sushi-k.com

I have a laptop. I use it for pretty much everything. A couple weeks ago during cherry blossom season, it was my job to stake a claim on some prime blossom territory with a big, blue tarp and then.. hold it. So I hauled my laptop along and got some work done while waiting for the party to start. After the battery died, I got up to take some pictures. With my face pressed to the viewfinder I sensed someone behind me, near my tarp. It was an old guy on a bike pointing at my laptop sitting alone on the ground. I gather he didn’t think that was the best place for a laptop, alone on the ground.

After he left it took me about two seconds of thought to figure out he was right. It also didn’t take me long to realize that, being a laptop, my macbook pro is all too vulnerable to pretty much every form of data loss imaginable, including theft, lost luggage, me being scatterbrained, crushed in a crowded train, …. scary stuff.

That’s it. It needs to be backed up.

Since it’s a Mac, and since I just upgraded to 10.5, my first thought was “Time Machine!” And shortly thereafter I had a new Time Capsule on my shelf backing up the machine. Nice.

But in my googling, I realized that encryption would be a good idea to. Having once been a victim of identity theft, I’m really not eager to repeat the experience. I suspect that my corporate clients would be none-too-happy to hear that details of their new products/research were about to be on bittorrent, either.

But no problem, this is Leopard! We’ve got FileVault, right?

Kinda.

Encryption and backups are really a necessity for laptops, when you think about it as I reluctantly did. Unfortunately FileVault and Time Machine don’t quite have that synergy thing going. FileVault will encrypt your home directory, and TM will back it up, but only after you’ve logged out. Er, I mean while you’re in the process of logging out. Which for me is like, never.

Some googling and some experience have brought to light that:

- TM is not all that stable. It’s crashed on me once already, probably because I closed the lid while it was working. That isn’t hard to do, btw, since it’s almost always working.

- when using FV, you can no longer use TM’s GUI to restore files. Oops.

- with FV, your home directory backups become way less efficient with disk space, and they weren’t very efficient to begin with.

So now I’m looking for a replacement. There are lots of programs out there, but most of them are of the mirror/duplication variety. Yes, it’s nice to have a bootable external drive as a backup, but it won’t do you much good if a big chunk of the filesystem gets corrupted and then duplicated before you notice. So SuperDuper! and its ilk are kinda out for me.

To make a long post short, I think I’ll go with CrashPlan. It’s pretty flexible, very professionally done (and I wouldn’t say that of many programs), and works on OS X, windows, and even linux. Its reason for living is to do off-site backups, and it can be coerced into doing local backups if you have more than one pc. It will also backup a FileVaulted home directory while mounted (with the backup encrypted, of course). It does versioning, and it even does it the smart way: by saving only the parts of the file that have changed.

Time Machine stopped working today with system.log containing the error: “/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[629]: Indexing a file failed. Returned -1130 for: /.DS_Store”

nice.

After much googling and poking around, I saw that the mount point for the backup drive (a time capsule) in /Volumes was hanging around even after the drive was unmounted, probably thanks to Spotlight placing a .DS_Store file there. After removing the directory and installing some updates (including updates to TM and TC) all seems back to normal. Not sure what did the trick, or what caused the problem (sleeping the machine while TM was running?)..

In about 13 years of using the net, today I wrote my first web site feedback.

RS Electronics is the only major electronics distributor to ship parts from locations in Japan, which means shipping is cheap and quick. They have a good selection of parts, prices which are sometimes reasonable, and ship very promptly.

And yet, I will try to source a part using any other means available before going to their site, inexplicably named rswww.co.jp and separate from the more reasonable rs-components.jp. Why? Because using rswww is almost physically painful.

I wasted so much time this weekend fighting with their horrible UI that today I actually took the time to fill out their feedback form. I tried to be polite.

I mostly expressed my frustration with one feature of their site, the “session timeout.” Sessions time out after 20 mins… doesn’t sound so bad, right? But, you don’t have to be logged in to have a session exist and inexplicably time out. If I click on “electronic parts,” go away for 20 min, then click on “LEDs” I would see a page saying that either the session timed out or the link is bad. And from there you can only go to the top. Huh? Knowing this, a clever person would try to avoid the extra time-out page and just click to go back to the top. Oh no. Trying to go to the top of the site gives you the timeout page.

So I wrote my first site feedback. I was polite. And when I click send… session timeout.

Which brings me to my point: could there be a business in creating a well-designed “wrapper” site to shield users from terrible UI design? I want one for RS. And my bank site. And credit card site. Hmmm….

