS X Leopard. It was the case with me too. Time Machine was designed to be like magic. Just turn it on, and it just works. Sure, there are a few settings that you could change, but it would just work if you didn’t do anything apart from turning it on.

Time Machine changed how I did backup on my MacBook Pro. Previously, I would be selective about what I backed up, and backing up usually meant copying to another disk or burning into CDROM/DVDROM. In fact, this is still the case with my Linux PC. I never would have done “whole disk” backups. But whole disk backups on my MacBook Pro has come in very convenient many times, when I had to change computers, or when I had to change hard disks. Or, like when I upgraded from the standard SATA hard disk to an SSD.

Nowadays, there are more backup options than simply backing up to another hard disk or CDROM/DVDROM. You can use the cloud. There are several options.

1. Cloud storage services that provide a “hard disk” in the cloud where you can throw in any data you like. Dropbox is one such solution that comes to mind. However, unless you’re willing to pay plenty, the free option gives you limited storage space. You’ll probably need to be selective about what you copy into the cloud.
2. There can also be services that target certain types of data. For example, your photos and videos have plenty of options these days: Flickr, Google Plus, Facebook, etc. Different services have different limitations. For example both Google and Facebook caps the maximum photo resolution.
3. There are also purpose-designed cloud backup services. Backblaze comes to mind. It’s not free, but at US$50/year (os US$95/2-years) for “unlimited storage”, that seems a pretty fair price to pay. The upside of such a service is that your data is stored remotely, safely away from the computer being backed up. The downside, of course, is that remote network backups may be slow.

Ultimately, another concern with putting your data in the cloud is with security. Do you trust the service providers to keep your secrets? Many services claim how they use encryption and what not, ultimately to convince users that the service is safe and secure. Layman may believe them. The paranoid techie needs to see proof. It doesn’t help that once a while, cloud storage exploits still happen (e.g. Dropbox security hole).

Have you backed up your data?

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So, I got about Googling, and kept coming up with ShapeCollage. It’s $40 (or free, if you don’t mind a watermark on your collage. Now, if it had been just $1.99, I would have given it some consideration. But hey, iPhoto costs only $19.99, and ShapeCollage wanted $40?

Next, I got onto the Mac App Store and searched. Tada… TurboCollage. Not the prettiest name. It does seem like it will do what I need it to do. Then, more importantly, it’s free for today. So if not for any other reason, just go grab it just because it is free now. Checking Google result cache shows that TurboCollage could have cost $3.99, which is not at all unreasonable either.

TurboCollage does just what I need. Give it a bunch of photos, drag and place it wherever you want. There are a few basic layout options, not quite so ambitious as ShapeCollage, but it’s just the kind of layouts I’m looking for. Simple collages where the original photos are still largely viewable, not lost in complex creative layouts.

There are options to add shadows, rounded corners, and type of borders. You can also add text and style them with shadows and rotations. You can share your creation directly to Facebook, if you so wish to.

It’s a pretty useful app that fills a need for me: assemble and style a bunch of photos for posting on my blog.

It’s free for now, but even at $3.99, I think I’ll still recommend it.

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Much as I enjoy working with Mac OS X, and think it is so much more fun than Windows XP, Vista, or 7, there are some issues with it that I’m having. The chief problem is that, from time to time, my MacBook Pro (MBP) does not properly wake up from sleep. When I try to wake up my MBP by opening the lid, I either get: 1) a blank black screen with just the mouse pointer, or 2) a beach ball on the lock screen with the unlock password prompt. There doesn’t seem to be anyway for me to get past that to my desktop.

Except, of course, to do a reset. This has been happening for a long while. This problem usually doesn’t happen very often, like lesser than once a month. But there are other times when it can happen so often that it gets very irritating. Yesterday, for example, it hit me three times. I was sufficiently annoyed to consider reinstalling Lion.

