Now available for the Mac and Windows, 1Password from Agile Web Solutions has earned a space on my drive. While I still use Little Secrets for a lot of miscellaneous information, 1Password shines in its ability to interface with multiple browsers and provide you with a convenient menu of applicable logins for the vast majority of sites including google, yahoo, logmein, and many banking sites. One click, or a command-\ and you’re logged in.
Mail Act-On and MailTags
A pair of extensions for Apple’s built in Mail application from InDev software. Act-On allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to redirect your current or selected mail via a set of custom rules. In my case I use it to file away several common general categories of mail, flag them or not based on whether I need to see it again (with a smart folder to view flagged mail), and forward them if needed, all in one easy step.
MailTags stands alone – allowing you to tag your mail much like Google Mail, letting you search for (or create smart folders to find) mail based on key words that you specify, including useful presets like “Waiting” (for reply). It also allows you to append notes to your mail messages.
Of the two, Act-On is the most useful, and a strong recommendation.
Strategies and Considerations for Backing Up Small Businesses
Most of us have seen it before: A client calls, in a panic, because a company report, a critical database, or a critical email is lost. It could be because a computer died, it could be something was stolen, it could be because something was maliciously wiped. Hoping the answer is “yes”, you ask the question: “Do you have backups of that?”
The question serves several purposes. First of all, it gives you a rough estimate of exactly how complicated or expensive the recovery procedures are going to get. Secondly – if the answer is yes – it acts as a pacifier, reminding the client that they may be inconvenienced, but all is not lost. Even if you know they have backups because you already had this talk, calmly reminding them that they have backups helps calm them down, because now they know the odds of things turning out better than their fears have dramatically improved.
Of course, the best time to deal with backups is before you need them, and smaller businesses (5-20 people) have some unique issues that many larger companies with a full-time IT guy on staff wouldn’t typically see. Even with larger companies, it may be hard to convince people to free up money to back up data after they just spent so much money on computer equipment in the first place.
How critical is your data?
What are you willing to lose? Exactly what you back up, and how, will be determined almost entirely by what information you are willing to sacrifice. This determines how long you need to store data and how frequently you back up. If you have to recover information, can you lose a day? Two days? A week? How often do you update your offsite backups? If a computer dies, how much time is allowed to get the user up on a new machine?
These are questions that, in smaller companies, usually need to be answered by the owners. Even if they are not computer-savvy, they need to understand the different ways their data can be protected.
Workstations
Workstations are one of the most common points of failure. Loss of the hard drive or failure of the file system can result in the loss of data not stored on a server. Failure of the computer means time taken to transfer the user, his data, and his programs to another physical machine.
There are three basic ways to protect individual workstations. The first is to avoid having data that exists solely on one workstation. While much more difficult with laptops than desktops because many laptops leave the network, you should encourage users to store as many working files/etc. as possible on network shares hosted by backed up servers. Combined with email accounts hosted on exchange servers or IMAP services like Google apps, this policy allows a user to log into a different computer and begin to get minimally productive with email and network-saved files until everything is restored “just so.”
Of course, while IMAP based email does allow you to recover gracefully if you drop your laptop, it doesn’t prevent you from permanently deleting email (though a properly configured exchange server allows you to recover recently deleted files). Networked storage also doesn’t protect files that are strictly local to the workstation. Protecting this information requires either regularly backing up to another local – usually external – drive, or running a networkable backup client that can back up the computer – or at least the user profiles – to a central backup server.
The last case is one common in graphic design situations: a workstation with many semi-unique apps highly customized to the user. This can be addressed by regularly cloning the drive to another bootable drive, so that recovering from a failure simply requires a reboot from the backup disk or restoring from the clone. Cloning software is also useful when preparing to install a larger HD into a user’s machine.
Servers
Servers are a great way to share information and provide for a central means of archiving needed data, but even here we can have file systems fail and files can be inadvertently or maliciously deleted.
