Talamathi

I have been having a bit of an ongoing discussion with a friend over Time Machine. A lot of this has been about the problems Time Machine currently has, and where it can/should go. What little I know about ZFS has made me think it could play an important role. This kind of feeling usually tells me I need to learn more about a topic. Often it often means my initial suspicions are wrong, but so far there haven’t been any disappointments yet. Just today, I came upon the blog post “Why ZFS Matters to Mac Users”. It feels like I’ve read this before, but it’s relevance strikes more much more, now. Currently, the most notable to me is block-level checksumming to detecting errors the ability to handle snapshots efficiently and quickly Clearly, ZFS is much more than this, but with my mind on how Time Machine could be better those seem like useful thing to keep an eye out for as ZFS becomes much more prevalent in the Mac world. Technorati Tags: Mac , Time+Machine ...

aLL OvEr Originally uploaded by TeLePoTo Every time I've flown to Nepal, we stayed above the cloud cover until getting close to Kathmandu Valley. Breaking through that cloud cover is particularly breathtaking, as you get a sudden view of the amazing hills. The last time coming in, a group of drunken tourists in front of me simultaneously said, "WOOOOOAAAAAAHHH" as the hills came in to view. Having said all that, I don't know where this photo was taken (it is someone else's photo, after all) or the real story behind it, but that's what came to my mind when I first saw this. Technorati Tags: Flickr , Nepal

It looks like I was beaten to the punch on my first ever hint submitted to Mac OS X Hints , but I thought I’d still post it here. One of the new features in Mac OS X 10.5.2 is a new menu extra for Time Machine . This is actually more functional to me than the original Dock icon; it tells you when you last backed up, and when it is backing up, how much is being copied over. Heck, the menu icon even has a little animation while it’s backing up. Why doesn’t the Dock do that? Anyway, compare for yourself. The dock menu is on the left, while the menu extra is on the right. The one missing thing, you’ll notice, is the ability to browse other Time Machine disks (not exactly a problem of mine, as I only have the one). You can still get this from the menu extra, though. Just hold the option key at any time while looking at the menu. Technorati Tags: Leopard , Time+Machine

Speaking of Squeak and Smalltalk in general, a recent search brought up these two pages about localizing Squeak to Nepali. Pretty cool. Technorati Tags: Nepal , Squeak , Smalltalk

Let me start by saying that very often I find Steve Yegge ’s points insightful. His last post about commenting code and type information has a few things I have an issue with, though. I should probably point out my area of research is software verification, and so some of the things he brings up does hit upon what I do. A large part of his argument is about metadata and it’s usefulness in programming. I wouldn’t say that he is totally against metadata, but his problem with it is a major part of his argument. This is a major oversimplification, but it does cover a lot of what he said. Metadata is just a great topic. If I ever get cornered in a dangerous situation, I think I could get out of it just by putting my opponent to sleep talking about either metadata, public policy, or XMPP . It’s an interesting topic (and I’m not in to it anywhere near as much as the people who wrote the Wikipedia article I linked to) mainly because we interact with metadata...

Thanks to Entourage 2008, I finally got to try out Time Machine to do a restoration. Let me point out, first off, that I happen to like Entourage (and in fact, I’ve had a pretty favorable impression of Office 2008 in general). However, when I let it use iSync to handle my contacts, each one got duplicated. This problem can only occur (I think) if you tell Entourage to go to Preferences > Sync Services, and check “Synchronize contacts with Address Book and .Mac”, which is off by default. Today I decided to give Leopard’s iChat a try. I’ve been an Adium user for a few years now and would recommend it to anyone who asked, but I thought it was time to give iChat another try. That’s how I noticed there was something weird with my address book: both iChat and Adium use the address book to map AIM and Jabber contacts with actual names (obviously, Adium can handle a lot more than that). Mostly iChat saw what Adium was seeing, but due to a few various ...