I’ve been using Macs, migrating my stuffs to each successive hardware that I upgrade to, since like 2003 or 2004. I’ve been thinking if I’ve accumulated too much cruft in the last 7 to 8 years that is starting to overwhelm Mac OS X. This problem did not just start with Lion. I think I can remember it happening with Leopard… which is 2 version of Mac OS X ago. Each time there is a software update, I cross my fingers and hope this problem will go away. When I upgraded Mac OS X through new versions, I did the same. Sometimes it seems like the problem had gone away… but it eventually comes back.

Thanks to SSD, rebooting my MBP is fast… so rebooting is just a minor inconvenience. But, computers are supposed to work for you, not cause inconveniences, not even minor inconveniences.

So, anyway, I’ve researched and found several useful bits of information about how to reset Macs. They don’t really fix my problem (since, after all, they eventually still come back…), but it does give the satisfaction that you’re clearing some cruft out of the computer.

First, here’s how to reset the System Management Controller. This is for MBPs that have built-in batteries (i.e. batteries that are not meant to be user replaceable).

1. Shutdown the Mac.
2. Remove the power cord, wait 5 seconds.
3. Reconnect the power cord.
4. Simultaneously press Ctrl, Option, Shift, and the power button. Just normal press and release. No need to hold it there.
5. Wait a few moments. You might notice the LED indicator on the magsafe connector change colour.
6. Press the power button to boot up the Mac normally.

Another thing that can be reset is the PRAM (or NVRAM). Here’s how:

1. Shutdown the Mac.
2. Press the power button to boot up normally.
3. Immediately press Command, Option, P and R keys simultaneously and hold it there until the Mac sounds a chime tone.
4. Release the keys.
5. The Mac will boot up normally.

One of the new features starting with Lion is that Mac OS X saves application state when you quit them so that you can resume from where you left off. I’ve found that some applications, like Preview, seem to take longer to start up over time. At least for me, removing the saved application state seems to restore its original performance. It might work for other apps too. The saved application states are stored in:

~/Library/Saved Application State/

Each application will have one subdirectory in there. You can remove all of them with a command like:

$ rm -rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/*

(Backslash needed to escape the spaces in the directory name.)

To permanently stop saving the application state:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click on General.
3. Look for “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps”, under the “Number of recent items” area, and uncheck that box.

If you just want to disable the saved application state for some specific apps, check out OS X Daily’s post.

There’s also other cruft you could get rid of:

• ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/*windowserver*
• All the *.lockfile under ~/Library

In fact, if you try to poke around ~/Library, there are plenty of things that look like they are random cruft left behind from really poor housekeeping. For example, I have like 156 files named like com.apple.iTunes.plist.??????? under ~/Library/Preferences, which look like temporary files. There are plenty of other similar *.plist.??????? in there too. I removed all of them.

Finally, I felt that my SSD wasn’t running as fast as it used to be. I have the OCZ Vertex 2 160GB SSD, which supposedly has its own internal garbage collection. No need for TRIM support from the OS. The trick, it seems, to get garbage collection to go about collecting garbage is to have the disk powered up but left idle. That means, to keep the Mac running but not using the disk.

The way I do this is to reboot the Mac into the login screen, but don’t login. Leave it in the login screen (make sure to disable sleep, etc) overnight. The next day, it seems like the SSD does perform better… it really does, even though I didn’t actually run any objective disk benchmark to confirm.

Oh yes, I must say this again: the SSD is about the best upgrade you can get for any notebook.

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The biggest pain, and then again it isn’t something that bugs me on a daily basis, but can be really annoying when it does… is printing. The Lion prints. Except that in Apple’s haste to abandon Samba, it seems they have forgotten about printing to Windows shared printers. For some reason, Lion cannot print to printers that are served through Windows SMB shares.

Considering that most enterprises would likely have Windows deeply entrenched in their corporate network, I didn’t think this would be something that Apple would have overlooked. Apple’s newer SMB implementation was supposed to be more forward looking, supporting methods new in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I thought perhaps the problem was with old servers in my organization.

