This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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By they way, I haven’t posted anything on those cuts of trans-oceanic internet cables that have been happening over the last week or so. But I have been paying attention. We are apparently now up to five such cables out of commission. There has been some hype about this knocking Iran completely off the Internet. That does not seem to be true. But there is still an issue with major communications channels to large parts of the world being cut.
The first reports said a ship had dropped anchor in a bad place and accidentally cut a cable. Later reports denied that. And as mentioned, we are now up to five cable cuts. Some reports are saying things like “this is starting to look suspicious”. Duh. One or MAYBE two might just be an accident. Having a coincidence on three is already stretching things. But five in a week? This can’t just be coincidence? Can it? Sometimes coincidences happen… but…
It certainly seems like somebody is definitely up to some mischief here. Who and for what purpose should now be the question.
Any one of you networks type guys reading this have any thoughts?
No, not politics, for at least a moment. But the new version of SuperDuper! came out today. This is the program that I always used to back up my Mac before Leopard came out. The old version was not compatible with Leopard. This one is, and adds some new features.
I have actually been without regular backups for almost a month now. I cloned my drive once but with that bad directory both Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner were choking on doing a regular backup, and SuperDuper! wasn’t Leopard compatible.
Even though I fixed that one directory, I had been waiting for 10.5.2 to come out to hopefully fix more TimeMachine issues before trying TimeMachine again. Especially since I only have one external drive, so to start up Time Machine again I’d have to delete the existing backup, leaving me for a bit with no backup. I do have a much older (pre-Leopard) backup stored on Amy’s computer. With some juggling I could delete that OLD backup, then move the more recent (But still old) backup to Amy’s machine, then restart regular backups.
Sounds like a potential plan, it will just be a bit of a pain.
I could also get a second external drive… I’ve been wanting to do that for awhile anyway. That would make the juggling a lot easier, and I could potentially once a week swap out which external drive is at home and keep the other one elsewhere, giving me off site backup, which would also be good.
I wish 10.5.2 would hurry up and come out. I think between doing SuperDuper! style backups and doing Time Machine style backups, I’m leaning toward Time Machine, but I kinda want to wait for 10.5.2 to try it again.
Exactly.
Better than Free
(Kevin Kelly, The Technium)
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can’t be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.
There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
(via Techmeme)
Then he goes on to outline eight different kinds of value people will pay for even after everybody eventually stops resisting that anything that can be copied, will be copied, will be widely distributed, and it will be free. DRM and lawsuits and making things illegal can only slow the tide, not stop it.
Anybody who plans to make money off “copyable” things in the 21st century should pay attention to this. This is the map to how to build a business that can succeed and thrive in a post-copying world.
Eh, I wasn’t excited by any of that. I guess the Air is OK, but I’m more a MacBook Pro kind of guy. We’ll be in the market for a laptop for Brandy in the next month or so most likely. I was really hoping for a MacBook Pro update for her. We shall see if those come soon. They are overdue.
I guess I do like Time Capsule. If Brandy does get a new laptop soon as planned, we’ll probably get one of those with it so it can be backed up easily. And to upgrade our base station to N at the same time.
Only 12 hours until the MacWorld keynote starts. Woo! Of course, I have a meeting at that time. So I’ll have to catch up after it is all done instead of hitting refresh every few seconds on one of the sites liveblogging it. Drat.
So I did the system install and that took a couple of hours. Then I went ahead and did Migration Assistant to move stuff over from my old system. That took about 28 hours or so. It looks like all the normal user stuff is there. I haven’t spent time making sure everything is all happy though. I had assumed it wouldn’t transfer over my trash, which is where those bad files are, but it looks like it did. I’ll have to investigate that later. I essentially now have a backup though, so I’ll feel more confident doing more aggressive things to get rid of those files.
Right now I have it doing software updates to get back up to speed with the last few months of updates.
After that I’ll have to work on restoring the webserver, php and mysql stuff I’d set up before, which I’m pretty sure is not there at the moment… but which is of course all on the old drive. I should be able to move it all over pretty easily I hope.
But all that will probably wait until morning.
I am now in the process of doing a completely clean system install on my external drive for my Mac. After that I will semi-manually start transferring everything over from my internal drive. (OK, maybe I’ll use the Migration Assistant for some stuff.) But I’ll have to do tons of stuff from scratch. Wish me luck, I may be offline for awhile. (And of course my webcam and the wiki will be down while this is in progress.)