A word about RAID. A question I often get asked is “But we’ve got RAID, doesn’t that give me backups?” No, it does not. RAID allows a server (or workstation) to continue working even if one of the disks fails. It provides some “backup” from outright drive failure, but does absolutely nothing if the file system gets confused, the drive controller or CPU dies, the computer gets stolen, or someone out for revenge starts deleting files.
Here, your concerns should be backing up stored data files (simple with most software like retrospect/backupexec, etc.), providing for “bare metal” restores to the same or similar machine in the event of hardware failure, and performing offsite backups.
Let’s face it. Someone may break into the facility at any time and steal those expensive servers, and smaller businesses generally don’t have separate locked rooms for them. Or a fire may break out. Or a hurricane may come. Whether you use an internet-based backup service like Mozy/Carbonite, or you regularly swap tapes or drives with a copy kept offsite, you need to consider what data actually has to be preserved to allow a business to rebuild itself from such disasters. Cost also needs to be factored in. It takes time or bandwidth to move data offsite, and offsite storage also costs money. These constraints mean that a business must decide which data is important enough to be backed up offsite and how current the offsite backups have to be. Most companies I deal with swap and take a full copy of the local backup offsite on a weekly basis. Some backup just the critical data files offsite via the internet, daily or several times a day. Others combine the two.
On both servers and workstations, there’s the classic “Oops, I didn’t mean to hit save” where a file gets overwritten, and critical data gets lost. Fortunately, most backup methods these days support some form of snapshot, incremental or differential backup features that allow you to revert to any previous version of the same file. The exact method chosen is dependent on the amount of backup storage available and how far back you want to keep copies.
Flaming Hoops
Of course, it doesn’t matter how thorough and complete your backup system is if the data never actually gets backed up. In my experience, even as simple a process as daily tape changes tend not to get done if there isn’t a dedicated IT-savvy person available. There are two solutions to this: simplicity and responsibility.
Make the backup as utterly transparent as possible. Every time the user must take a step to ensure the backups continue, it’s a potential point of failure where users will eventually put off the action or forget to do it. While tapes still have a purpose and usage, our small business clients typically use hard drives that can be swapped out once per week with one offsite to minimize the amount of time and thought needed to maintain backups.
Also, we push the responsibility for swapping out backup devices as far up the ownership chain as possible. Face it – the owner will be a lot more concerned about the loss of business data than some secretary on the first floor. The more invested the person is in the success and continuity of the company, the more likely he will be to make sure backup tapes or drives are swapped out.
As we’ve seen, there are many factors that determine what specific products and strategies you use to maintain data integrity and continuity of operation. There are also many products, from many companies, that can be used for this purpose. They range from those oriented towards larger companies such as Backupexec, to those oriented towards individual needs such as Dropbox or the personal versions of Mozy. Which combination you use depends on how much downtime you can afford to have, and how much data you need to protect.
Recommendations
Antivirus
If you need to have a free antivirus for home use, try Microsoft’s “Security Essentials.” It’s fast, it works, and best of all, it’s free. Even for businesses.
If you have the cash to spring for antivirus (or have to because you are a business and have lots of computers) try out Kaspersky and ESET Nod 32.
On the Mac side, I’d stay away from both of the Norton and McAffee products. Both have a reputation for causing weirdness that should have also been earned on the Windows side as well (I’ve run into some totally showstopping bugs over the last few years). If you NEED an antivirus there is a graphically-driven version of ClamAV for the mac that is free, and will scan files.
Routers
For home gear I now generally recommend stuff from Netgear. Their current boxes seem to generally work more reliably than equipment from Linksys or D-link (though they generally also work well), and are readily available. They also tends to upgrade fairly easy.
Wireless
If you’re willing to spend the extra money, the Airport WAP/routers fromApple are high-quality pieces of equipment with excellent security, signal strength, and ease-of-setup features, as well as allowing their use as a repeater, and a decent Windows/Mac print server for USB printers. The repeater functionality is especially slick and well done. Last but not least, the Time Capsule allows for wireless home storage and across-the-network backups (for Macs). Otherwise, I’d usually go for a Netgear.