Now, I’m not so sure. Did Apple really royally mess up Windows printing? It just seems so shocking. Did no Lion beta tester ever had to print to a Windows shared printer? It sounds quite unbelievable.

I don’t print that much. Definitely not on a daily basis. But it certainly makes printing a very cumbersome task now if I had to get something printed.

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However, in the run up to Lion’s official launch, I got interested. Snow Leopard wasn’t much of a change from Leopard. The UI had gotten a bit stale. Lion would be more adventurous in its UI improvements. It would be nice to see something new. The Mac App Store installation would be a new experience too. Then, I found out that for $29.99, I could upgrade multiple Macs (that belong to me, of course). How neat!

So, without much more deliberation, I surprised myself by purchasing Mac OS X Lion on day two of its launch. The whole process of upgrading was relatively painless. I think the most painful part is actually spending 4 hours or so for my Time Machine backup to complete (I made a brand new Time Machine backup).

Lion is downloaded just like any other application from the App Store. This application is special, of course, since it installs a new operating system. Once the installation is done, the original “application” is deleted. So if you want to make a copy of it, do it before you upgrade. You can, in fact, burn Lion into a DVD or make a bootable thumb drive, but you’ve got to do it before using the application to install Lion. (Find the application, Show Package Contents, Contents, SharedSupport, then copy the InstallESD.dmg file.)

From the time my MBP rebooted to start the upgrade, it took just 17 minutes or so before the installer completed and rebooted into Lion. The installer originally estimated 33 minutes. I’m thinking my SSD probably helped a lot.

Then, once Lion was up… I got stuck at the silly Setup Assistant. You know, many users don’t read instructions. Setup Assistant was trying to explain how scrolling has changed. But I didn’t digest the information. I was getting annoyed trying to figure out how to dismiss that screen… when I accidentally discovered Steve Job’s new natural scroll.

Natural scroll was truly frustrating. I couldn’t stand it after 15 minuts of use, and figured out how to undo it (from System Preferences, of course). But after that, I thought I’ll give Steve Jobs a chance and try to relearn scrolling. At the end of one day, I think I’ve made some progress accepting how natural scrolling is in fact more natural. Hmm, except that it still got disorienting when I went back to use a Windows PC.

Overall, the Lion upgrade has been pretty pleasant, but there are also a few surprises and disappointments. Here’s a bunch of them that I encountered. They are all probably already mentioned in some review somewhere, but either I didn’t take notice of them, or it’s just important enough to me that I want to mention them again.

First of all, the Mail app has changed somewhat. I’ve read that it has undergone some changes. The change is substantial enough that it could be unsettling for some people. It is unsettling for me. The UI layout now follows the style of the iPad mail program. The conversation threading is neat and very useful, as is the button to “show related messages”. But the new layout taking up three vertical columns (it’s two by default, but I really want to see my Mailbox list, and revealing it adds the third column) uses up more screen real-estate than I’m happy to let the Mail app have. Perhaps I need a higher resolution screen.

The way desktop spaces work has also changed. You start off with no spaces. To add a new space, move your mouse pointer to the top right corner of Mission Control (the new expose-spaces thingy), and click on the plus icon that appears in that corner.

There are plenty of new gestures to do a whole bunch of useful things. I like them. I like using CLI, but gestures represent a neat alternative to clumsy pointer movements and clicks.

Fullscreen apps work quite differently in Lion than they did before. When an app is made fullscreen, it now appears in a new space of its own. This is assuming, of course, that the application uses Lion’s new fullscreen API. You can swipe between spaces to move in and out of fullscreen apps. Chrome doesn’t support the new fullscreen API, but Google has said that they will update Chrome to offer the best native OS platform experience.

