Josh Babetski : Quixotic Bravado

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• The Scala Programming Language
• IDEO Labs » LiveView: an iPhone app for on-screen prototyping iPhone app and screen overlay to help with iPhone app and site development.
• Twitter jilts Ruby for Scala • The Register
• 2009 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development environment — GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS Here’s how I quickly got my Ruby web development environment into ship-shape form The Thoughtbot Way.
  Many of these instructions are specific to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Some of them are opinionated (Vim over Textmate). Pick-and-choose what you need but this is everything that I use happily day-to-day right now.
• DD_belatedPNG: Medicine for your IE6/PNG headache! This is a Javascript library that sandwiches PNG image support into IE6 without much fuss.
  You can use PNGs as the SRC of an <IMG/> element or as a background-image property in CSS.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• iWebkit – Framework for iPhone web sites
• 100 Free Useful Mac Applications (Part I) | Tools
• How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard » aimClear Search Marketing Blog
• git-rebase(1)
• Engrave Your Book | Icons Moleskine Icons
• Migration-Related Rake Commands « Oomoo

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• San Antonio Riverwalk Hotel: Hotel Valencia Riverwalk, a Luxury San Antonio Hotel
• Hidden Preferences in Safari 4 Public Beta — Observation Point
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist | Our Blog | Box UK
• jQuery Pop Over Effects | Team Tutorials
• How to create a stunning and smooth popup using jQuery | yensdesign – Tutorials, Web Design and Coding

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• RepRapOneDarwin < Main < Reprap 3D Printer you can make yourself. Interesting.
• Is Google Chrome The New IE 6 For Web Designers? | Webdesigner Depot Tips on making sites Chrome-friendly.
• Recreating the button | stopdesign Good overview on button design.
• PowerPoint Design in 2009: Blog posts with summary : Speaking about Presenting
• OSX Tips and Tricks

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• calaboration – Google Code Calaboration makes it easy to set up iCal to view and edit your Google Calendar calendars. It automatically finds all of your calendars and allows you to add any of them to iCal with the press of a button.
• GitX – Home GitX is a git GUI specifically for Mac OS X. It currently features a history viewer much like gitk and a commit GUI like git gui.
• git-osx-installer – Google Code Installer for Git on OSX.
• git ready » intro to rebase
• Set Font Size Based On Word Count

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• kuler "Web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you're creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community."
• Sequel Pro — MySQL database management app for Mac OS X
• iConvert: Convert ico, icns, and png icons online for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
• Bacon Explosion: The BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes
• rentzsch's clicktoflash at master – GitHub ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to its whitelist.

  Try control-clicking (or right-clicking) on a unloaded Flash box to access ClickToFlash's contextual menu which allow you to do advanced things like edit its whitelist.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• How to do Basecamp-style subdomains in Rails – (37signals)
• Building an interactive map with jQuery instead of Flash | Raleigh Web Design & Development | New Media Campaigns
• iLife Tip: Enable Multi-Touch maps in iPhoto '09 – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities) and type (or copy/paste) the following statement and press enter:

  defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES

  When you restart iPhoto, you will notice that you are now able to scroll in/out of the Places maps with ease. If it turns out that you don't want the scrolling feature, just retype the statement, replacing "YES" with "NO."

• Encoding for Apple TV | Mac 911 | Macworld
• Enable Emoji Icon on iPhone 2.2 without Jailbreak | Simon Blog

In my previous post: “I bought a Drobo, Now What?” I set up the backstory of getting a Drobo and researching the best way to set it up to work with Time Machine and SuperDuper. This post is a step-by-step of what I did next. I hope you find it useful.

Prepping the Drobo

While you can buy a Drobo with hard drives, you’re much better off buying them separately. You can see how much actual storage you will get out of the Drobo by using their Drobolator. I bought two Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA hard drives from Newegg.com for $104.99 each. I picked them because although slower, they’re more energy efficient and are only used for back-up anyway. This is going to give me about a Terrabyte of usable back-up space since the information is duplicated on each of the drives. I can expand later if needed.

Unpacking the Drobo is pretty straight forward. BTW: They’ve done a great job with packaging and presentation once you open the box. Very impressive. As you go through the process of setting up your Drobo, I recommend starting a text file of information to reference later. I do this for all my hardware set-ups for easy reference of serial numbers, drive capacity, purchase date, and how-to information (like in this post), etc. It’ll come in handy later. Trust me.

1. Unpack the Drobo
2. Put the hard drives in the Drobo
3. Wire up the Firewire or USB cables
4. Install the Drobo Dashboard. If prompted to upgrade the Drobo Dashboard, do it.
5. Power-up the Drobo
6. In the dashboard, format the drobo. I left it at 2TBs after reading about the trade-offs.
7. You’ll likely get prompted about updating the firmware. Do this. The Drobo will then restart. Wait for it to come back up; enjoy the light show.

Assuming everything has gone well, in Finder you’ll now see that Drobo is mounted and available for use.