Now, I don’t actually no for sure that my recent woes are because of my iunternal drive having issues, or that they are because of years of cruft built up through multiple OS upgrades using the upgrade process rather than archive and install or clean installs. But I’m willing to give it a try and see what it does.
Also, when recovering from my mail meltdown I found that one version (I had several) of a mailbox file from October 1999 was corrupted. That original mailbox file could not have been more than a few hundred meg max, but the system now thought it was 33 Gig. And when I try to open the folder… or empty the trash with the folder in the trash… Finder chugs for an hour or two then crashes and restarts with nothing done. It did let me COPY the directory though, so now I have 66 Gig of unusable messed up directory. And I know I have other copies of the content that was in that now messed up directory. So I’m not too concerned about it. But I couldn’t figure out a way to kill it in a way that didn’t make me nervous given that at the moment I have no recent backup of my system.
So, although I guess it may be overkill, I guess reinstalling the whole system on a new hard drive and then copying everything EXCEPT the corrup directory might do the trick. :-)
We shall see. As I type (on another computer obviously) the initial system install is about 30% done. After it comes up I then will migrate my relevant content and settings, then reinstall needed applications, then start working on getting the webcam and wiki and such all operating again… this could take quite awhile. I am starting early Saturday to allow the worst case of this taking all weekend. I hope that will not be the case.
Bleh. And then if I end up continuing to run on the external drive for the semi-long-term, I’ll probably snag a second external drive to to backups too. Cause I’m not sure I’d want to backup back into the external drive even if I could.
If I get this all working though, at some point I might try reformatting the external drive then restoring back onto it to see if that works smoothly again or not. (Separating out the possible bad drive issue from the crufty upgrade on top of upgrade potential issue… I’ve done nothing but upgrade installs since OS 9… well… and one system migration to a new machine as well I guess… so maybe only the last upgrade really counts… but whatever.)
Anyway, wish me luck. :-)
Well, I finally gave up on time machine. I only had it actually working successfully for a few days. Even then, it was only doing “hourly” backups every few hours. But then my computer crashed at some point while it was doing one of the hourlys. And it could never recover. It would think for a couple days, then Time Machine would crash. And then it would try again. Wash Rinse Repeat. If I zeroed everything and had it start from scratch, it would start an initial backup, but it would go slowly (at a pace to do my whole 500GB drive in about a week) and some random thing or other would crash the computer before it was done, and once again it would never recover.
I used to use Super Duper! to do my daily backups, but it is not yet Leopard compatible, although the developer says “soon”. So I am now in the process of trying out Carbon Copy Cloner. As I speak it is doing an initial backup of my drive. The computer crashed last night while it was doing things, but CCC was able to just pick up and do a new incremental backup instead of getting confused. So crossing my fingers that I’ll get a new good backup again, and then nightly backups will resume.
I really really wanted to use Time Machine. It was one of the BIG things I wanted from Leopard. And I still really want to use it. I will probably try it again when Apple releases 10.5.2, and 10.5.3… etc, until hopefully eventually it works well for me. Sigh.
(And yes, I’ve tried all the things I’ve found on a bunch of different forums for making Time Machine work faster/better/at all, but no luck.)
In the mean time, CCC for now.
Time Machine FINALLY successfully finished a complete backup. After a week and a half of trying. Hopefully now the hourlies will work smoothly…
When I started having issues with bloggspammers on this blog away back when, I started requiring registration to comment. Registration with email confirmation. That pretty much seemed to do the trick for a long time. But earlier this week there was a new registration, confirmed by email, and they started adding spam to a bunch of posts. I caught it within 15 minutes, deleted the account and deleted the spam comments. Then the same guy (or robot, or whatever) registered under a slightly different email a few minutes later and I just blocked the IP it was coming from. Since then nothing more.
Annoying though. This was the first one that has bothered to register with the email confirm though. If I start getting more I’ll have to add a capcha or something. But I hate those things. So I hope it won’t become needed, but it probably will.
Of course, if it wasn’t a robot but was actually a human, that won’t help. But hopefully the volume actual humans could do would be small enough I could handle it by hand.
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