I did find some bits of the UI looking a bit odd. For some reason, the font size in the Finder’s sidebars, as well as the Mailboxes sidebar in Mail.app, has gotten to big. It’s easy enough to fix: Go to System Preferences, General, Sidebar icon size, change that to “small”.

All the applications I typically run on a daily basis seem to run without problems. Some may not take advantage of Lion’s new features (e.g. fullscreen API, versions, etc). I was disappointed to note, however, that Microsoft Word seemed to take noticeably longer to load than before. I’m not sure if it is just me… but at least another colleague has shared the same experience with me. It seems to be Word only. Excel and Powerpoint appeared to load just as fast (or slow…) as before.

In case you don’t yet know… Rosetta apps won’t run anymore, because Rosetta is no longer available. This is how we get to run PowerPC binaries after the Mac moved to the Intel CPU. The only PowerPC application I had is ZTerm (a terminal emulation program). Fortunately, I can substitute that with the Unix screen command.

Over the next couple of days, I’m sure there’ll be many more new things to learn. Like… maybe to find out what the new Safari 5.1 has to offer. This is just my first day (or so) impression of the new Mac OS X Lion. I’m happy that the upgrade experience has overall been pretty pleasant.

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Oh well. So it was back to the old way of configuring Mail.app, using IMAP to access the Exchange server. It works well enough to read emails, of course, and that’s the most important thing. Just no calendar and no directory. It would really have been nice to be in “sync” with the corporate dictated collaboration platform.

But wait… it seems we now do have Exchange 2007! A comment posted on my Mac@NUS page pointed out that the configuration has changed. I checked it out, and yippee, we now really do have directory and calendar integration. So now I can be aligned to the corporate direction to adopt Microsoft technology for email, calendaring and directory. It’s not that I like Exchange very much, but at least I’m now not incompatible with the rest of the organization.

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Honestly, the Time Capsule is quite a fine piece of hardware too. It is basically a simultaneous dual band 802.11n wireless broadband router, gigabit ethernet switch, print server and includes massive internal disk storage. The problem is that what if you already have all these capabilities in one or several deviecs… there’s not much reason to buy a Time Capsule.

So… here’s the thing. You can trick Time Machine to use some other type of network attached storage. You don’t even need to run any new fancy thing like Apple’s own networking protocol. Just a few setup steps.

1. First, make sure that your network folder is already setup and working. Particularly, make sure that your Mac can connect to it, read and write files to it. How to setup this network folder is beyond the scope of this post.
2. Next, you need to tweak a setting in Mac OS X. Run this in a terminal:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
3. Then, you need to create a “disk image” on your Mac locally. In a terminal, run:
   hdiutil create -library SPUD -size $SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “Backup of $MACNAME” $MACNAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle
   where $SIZE is the size of the Time Machine backup storage to create (e.g. “320G” for a 320GB size storage), $MACNAME is the computer name of your Mac (find it in System Preferences → Sharing), and $MACADDRESS is the ethernet ID of your LAN interface (just the 12 hexademical digits, e.g. d49a20122334). Note that the “sparsebundle” created is not actually the size that you specify, but it can grow to accommodate the size that you set.
4. Use the Finder, locate the image you created above ($MACNAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle) and copy it into the network folder.
5. Now open Time Machine Preferences, click Select Disk, and then select your network folder.
6. You’re almost done. Just wait for the first backup to start. Or you can just tell Time Machine to Back Up Now.

The initial backup does take some time, like it also does on a directly connected USB or Firewire disk. I had 93GB of data to backup initially, and over my 802.11n wireless network, it took almost 7 hours to complete.

A nice thing I like about this solution is the ability to “limit” the amount of space consumed by Time Machine. Ordinarily, Time Machine uses up the entire disk that it is offered, which is inconvenient when you want to share that disk with other data, or use it for multiple Time Machines (i.e. different Macs). How do you tell Time Machine play nice and not to gobble up all the space it can lay its hands on? Well, now the sparsebundle image lets you determine the maximum amount of space that Time Machine will use.