Disc Utility

Now let’s fire-up Disk Utility which is in Applications: Utilities: Disk Utility. Here we’re going to repartition the Drobo into volumes for Time Machine, SuperDuper, and storage for everything else one might rsync, copy, or otherwise backup.

1. Select the Drobo Disk on the left. It will say something like “2.0TB Drobo”
2. Select the “Partition” tab on the right
3. Underneath “Volume Scheme” click the “-” (minus sign) and erase the partition Drobo created. This is only important if you need GUID partitioning, like for Time Machine and as recommended by SuperDuper.
4. Under volume scheme, select the number of partitions you need to make. In my case it’s 3:
   • Time Machine
   • SuperDuper
   • Everything else
5. Resize and name partitions accordingly. Unless you have a reason not to, the format should be “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for all of them. I recommend unique names like “drobo-your machine name-tm” in case you connect to other external drives, make it easy to remember which volume is which.
6. Under options, select “GUID formatting”
7. Click “Apply”
8. After reformatting, you should now see new volumes on the left of the Disk Utility and in the Finder window.

You should now be able to point Time Machine and SuperDuper to the new back-up volumes.

Additional Notes

• For performance reasons, I recommend excluding your back-up volumes from Spotlight indexing. To do this, open “System Preferences” from the Apple menu, select Spotlight, and add the back-up volumes under the “Privacy” tab.
• If you’re copying data to Drobo from an smaller (or in my case smaller and busted) external drive, here’s a some quick instructions for copying over the data.
  1. Connect both the old External Drive and the Drobo
  2. In Disk Utility click the “Restore” tab on the right
  3. Drag the hard drive/volume/partition you want to copy from into the “Source” field
  4. Drag the volume you want to copy to into the “Destination” field
  5. Click “Restore”

  This will copy over all the data to your new drive.

• If you’re getting rid of the old drive, don’t forget to use the “Erase” feature in Disk Utility and use at least a “7-Pass Erase” on the drive so the data on it can’t be recovered. Just because you click delete doesn’t mean the data is gone; be safe before you toss, sell, or give away that drive!

This is what worked for me. Your needs or mileage may vary and my wisdom is as-is without any support or warranty. Good luck!

My external back-up drive died… sorta. Something’s hosed on it and my Mac will only mount it as read-only with stern warnings to copy it and try and reformat. Sometimes it will only mount temporarily and then act like I yanked the USB cable out without ejecting. Ahhh…technology. Fortunately, the drive only contains back-up information that exists elsewhere.

All hard drives fail, it’s just a matter of when. In order to create more redundancy, I did some homework and bought myself a Drobo. It allows the mixing and matching of different-sized hard drives and keeps data redundantly stored on each drive. If one fails: just swap it out. Need more storage? Add another drive or replace an exisitng drive with a larger one.

On a related side note, I got a great deal on the Drobo at B&H Photo and Video: $349.95 after rebate. I’ve bought quite a few things from them in the past and highly recommend them.

On the old back-up drive, it was separated into multiple volumes to separate back-ups for Time Machine and SuperDuper from everything else. Time Machine, by default, will fill up whatever drive you assign it; SuperDuper, in order to be bootable, needs its own volume as well.

The challenge with the Drobo is that it’s not a fixed size disk since you can continue to add drive space. By creating volumes (or partitions), you’re fixing that capacity and changing them involves reformatting, which erases all the data, and you have to start all over. Now of course, Mac OS X supports partition resizing, but Drobo doesn’t support it and advises against it.

I did however find a few references to using a .sparseimage for each of the back-up “volumes” needed. This would allow the Drobo to just be one large flexible volume and both Time Machine and SuperDuper would still be able to function normally. Erik Barzeski’s post: “Formatting the Drobo for Time Machine Backup” is the best write-up I found on using .sparseimage with Drobo. I was leaning in this direction, but then Dave Nanian, author of SuperDuper, offered to lend some feedback on the optimal set-up via Twitter. I posted to the SuperDuper forums (”SuperDuper Set-up with Drobo: .sparseimage vs. partitions“) so the info could be useful to others and Dave gave some good reasons to partition the drive instead.

So that’s what I decided to do. My next post is a step-by-step of: “My Drobo Set-up for Time Machine and SuperDuper on Mac“.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• Ajaxian » iPhone Safari Flick Navigation By Example .divSlide {
  -webkit-animation-name: "slide-me-to-the-right";
  -webkit-animation-duration: 1s;
  }
  @-webkit-keyframes "slide-me-to-the-right" {
  from { left: 0px; }
  to { left: 100px; }
  }
• To Title Case | Individed JavaScript for converting text to title case.
• Terminal Tip: Burning a disc did you know that you can burn discs right from the Terminal window with a simple command and a drag/drop? Just enter the following command followed by the path to a folder or disk image:

  drutil burn filehere

  Don't type the "filehere" — that's where you put the path to the file/folder that you wish to burn. You can either type the location manually or drag and drop the file onto the Terminal window. But that's not all you can do with drutil; you can also eject media from the optical drive by typing "drutil eject." To see all of the available drutil options, just type in drutil for a quick list or man drutil for a full description.