Browsers
Windows: IE8 is a huge improvement in many ways. It is somewhat safer from hijackings, has tabs for browsing, and best of all for all too many people I’ve known, finally fixes a printing bug that would cut off the right side of wider web pages.
That said, in combination with all of the various security updates and antispyware and firewalls and such, Windows starts running like a crippled turtle with IE7 on it unless you have a lot of RAM. 512MB, even 756MB, no longer cuts the mustard. 1GB on a Vista machine is asking for trouble.
So if you want a browser that won’t punish your system as much, and is still more secure, nevermind more extensible, do yourself a favor and use Firefox or Chrome wherever you can.
Firefox is a solid browser with support for many useful plugins, but getting away from its origins as a small, light, standards-compliant alternative to IE. Chrome is a browser provided by Google that uses the same “webkit” rendering engine as Safari (also available for Windows) but with an emphasis on speed and a minimalist interface that I wish Firefox would emulate.
Mac: A matter of taste. While there are other good options available such as Camino, you really can’t go wrong with either the built-in Safari, Chrome (intel macs only), and Firefox for those occasions where Safari just won’t work, or vice versa. Firefox is slower but far more flexible, and on the newer intel-based Macs, the differences are far less noticeable.
Memory
As much as is humanly possible. Neither an up-to–date copy of XP nor OSX run comfortably with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Two Gigabytes or more are recommended for OSX or Vista. Check out 18004memory.com for good prices and a great return policy. Another good place to check out is crucial at crucial.com.
Outgrowing the Viewpoint…
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that life is complex, that there is no black and white, that things are forever gray and mixed.
There is a lot of truth to this viewpoint, and I still like the song from Live’s first album Beauty of Gray. It’s a good reminder to check as many factors as you can, and that the factors involved in weighing choices are rarely simple, especially when there exists a conflict between several held values. It’s also a good reminder that you may have caught someone on a bad day.
And yet…
Eventually choices must be made. One must decide how to act, or decide whether or not to act. Life is full of binary, trinary, and otherwise exclusive solution sets where once made, the results cannot be changed. Even where the choice can be undone (say, taking a wrong turn) it still takes time and effort to correct it and you have forever gone a step down that path. Do I open the door? Do I wait? Do I go left or right? Do I pull the trigger or not?
Most of our lives we don’t live so near the edge where the choices we make cannot be undone, where the consequences are matters of life or death, or financial success or failure. I was reminded today, listening to Roland by the Cruxshadows, that there are areas in life where what we decide from moment to moment matters in both an immediate and grand sense, and ultimately, the palette of options we keep before us gets narrowed down to Do, or Do Not. Whatever the blend of factors going in, however gray and mixed the results will be, our choices in front of us are narrowed to two: black or white.
Choosing which factors have priority and drive the direction of the choice, and which ones are irrelevant is not inherently oversimplifying the situation when a decision must be made to act, or not. There is no inherent good in tracking down nuances if it paralyzes you and keeps you from committing to a course of action – or inaction.
Things I No Longer Use…
Once upon a time I had a killer program from an outfit called Cultured Code called Xyle Scope that made it as painless as possible to see what style sheet settings affected what text and blocks on a web page, making it far, far easier to make web pages look consistent, and figure out what bit of .css code you needed to adjust.
I realized today, when troubleshooting some display issues in Safari, that I hadn’t used Xyle in a while.
The problem is that there are other options that have improved. Not only does Firefox have a killer javascript debugger that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but has a few decent css debugging tools as well (though not as good as Xyle…). I leave even that alone, because now Safari is up to version 4. The web elements inspector under the debug menu is somewhat clunkier in use, but just as useful information wise. The javascript features give me enough info to fix most of my problems without going into a full debugger. The real killer app feature of this though, and why Xyle hasn’t been opened in forever, is that unlike Xyle Scope, the web elements inspector allows me to see the styling and elements of the web page is it is currently rendered, after content has been dynamically modified via javascript, and not just in the initial load state of the basic web code.
