Category Archives: technology

Last week was my first, full, uninterrupted week back at work. The trials of December had kept me away and not only made my work schedule irregular but also guaranteed that I was pretty well distracted even when I did make it in. The nature of my job means that there is not much that I can delegate to get done while I am away. All of the projects, tasks, e-mails, etc. just park there at my doorstep until I get back and am engaged enough to deal with them.

One of the first things I wanted to take care of once I got back to the office was to backup my PowerBook. With everything going on I had not been able to back up since December 5th – which from past experience I know is a dangerous thing.

But I was swamped. From the moment I arrived at the office I was deluged with an avalanche of items that had just been sitting there for me to return. Therefore, I was unable to even begin to backup until the end of the day. I was stressed. I was frazzled. I was tired… I also should not have been attempting to do anything as important and attention sensitive as backing up.

So despite the multiple dialog boxes. Despite the warnings and chances to say “no” to the question “are you sure” I plugged in my PowerBook and hit…

Restore.

That’s right, instead of backing up I restored my machine back to the state of my last back up. On December 5th, 2006. A month worth of changes. Lost. Or so I initially thought…

You see, after a few minutes of sheer panic. I realized that I, in fact, had not lost everything I had done for the month. Actually, I lost very little. I had some aces in the hole. Here is a list of the things that saved this from being a catastrophic failure:

>IMAP – A couple of years ago, I switched all of my e-mail from POP to IMAP. Now, instead of my e-mail being downloaded to my local machine it is stored on the server. Therefore, zero loss of e-mail. I just launched Mail.app and it was all there.

>iDisk – I am a slave to Apple’s .Mac service. Largely due to the iDisk. Apple’s iDisk provides up to 1GB of WebDav based storage. You can keep a local copy of it multiple machines that sync changes, online and off with the server. I have gotten in the habit of storing and backing up documents to the iDisk. Not just for added safety but also so that I can have access to them on multiple machines. Therefore, I lost none of those.

>Yojimbo – As I have said in the past, I have gotten in the habit of throwing any document it can handle into Yojimbo . It has quickly become the center of my Mac universe. Not only do I use it for general information and document storage but I use it for a good many of my text processing needs. If I need to write a quick letter, take some notes, flesh out an idea – I use Yojimbo. I also use the sync services capabilities of Yojimbo to keep all of this stuff synced between machines through .Mac. Therefore, I simply took my Yojimbo database from another machine, replaced the “old” one on my PowerBook and all was well.

>MacJournal – Everything I don’t write in Yojimbo I generally do in MacJournal. All of my journal posts, for instance, are written using MacJournal. It has a number of great features (the full screen mode is the best available in my opinion). The one that saved me though was “Download Entries from blog…” which synced all of the “missing” entries. Therefore all of the blogs posts that were missing from MacJournal were synced back. Zero loss.

These things, combined with the fact that so much of my other stuff is managed in web apps like Basecamp and Backpack, made all of the difference in the world. Through them, I basically have regular and consistent offsite backup. This, to me, is the real promise of the convergence of broadband, web 2.0 and online storage. The ability to not only have my information ubiquitously at any machine I am at but also to have multiple backups should anything go wrong locally.

OK, this changes the game quite a bit. According to a screencast on Michael Verdi’s blog, the next version of Parallels, the PC Virtualization software for Intel based Macs, will apparently allow you to run PC apps side by side with your Mac apps. Not the “Windows inside of a window” we have all been forced to use until now. Not only that but you will also be able to use the same key commands in the Windows apps for copy and paste and such as you do on the Mac. Also, you will also be able to seamlessly copy and paste between PC and Mac apps. You have to watch the screencast – This is huge!

Furthermore, Apple has gone on the record once again throwing their support behind Parallels in a recent analyst meeting as they are “very pleased with Parallels software and didn’t feel the need to compete with its own version of embedded virtualization”.

(via Ethan and OS News)

Yojimbo, an application that is quickly gaining ground as my favorite software of all time, was upgraded today to version 1.3. This release adds, among other things, the ability to easily tag items and then to group those items into “tag collections” by said tag. While, this is the one feature that I was waiting for to turn Yojimbo into the info-ninja I have been waiting for, I am sure it will not satisfy those who are champions of the long in the tooth idea of sorting.

You see, one of the reoccurring requests that keeps coming up on the Yojimbo mailing list that I am member of is the ability to have endless sub-collections. That is, to be able to have a collection folder called “Projects” and then be able to have sub-collection folders underneath that with the names of your ious projects, then sub-collections under that for the ious project areas, etc. Basically, a way to organize information that is not much different than the Mac OS Finder (for our purposes here – “sorting”).

The Bare Bones folks have countered that this feature is not in their current plans for the product and may never be. Their argument is that, with the ability to label, tag, flag, search and the ability to create your own tag collections will provide all of these benefits of sorting and more. Better yet, they say, the Core Data based capability to search for the information one seeks by any of these criteria and/or the content of the info is all one needs to be able to slice and dice their heaps of info (for our purposes here “searching”). They hasten to add that this arrangement is not really any different than what Apple is doing in iTunes and iPhoto, and the direction Apple is moving even in the Finder with sidebars and smart collections – why should data in Yojimbo be any different?

There are many things I find interesting about this. Not insignificantly, what I see as the upcoming computing battle royale of the decade, search (including labels, tags and flags) versus sort. Search, as an organization metaphor, is quickly gaining ground on the mature but aging sort paradigm. Needless to say, those that are strongly tied to the sort method are up in arms over this decision and are forced to either suck it up and change their long standing way of organizing or go elsewhere to an application that fits this need.

I personally agree with Bare Bones on this one. I think that by following this course, Yojimbo is doing just what it is supposed to do, allow one to be able to dump all sorts of information into it and then be able to recall that information quickly when needed. All of the options given (collections, labels, tags, flags, etc.) allow one to easily sort the data for the time such sorting is needed. For me, sorting items into endless levels of organization is actually less productive and in fact a giant time sucking wolf in organizational sheep’s clothing. Give me the ability to tag and bag quickly and easily any day and then I can let the little elves inside my computer do the heavy sorting work for me.