Note: If you are going to copy-and-paste the hdutil command line above, be wary that when displayed by WordPress in here, the quotes are replaced with nice curly quotes. Remember to swap it back for a normal quote character.

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No operating system is immune to these kernel panic. I suppose the question is how often the panics are, and what sort of impact it has on the applications and data. Nowadays, the impact of data loss on disk is minimal because of journalized file systems. While this can be an operating system provided feature, preserving the state of applications is a lot more complicated. At this time, application recovery (i.e. returning to the user to where he/she was before the crash) is often left to the applications themselves. That being said, applications like Microsoft Word will automatically store state data to disk and use that to recover the opened document after the computer restarts.

Considering that many applications are nowadays browser-based, the web browser itself is going to be a very important application where robustness and recovery is important. I think, today, the modern web browser can re-open web pages that were being viewed after restarting from a crash (be it application crash or system crash). Moving forward, what is becoming very important is to preserve state data such as navigation history, cookies, login credentials, form input data, etc, so that the user can continue his browsing session as if nothing had actually got interrupted.

But there is a tricky situation here. Do you want to preserve login credentials across a crash? What if you were browsing a secure website such as your internet banking portal? The fact that data is being automatically preserved should sound out some alarm bells. Then, on the other hand, if login credentials are not being preserved, obviously the resumption of state on various websites are going to be rather tricky too.

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For some time now, I’ve been using VirtualBox. It works pretty well. It’s integration with the host operating system (i.e. Mac OS X) is a little lacking. The handling of USB devices is a little clumsy. But it is free, and if it is free, you tend to make do with some minor inconveniences. It’s not really a big deal if you need the virtualization only occasionally.

But a friend recently started evaluating VMware Fusion, and my interest in it was piqued. I’m not new to VMware. I’ve used various flavours of VMware on both Windows and Linux. But so far, not Fusion on Mac OS X. So, alright, it was time to give it a try. It worked good enough for me. You can read plenty of reviews of VMware Fusion on the Internet, so I’m not going to write another one.

While evaluating VMware Fusion, I thought about Parallels Desktop. It has also received favourable reviews. A bit question on my mind was, which is faster? Put features aside for a while, let’s see which virtualization platform runs faster. Speed, inevitably, is going to be one important consideration.

So, I put together my very simple benchmark of VMware Fusion 3 vs Parallels Desktop 5 carrying out a few simple tasks.

Yes, I know this is not the most professional or comprehensive benchmark, but it tells me a few important things I want to know. It appears like Parallels Desktop 5 is quicker at getting things done inside the guest OS once the VM has started up. I suppose if you tend to leave a VM running for long periods and do a lot work inside it, this will be an important advantage.

Interestingly, I noted previously that Parallels Desktop 5 was a lot faster at restarting itself than VMware Fusion 3. It can take VMware Fusion 3 about the 38s it scored in the above table to restart itself, but Parallels Desktop 5 would take only like 12s. It is quite remarkable.

If you need a more professional benchmark comparison, check out this article from MacTech, and another one in Wikipedia.

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That’s all happened in just half a week. It could have been worse, had it been some other operating system, and it’s not really all that bothersome if you consider that many of the updates happen automatically. “Automatically”, however, could typically be any time in a one week window, since automatic checks are often configured to happen at weekly intervals. Furthermore, that’s all assuming that you are using your computer and it is connected to the Internet at reasonable broadband speeds.

It’s just one computer, or just one device. Yet there are so many updates to talk about. Sometimes I’d think life would be so much easier had all the software been sufficiently tightly integrated so that users just need to know of one update. Perhaps moving all the apps to the web (or the “Internet”) will make this easier. You’d still need some basic operating system, a web browser, and device drivers to take care of, but I suppose this would be much easier to manage.

Update (13 Nov 2009): To add to the update week is WordPress 2.8.6, released today.

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