Apparently, even the guys who made it agree, as cultured code no longer even links to it off of their front page.
Two apostrophes and a diff later…
Hooookay. Again the geekery, and also dabbing a toe into a subject that if anything, gets geeks even more fired up than the platform wars (Unix/Mac/Windows/Whatever).
Editors.
One is left wondering how they got themselves into this.
The long and the short is that I saw an article where someone was discussing the power of an ancient, and highly honed text editor in the *nix world called emacs, and how it was again becoming the cool kid on the block. It didn’t hurt that a few days before that I saw one of the guys from Digital Domain at my son’s High School (he was an alumnus there) showing off some of his work – and using a customized emacs editor.
So I took a plunge, tried the different versions, decided that of the commonly available flavors the current “carbon emacs” was the best, but…..
It just wasn’t me. Powerful, yes, and something I’ll need to ramp up on a bit along with vi when editing text remotely on a server, but….
It was too much work to learn a new set of tools.
Which brought me to another quandary, my two preferred sets of tools. TextMate and BBEdit.
Why two? because neither is exactly what I want either.
Textmate is fresher, more customizable, seems to have a better intuitive grasp of languages, and can easily create some truly killer code snippets I can fire off with a few letters and a tab.
On the other hand, it chokes on some of the larger logfiles I have to parse through, the “find” features don’t color code the matching syntax, comparing two files line by line is so utterly painful I go out o my way to open up BBEdit just to do it when I hit that brick wall, and it can be far too aggressively helpful when it comes to single and double quotes.
I don’t really want or need all of BBEdit’s features… I’ve stripped down my TextMate feature set to just what I need as it is….
But…
If it would deal with large files smoothly without beachballing (for minutes even….), and if the file comparison using “diff” gave me results like BBEdit, I’d be a happy camper and forgive the rest of the annoyances.
I’d also like it if the long-promised version 2 that would make use of the then-new 10.5 “Leopard” features would finally, finally come out.
The Cruxshadows: Quicksilver
There are songs that settle me. Make me happy. There are songs that make me want to dance.There are songs that pick me up and carry me, pump me up, feed me with energy and determination. Fuel me.
Alongside songs such as Bring me to Life by Evanescence, and Stand my Ground by Within Temptation, The Cruxshadows have contributed more than their fair share in the latter category. Citadel. Winterborn (my Sacrifice). Sophia.
Rarer is the song that not only lifts me, but straps wings on, lights the fuel and takes off into the clouds, the audible sensation of flight at the edge of a hypersonic flight envelope. Red Sector A by Rush is one such song, Immortal by the Cruxshadows another.
So, it’s labor day weekend, and the Cruxshadows kicked off their US tour at Dragon*Con again. This of course means there’s another single due.
With their latest single release, Quicksilver, they’ve done it again. The title track may or may not take my overall “favorite” slot from Eye of the Storm, but I can imagine it hitting me with the same energy and impact Immortal did when I heard it for the first time opening the concert at last year’s con (missed this one, drat it…).
Stylistically it feels more like a lighter, more upbeat Marilyn my Bitterness, with the power chords toned down, the synths turned up, and their signature violin mostly AWOL. Nevertheless, the arching introductory keyboards get you moving, and the driving refrain and beat will carry you through anything.
The “edit” track won’t make it to my iPod. It’s a solid, shorter mix, of Quicksilver, but not stylistically different enough to justify the precious space. The “remix” track (apparently mistakenly named “Avalanche” at both the Amazon MP3 and iTunes download stores) is long, but worth it, with a trippy -trancy take on the tune, and an opening that reminds me of the intro to Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger.”
