Matt Henderson's Blog

I’ve been a happy owner of a hacked “Jailbroken” iPhone for a long time. My iPhone has been running perfectly well for me on version 1.1.1 for, well, since I bought it several months ago.

I also work with young people who live (and sometimes cut themselves) on the very bleeding and dripping edge of technology. One such “yoot” (taking a line from My Cousin Vinnie) told me the other day:

“Matt, I can upgrade you to 1.1.3 in about 30 seconds. It’s smooth, and easy, and risk free.”

So I caved. A day and a half later, my iPhone was running 1.1.3, and in my case, this carried both benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit: I can now manually reorganize the icons on the screen. If I don’t like the SMS icon at the top, I now have the power to do something about it. I can drag it to the bottom.

Drawback: The telephone ringing sound no longer works, so I now miss all calls. (Same with the alarm sound; so I now get up late and miss appointments.) According to the Apple Support website, “This is an issue with Jailbroken iPhones running 1.1.3.”

And, of course, there’s no way to go back. So, I now spend my days re-organizing icons, staring at the screen and waiting for phone calls to come in.

As my buddy Niall said, “Who needs a phone to do something as old fashioned as RING for goodness sake. I mean, you can drag your icons round.” Lucky me.

I use rsync running on MacOS X to mirror some remote Linux file systems to an externally connected Firewire drive (“Mirror”), and to archive changed and deleted files to a second externally connected Firewire drive (“Archives”). In general, it works fine, but there has been a long-standing tricky problem, that my system administrator (Niall O Broin) and I finally solved today.

Since I really enjoy blog articles where people present the tools and equipment supporting their work and play, I thought I’d do the same. We’ll start from the top, and work our way down through the details.

On the beach…

Our office is located on the mediterranean sea, in beautiful Marbella, Spain. It’s a wonderful place to work!

It’s kind of cute or weird or funny or something when your music system is about a fraction of the size of your headphones. This is the case with my new Apple iPod Shuffle, and trusty old Audio Technica ATH-ES7 headphones.

For mother’s day this year, I decided to order my world’s greatest mom a little pink (pronounced, “pank” by southern rednecks like me) iPod Shuffle.

This is sort of a summary post related to a combination of recent technological advances, combined with older technology, that’s making my networked life a lot more convenient.

MacFUSE & MacFusion: Mounting Volumes over SSH

Our company is very distributed — we have offices in Germany, Spain and the US, with a number of employees living in yet other countries like France and Ireland.

Back in 1999 or thereabouts, I had a Paperport, and loved it. It was small scanner that sat between my keyboard and monitor, about the size of a roll of aluminum foil. Anytime you wanted to get a document into the Mac, you just fed the paper into the bottom of the Paperport, and it got spit out the top. So it was a roll-type scanner, as opposed to a flatbed. Getting document scans into your computer couldn’t be easier.

Today I upgraded to QuickBooks Pro 2007, in order to have an Intel binary version of the application to run on my MacBook.

I went to the site to buy it, $199 (yikes!) and noticed the “Coupon” field on the check-out screen. I stared at this field, feeling somehow left out, as I always do on these online purchasing screens, wondering “Who actually gets these coupons? I don’t think anybody has ever given me an online coupon.”

Then, remembering a tip from my brother-in-law, I hit Google: “QuickBooks Coupons”.

Moore’s Law states (roughly) that the speed of computers doubles every two years, and he’s been more or less on the money. Today I introduce a corollary to Moore’s Law, which I expect to come to be known as Matt’s Corollary:

Except for the first couple days of ownership, the perceived speed of computers, over time, remains a constant (and a slow one at that).

My shiny new MacBook has become dog slow. Some people claim it’s the fact I didn’t do a clean install. Niall probably figures it has something to do with the 25+ apps I run at the same time.

I’ve been purchasing music from the Apple iTunes Store since it opened, and am sure that I’m single-handedly keeping them in business. Thinking about it (as a roaming mountain goat tried to climb into my car) this past weekend, it occured to me that the true value, for me, in the iTunes store is the discovery of new music, and the purchasing of blended lists of music (either iTunes Essential My Groove lists), or user-submitted playlists.

These days I’m working exclusively from a laptop computer — an Apple MacBook — which I transport daily between my home and my office. Each night, my MacBook mounts and backs up my home directory to a 500GB drive served from my home server, a Mac mini. The mini later mirrors this 500GB drive to another 500GB drive, and archives any changed or deleted files to a third (120 GB drive). This mirroring/archiving type backup system has served me well for years. (Knock on virtual wood here…)

But what happens if my MacBook gets damaged in the trip from work to home?