So I need to do a bunch of technical illustrations.. what to use?  I hope to avoid buying Illustrator just now, so looking at free and low-cost alternatives, the major players seem to be:  Inkscape

• no patterns built-in
• pattern creation and editing is clumsy
• no support for named styles
• styles and patterns can’t be shared across files
• kinda buggy
• PDF export doesn’t play well with Preview.app
• everything keyboard-accessible
• good features for diagramming like glue points and connectors
• no auto-save (not reliable anyway).  not sure if Inkscape crashed or X11, but an hour’s work is gone just the same.
• X11 app, so integration is not so good

Lineform

• only bitmap pattern fills, not so great for a vector editor
• few primitives
• no support for diagramming
• otherwise nice UI, fast, quite nice

Intaglio

• good feature set
• lightweight
• good AppleScript support
• no support for diagramming
• crashed at least once on my Intel MBP

Lineform and Intaglio are both well done, but Lineform is still a bit immature, and both programs are clearly designed first with graphic design in mind. In the end, Inkscape seems to have the largest feature set, convenient primitives, support for diagrams with connectors, and it’s free. I really want to like Lineform and Intaglio, but for commercial software of that price (~$90), they really need to work on their non-artistic features to make it worth the purchase to me. As it is, I think I’ll end up buying Illustrator somewhere down the line.  Of course I may be on the wrong track completely; perhaps I should be looking at CAD software instead of illustration.

Finally got around to switching one of my other domains to elahost, which is hosting this site. The web site moved over pretty smoothly, but mail proved to be another matter entirely.

Having created an identical mail account on elahost before changing the dns entries, I expected to be happy after simply changing the mail server in Mail.app setup. Indeed I was able to send and receive mail without interruption after hitting “ok”, but suddenly my inbox and sent folders were empty!

A moment’s thought told me I should have expected this, since I was using IMAP. Ok, that mystery solved. But why now can I not see any folder but “INBOX” on the new server?!

Not sure why, even now that it’s working. I seem to have fixed it by changing the username from “me+domain.com” to “me@domain.com”, two forms which the provider docs say should be equivalent. Don’t know if I knocked something loose in Mail.app, or if it’s a bug in whatever mail account system they’re using on elahost..

Well it only took me an hour and a half to figure out how to enter a backslash on my Japanese MacBook Pro. Kotoeri->Preferences->”Enter a backslash instead of a yen mark”.

Japanese PC keyboards have both backslash and yen mark keys, with backslash located (suprisingly) next to slash. The shifted state of backslash on a PC keyboard is underscore. Now, the shifted state of the key next to slash on my MBP keyboard is also an underscore. Would anyone care to guess what the unshifted state is? That’s right, underscore! Apple has done the sensible thing and duplicated the underscore in both the shifted and unshifted states! Yay!

May I humbly suggest that Apple consider implementing a “no designing hardware while blind, stupid drunk” policy?

Time to get back to work.

After finally getting my keyboard set up as I like it and sitting down to code, I discovered a new feature of Emacs.app for OS X, kind of.  Placing the cursor on an opening or closing delimiter (paren, brace) highlights the whole expression by default.  Unfortunately the default color choice turns my screen unreadable every time I put the cursor on an opening brace of a long class definition, flashes the arguments of a function call every time I type it, and otherwise continually taunts me.

With the help of the emacs-app-dev- mailing list I discovered the the culprit is mic-paren.el, a lisp package that extends the usual paren matching package paren.el.  (setq paren-sexp-mode nil) has restored peace to my screen.

Thanks to the very wonderful KeyRemap4MacBook I now have a useable macbook pro! The “eisuu” and “kana” keys, on either side of the spacebar on japanese keyboards, are now mapped to control so I can emacs away with my thumbs. If you use emacs, doing this can save you a lot of pain, quite literally. No more nerve-pinching little-finger moves.

I occasionally wish I had a spectrometer, and last week was one of those occasions. Since I tend to make more of my own equipment than I should, before I knew it I was googling for “make cheap spectrometer.” The search turned up a fantastic page with instructions and pictures which inspired me to hack up something similar. I figured you could make something with a CD as a diffraction grating, but didn’t realize it was possible to get such high-quality images. Particularly the fact that you can make out the Fraunhofer lines means that it’s easy to make precise measurements by using the lines for callibration.

Here are a two pics, the first taken with my Casio EX-Z750, the second with an older Sony DSC-P5.

It’s interesting that the two cameras produce very different colors for the same spectrum. The Sony is far better in this case, but still not so good. Unless my eyesight is going, I don’t see much purple or violet, just a whole lot of blue. I hope they do a better job with rainbows.