Avalanche is solid, lyrical, and has more violins. I seem to be in the minority of of the Amazon reviews in preferring the title track to Avalanche, but it’s a solid, lyrical, song with a variety of musical textures that will stay on my iPod.
Roland is the oddball track – a slow, sad ballad with a haunting piano opening leading into an quiet, retrospective song.
All in all, this is exactly what I’ve come to expect from their past albums: craft, depth, energy, and themes of responsibility, valor, heroism, and myth.
In All Fairness to Adobe
Adobe did get around to testing CS3 compatibility.
Now – if they had even mentioned that compatibility testing was in the works up front (but that it may be delayed in prioritizing CS4 first – and that bug fixes would depend on the nature of the bug) – a lot of people would have been happy that Adobe wasn’t blowing them off on a product some had only bought a year ago.
Let it Snow…
Snow Leopard
I’ve spent nearly a straight week poking into an operating system to a degree and intensity that I never have before. Yes, many of the things I was poking at I’d done before, but rarely had I so intensely poked, pushed, and prodded to see what broke.
Honestly, rarely have I had to push and prod so much to find things to break.
Word of warning. I am fully certain I will be recommending this update to every client that has an intel based Mac. I’m already getting questions on it.
Yet.
I can NOT recommend this in good faith right this second to anyone with an established workflow in mission-critical software that has not yet been certified and updated specifically to run on Snow Leopard. Wait a few weeks. Try a test platform.
That said. Wow.
Installation on my laptop was less painful than installing Leopard onto my wife’s MacBook Pro. Or my old iBook. Or my G5. Since I didn’t run into the blue screen (thank you again Logitech. Your hardware is great, your drivers uniformly create a perfect vacuum… on every platform), it was far easier than my last major upgrade.
Starting up and shutting down, among other things, are both faster. So is time machine. Mail hasn’t flaked out in any weird ways, and is also much faster (and can now incorporate hyperlinks within signatures. I can hear the text-only purists grinding their teeth). Most programs are noticably snappier, and many, despite apple releasing ahead of schedule, already had verified their software was compatible. Thus my list of stuff that was broken was very, very short.
Most of my programs worked without hiccups. Predictably, almost every non-apple program was 32 bit. Surprisingly, among the tiny handful of Apple programs that are not 64 bit are front row and the DVD player.
The first category of programs I looked at were those with only PowerPC code. While I expected this from my copy of Office (I still run 2004. Anything newer I translate into Pages or NeoOffice…), I didn’t realize that Zterm, Disk Inventory X, Pic2Icon, or the graphical version of NetHack had never been rebuilt as intel-native programs. While most non-techies could care less about most of those programs, and can get a newer version of the office suite – MS or not – Disk Inventory is a useful tool for us crazies and for normal people that lets you very easily hunt down where space is getting used up on your hard drive, by giving you a nice, graphical, color-coded mapping.
I may have to bit the bullet and either get by without it (I don’t need it that often), or hope somebody updates it, and the rest of the powerPC programs. Office, I’ll just have to work in NeoOffice and Pages until I decide it’s worth ponying up for the Microsoft product. I’ve taken NetHack in an even _more_ retro direction by downloading and installing the text-only version.
Let’s get to what broke, shall we?
Cooliris, a wonderful web plugin for navigating pictures in sites like Flickr and Facebook, still works in Firefox, but the Safari version is broken, and now pending.
NeoOffice did not work – would not even start up, but has been patched and will now work after the update. There are still a couple bugs related to the image browser and networked file saves, but those are survivable. Once Apple gets the x.1 round of updates out of the way and the stable release of NeoOffice 3.1 arrives, we should be good to go.
I expected OnyX to fail – it’s a very version-specific cleanup utility for nuking corrupt caches, etc, and I would not expect the 10.5 version to work safely on Snow leopard than I would expect the 10.4 version to. Winclone surprised me a bit – I would not have thought it would be affected.
