One of the best things that Apple had introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Time Machine. It’s a no-brainer backup utility that “just works”, and furthermore, one that people will actually use. While Time Machine works great with a direct attached storage disk (internal or external firewire/USB) or Time Capsule, it wouldn’t readily work with other network attached storage. If you want to backup “over the network”, Apple wants you to buy their Time Capsule hardware. But there are fixes to get around that.

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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I opened the lid of my MacBook, it resumed from the previous suspend, and I clicked something on Safari. Then, Mac OS X told me: You need to restart your computer. It explained how I could do that, and it did it in 5 languages. Yes, it is the Mac OS X kernel panic. It’s the first kernel panic I experienced on Snow Leopard. The last time I saw a kernel panic was on Leopard. It’s the same MacBook, before upgrading to Snow Leopard 2 months ago.

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 many Mac users, it is inevitable that Microsoft Windows will be needed at some point or other. There are a few solutions to running Windows on a Mac hardware. I much prefer the virtualization solution than running Bootcamp because I can still access the Mac OS X system at all times. The two main virtualization solutions are basically VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Then, the next inevitable question is, which is better? Which is faster? Which is more integrated? Which is more interoperable with various guest operating systems?

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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There’re plenty of software updates this week. First up was for Snow Leopard which is updated to Mac OS X 10.6.2, which contains quite a number of fixes (58, apparently) including an important one that involves data loss. Then, the Safari web browser itself, whose updates are distributed separately from Mac OS X, was updated to version 4.0.4. It fixes some security vulnerabilities, and improves performance and stability. Finally, there is also the update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac with version 12.2.3, which fixes stability and security issues.

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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I’ve just finished upgrading to Snow Leopard. Apple claims it is faster. With most things turned 64-bits, one would expect to see some improvements. But how good is better? Well, I timed a selected bunch of events, just before upgrading (i.e. still running Leopard), and then after the upgrade to Snow Leopard was done. Here’s the quantitative comparisons.

Time from turn on till login screen is ready: 46s down to 43s. Minimal change.

Time from login screen till desktop is loaded, all icons painted, all menu bar items displayed: 66s down to 41s. This is a big speed up.

Time to load Safari: 6s down to 5s. It was quick enough to begin with I guess.

Time to load Microsoft Word: 20s down to 13s. Superb.

Time to load iPhoto: 9s down to 6s.

Time to load iTunes: 8s down to 5s.

Incidentally, disk space available before upgrade: 66.8GB. Disk space available after upgrade: 81.7GB. 14.9GB of recovered space. Double what Apple said it would be.

This is on my MacBook 2.4GHz notebook.

Sadly, a few things have broken.

1. Bluetooth modem connection to my Nokia N97 is not working anymore. Snow Leopard keeps complaining that /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Modem is busy. I tried with a Nokia 5800 with the same problem too. For now, I can only run my N97 as a wireless hotpost (using JoikuSpot), and have the Mac connect to the phone over 802.11g to use its 3G HSDPA connection.
2. Nokia Multimedia Transfer appears to work mostly, except that it fails to launch iPhoto and I can’t import photos. Alternative solution for now is to connect the phone using USB in Image Transfer mode, and iPhoto detects the phone and imports photos just like before. I much prefer to use bluetooth though.

Hopefully some solutions are found for these issues pretty soon.

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Customers in Singapore are now receiving their Snow Leopard! Here’s the opened up Mac Box Set ordered by my colleague. The first thing that struck me? Oh, the box is so small. It is about the area of a standard CDROM. I somehow got the impression that it is a more sizable portion. The photos on their website make the box look big. This is my colleague’s order. Still waiting for mine to arrive at home.

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Earlier this afternoon, I noticed that the order status in the Apple Online Store for my Snow Leopard had been updated to “Prepared for shipment”. Delivery will be by tomorrow, so the order tracking page says. I guess people in Singapore, along with those in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc, will be amongst the first in the world to get their copy of Snow Leopard. It is going to be goodbye to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on this MacBook really soon now.

The new “in” thing with operating systems is not about doing more. Apple is done with adding more (major) features. It seems to be the case with Windows 7 coming up in about 2 months. For some people, it seems like a disappointment that the upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 looks almost like a “service pack”. Even the version name, Snow Leopard, suggests only a marginal improvement over Leopard.

On the other hand, for only US$29 (S$48), it seems like a relatively cheap upgrade. I tend to agree that many of the new improvements in Snow Leopard really ought to be enhancements that should have been available as a Leopard update, not requiring users to upgrade to a new version of Mac OS X. But I think there are enough under-the-hood changes that are significant enough to deserve a version number of its own.

Snow Leopard is not about major feature upgrades. It is about plenty of little refinements and usability improvements that add up  to be, hopefully, worthy of US$29.

What am I looking forward to?

1. Improved performance: Plenty of things are said to be faster. With more parts of the operating system turned 64-bits, one would expect a speedier and snappier operating system.
2. Quicktime X: It now records video, audio, and the computer screen. Making video tutorials are now going to be a snap. I think I can find plenty of uses for this.
3. Integration with Exchange: Now, I can finally be in-sync with the corporate mandated platform for email, calendaring and directory, without me having to put up with a Windows OS on my computer. Actually I don’t know how better Mail and Address Book would be (after all there is already IMAP4 and LDAP), but at least there would be iCal calendar integration.
4. Usability enhancements all around: Better Expose, better Docks.