Another geeky program, nmap – used for security and network analysis – had an oddball issue properly scanning the local network. There is a workaround for it.
Predictably, the Cisco VPN software broke, just like many OS updates – even minor ones – have done in the past. Fortunately reinstalling the latest version worked great. A lot of other programs I use had minor updates and seem to work great (haven’t run into any obvious bugs) in 32 bit mode.
Interestingly, while Tweetdeck runs fine, it’s predictably enough in 32 bit mode as it’s based on Adobe Air. The Tweetie client is actually a full 64-bit app. This has shifted me even more to the point where I’m using that for quick posts, and tweetdeck when I’m doing serious searching and monitoring – which is rare.
Many apps got updated, and work fine. Of the ones that haven’t been updated, I’ve not noticed anything wrong with the vast majority. Even Microsoft’s Silverlight – their answer to adobe Flash and Air which netflix uses for their movie streaming service – worked great once updated.
Video playback and preference panes got hit the hardest. As of this writing, neither Microsoft, nor Flip4Mac (which is where MS has pointed people for several years now) have a version of their windows media codec that plays on my system without significant issues. Fortunately, VLC does, and plays flash video files as well.
Several third party preference panes (Perian, Weathercal, Hazel) have been updated to full 64-bit status, and don’t force the preference pane to restart. Most third-party preference panes still force a restart of system preferences as of this writing. While my WMV playback only seems to work in VLC, Perian seems to be handling everything else just fine even in Quicktime Player X.
I’ve yet to see how well the Adobe Creative Suite programs work, and I’m disappointed that Mailtags is broken and will be a paid upgrade, which brings me to the last point.
Mailtags is an awesome plugin for mail that allows you to apply arbitrary tags and metadata to mail messages. Incredibly useful in association with smart folders – and in principle similar to what Google mail does even though most mail programs present Google mail’s labels as traditional “folders”.
As extensive as the backend changes were to the Mac OS, I am saddened, but hardly surprised that Mailtags broke. My regret is that getting the functionality back will involve a paid upgrade for a program I’ve already paid for, or I lose the functionality utterly due to my system upgrade. Being fair, I’ve had two years of use out of it already, and they will be doing a lot of work getting it improved – it’s well worth the money.
Textmate – which is neck in neck with BBedit as my favorite coding and plain text editor, has hardly improved in forever. While only a few bugs cropped up – none showstoppers – and I’m glad to see some new updates and life on the website, it’s high time we see some progress made.
I am less forgiving of Adobe. I understand many of the technical difficulties involved, and am sympathetic. I also get the distinct feeling that getting their products in sync with the roadmap of technology changes for the Mac has been lacking in dedication and sincere effort. This ironically echoes the position Quark was in with their page layout program QuarkXpress – resting comfortably on their laurels with no competitors in sight – before InDesign swooped in and stole the mindshare, and the majority of the marketshare, from them. Intel was on the roadmap long before CS3 – even before CS2. They had a lot of time to deal with the reality of 64-bit Macs as the norm (It’s hard for even me to remember how long the Mac Pro’s have been out already). It’s one thing to prioritize getting the current shipping product, CS4, debugged before putting major efforts into supporting CS3. It’s another to make customers who bought CS3 as a current product just under a year ago feel like they’re being left out in the cold if they don’t pay up for the new software instead of skipping a version. Many shops didn’t consider the new features in version 4 enough to justify the ever steeper upgrade costs – and in the past, Adobe software was usually good for several years. Worse, Adobe’s initial statements regarding CS3 strongly implied you were on your own if anything broke. Period.
I haven’t seen how the backend changes affect Video editing tools dependent on Quicktime, how Filemaker, et
c. are affected, and how some business-critical programs like PowerCADD that have proven notoriously sensitive to changes (in one case – to differing version numbers between the 10.4 and 10.5 (unicode) versions of the Helvetica font )
I also can’t wait until this view in the activity window is all Intel 64…..