Update: Oh. Even before I really finished posting this… there’s an update. I think Apple’s working through the night tonight. My order has been shipped. DHL Express picked up the box at 21:17!

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Do you fancy Mac OS X on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10? The S10 is a nice cool-looking netbook, and Mac OS X is a nice cool operating system. The problem, of course, is that you could not legally buy Mac OS X to install in the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. That, however, has not stopped plenty of people all over the world from trying to install Mac OS X on their non-Apple hardware. See the photo? This netbook hackintosh is made “complete” with a genuine Apple sticker pasted on the cover!

I’m quite surprised that to find Mac OS X working, for the most part, on many non-Apple hardware, including this Lenovo IdeaPad S10. I’d think that if Apple was not agreeable to have Mac OS X installed in non-approved hardware, they could have easily tweaked their code to make it impossible to install on anything but their own hardware. As it turns out, this is possible, although a little cumbersome, but possible nevertheless without hacking the Mac OS X code itself.

The funny thing is that the Software Update continues to update Mac OS X on these non-approved hardware.

Furthermore, even though Apple does not have a netbook platform themselves, apparently the latest Mac OS X update is suspected to have optimizations for the Atom CPU platform used by many netbooks, resulting in improved battery life.

I think this could possibly open up a market for resellers to pre-configure a Mac OS X loaded netbook for sale. Or other PC hardware. I believe there would be some users who are interested to have Mac OS X installed on non-Apple hardware for whatever reasons. But they find it too much hassle to do it themselves, so they wouldn’t mind paying someone else to do it for them.

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The cat is out of the bag. The latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, code named Snow Leopard, will be launched in September. Current Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) users can upgrade to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) for just US$29. That seems like a very reasonable upgrade price to pay.

Apple’s WWDC event is happening right now, and there are plenty of news to talk about. The iPhone is one of them, but there are plenty of hardware refreshes throughout the MacBook and MacBook product lines.

First off, there are the new 15″ MacBook Pros, and updates to the 17″ MacBook Pros. The 13″ models were all known as MacBooks previously, but the 13″ aluminum unibodies have now been “upgraded” into the MacBook Pro line. So now, the MacBook line has just that single white polycarbonate body version left. All the aluminum unibodies are MacBook Pros, except for the ultra-thin MacBook Air which remains as the MacBook Air. There is also some price drops. For example, the entry level 13″ MacBook Pro (which is the previous middle 13″ MacBook model, or the lower of the two previous aluminum unibody 13″ MacBook models) now sells for US$100 less, although it seems to work out to be only S$100 less in the Apple Singapore store.

The price reductions are great. For some time, I’ve begun to think that the Mac hardware have been overpriced. The reduction is “not enough” in my opinion, but it is certainly a first step in the right direction.

The new Safari 4 browser is finally launched too, and available immediately for download. I hope the various bugs that made me “give up” and go back to Safari 3 has been fixed.

I will be looking forward to Snow Leopard. I hope they have a bundle for iLife ‘09 and Snow Leopard upgrade. Here’s a snippet about Snow Leopard from Apple’s press release:

“We’ve built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown,� said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before.�

Yeah, each new version is always faster, more responsive and more reliable. Although no specific date in September was announced for the release of Snow Leopard, if Apple does make the release on time, they would be weeks ahead of Windows 7. They better be weeks ahead of Windows 7, otherwise all the media attention would too quickly be turned to the launch of Windows 7 instead.

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I took me a couple of days too long to get started setting up my new Epson Stylus CX9300F all-in-one printer. It took me over another month before I got around to scanning my first document with the printer. It was a silly problem. It turns out that there was probably something loose with my USB cable connection to the printer. I hadn’t suspected that previously, because I could print to the printer okay. But the Epson Scan program hung. Subsequently I could still print. It didn’t seem logical to suspect the USB cable connection.

So anyway, now the Epson Stylus CX9300F prints, copies, scans and, oh well, I forgot if I did fax with it. I think I did.

All-in-one printers are wonderful, especially copying and scanning. I know many eons ago when I was a student, printing was the most relevant thing to me. Scanning and copying wasn’t all that important (at least not to me then, maybe students nowadays are different). Nowadays, having a photocopier at home has become indispensable. There are so many times I need to make photocopies of vehicle log card, insurance cover note, kid’s birth certificate, medical receipts, etc. These used to be activities that had to be done in office. But now it is so convenient doing it at home.

I guess that’s what these all-in-one printers were designed to do. My only gripe is that they aren’t fast enough, and they don’t do duplex printing. I would really love duplex printing. Okay I know all that is possible, but oh well, I also want it at like $200. Maybe I would settle for $300, or $350 tops. Someday, all-in-one colour laser printers with duplex function and 24ppm will sell for that price.

So anyway, back to my Epson Stylus CX9300F. If anyone wants to know, it works superb with Mac OS X. The accompanying Epson programs don’t have the elegance of the typical Mac OS X graphical look and feel, but they get the job done.

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