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Mozy after two weeks

January 30, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze 2 Comments

I’m pleased to say that I am still quite happy with my choice in online backup services after two weeks. I chose to use Mozy and it has simply been invisible since then.

Actually, invisible isn’t the right description, that would imply I couldn’t see it even if I wanted to. But since I can, I just don’t have to think about it. At any time, I can use a menu bar icon on the top of the screen to see how long since my last backup, and if a backup is completed while I am looking at the screen, I occasionally catch a Growl notification. I didn’t even realize Mozy had a growl notifier, but that’s how unobtrusive things are supposed to work!

So far, I am only using the free 6 gig storage space, because for the time being I am stuck with stinky Comcast cablemodem upload speeds of <128K. That’s just not going to cut it for keeping many gigs in sync. However, this week I am getting Qwest FIOS installed in the office, which should have a much beefier and guaranteed upload speed of 1024K. I’m planning to upgrade to a paid Mozy account at that point. $5/mo is a great deal for software that seems to work exactly like I want good software to work.

Yes, I still use SuperDuper to make external drive backups on a regular basis. I used to think that was the epitome of easy flexibility, but Mozy makes it seem awkward.

[tags]backup,online backup,mozy[/tags]

Filed Under: Reviews

Amazon Payments for Satchmo

January 16, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze Leave a Comment

I’m not sure how I missed it before, but PayPal has a new competitor in Amazon Payments.

I applied this evening to the beta “Flexible Payment Service” so that I can develop a plugin for Satchmo, using Amazon Payments.

It looks really interesting. The base features will be a snap to do in python/Satchmo, of course. But the other features are quite intriguing. I’m particularly interested in the the ability to:

Create “Payment Instructions” to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or “tokens” that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.

And of course I’m also interested in the multiple and recurring payment options. But what’s this? Aggregating micro-payments using pre or post-paid systems. Nice! This is what I was hoping Google Checkout would be.

I went ahead slapped a little “pay now” Amazon Payments button on my Invisible Castle gaming site. It is just to lower the barrier to paying me, and to test out how well it works. It isn’t micro payment, recurring, or a split-payment, so it isn’t enormously-geeky-great, but it is money after all. Hehe.

[tags]webservices,amazon payments,paypal[/tags]

Filed Under: Libraries, Satchmo

Going to SXSWi

January 16, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze Leave a Comment

Yay! I’m going to go to South by Southwest Interactive in March. I was just checking ticket prices, and I lucked into a great deal on my favorite airline.

What’s more, since it is clearly a business trip, I’ll be able to write off every penny. Excellent.

Now, I just need to get in touch with friends I haven’t seen in years. Austin is my old stomping grounds and it will be a blast to visit.

[tags]sxsw,sxswi[/tags]

Filed Under: Planning

Using Mozy for my new Online Data Backup

January 13, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze 2 Comments

Last week, I hit a scary snag when updating my MacBook. I got stuck in an endless loop of “Register with .Mac” requests, which made me worried I’d lost all my profile information. The solution was simple, boot into Safe Mode by holding the shift key down, then reboot. But my concern was raised.

So, I reviewed my backup and recovery plans for my MacBook and my G5 desktop. To be honest, the plans were better than nothing, but not as good and automated as I want. Up to then, my solution was to use Maxtor One-touch external firewire drives, and SuperDuper to make clones of most of my data.

I did this weekly, or pretty much weekly. Because these are powered drives, I feel that it is important to turn them off between backups. That way a lightning strike (I’ve had one before, ugly) wouldn’t destroy the backups. So, it is quite a manual process. I’ve always intended to get a couple more of these cheap drives, and then cycle the backups to some place offsite, or at least to my barn which is quite a ways from the main house.

After reading reviews of the various free online backup services, and the paid remote backup solutions as well, I narrowed my decision down to either Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 (unlinked because Amazon makes it tricky to link for some reason. Just google it.) or Mozy Online Backup.

Both seem quite nice and exactly what I want. Using them as my remote backup solution, I would basically just run a background program, select what I want backed up, and forget about it. The program will back up incrementally in the background.

At first, I was certain I should go with Jungle Disk, since the service is just so geekily great, and almost startlingly cheap. I estimate my full backup set to be about 20G from the laptop. Using Amazon s3, that is about $3 per month. During my test runs, I’m only backing up a couple gigs, so that would only be $0.30! Nice.

But, I decided to go with Mozy Online Backup, at least for now. They offer a free 2 gigs of online storage, which is just perfect for me to test the service and to back up at least the most critical data. So far, I am extremely impressed. The backups are encrypted, so my data isn’t being sent in the clear. Configuring my backup set was trivial, and so far it seems to really be what they claim, “set it and forget it.”

If the first month or two of tests work out, I’ll upgrade to the unlimited plan. $5 per month per computer. It’ll take a long while to get the first set done when I add some of my non-critical-but-I’d-hate-to-lose-it data.

[tags]online backup,backup[/tags]

Filed Under: Macintosh, Reviews

How To Kill nasty Word Garbage Characters in your CMS

January 9, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze Leave a Comment

Recently I was doing a server move for a client. From an ancient slow system costing her too much money (and me too much bother dealing with a know-it-all-wrong admin) at Today.net, to a nice modern VPS reliably, competently and fully managed by LiquidWeb.

Last year, I wrote her a travel reservation & quoting app in PHP/Drupal. That gave her a lot of nice CMS capabilities for handling her own pages, but the problem is that she uses Word to compose most of the text before adding it. Grah! Word is a lot of things to a lot of people, but it is not a good app to use for that purpose. It likes to leave more than a few garbage and invisible characters scattered around when you cut and paste from it.

The problem really reared its ugly head when I exported the data from her database. Or rather, when I imported it into her new server. Garbage characters everywhere. Messing with character encodings simply did not help either.

I was desperate to get this done, since it was 1 in the morning. I’d started the transfer late at night so I wouldn’t step on any customers creating new travel quotes. I had to get it done in an hour or two or else put it off to the next day and start over.

I almost started writing a load of regular expressions, but I did one last search for help. Aha! My beloved TextMate has a command for just this problem. Just select all, and go to “Bundles > Text > Converting > Transliterate Selection to ASCII”. Done!

Thank you TextMate.

P.S. Yes, I suppose I could’ve used the iconv command in Linux on the server. Maybe. Hassle hassle hassle.

[tags]osx,mysql,encoding,unicode,textmate[/tags]

Filed Under: Macintosh, Tips

New GTD love

January 2, 2008 By Bruce Kroeze Leave a Comment

Last year, I wrote about my love of apps which “just fit” into OSX. At that time, iGTD was my pick for an app that best fit my Mac and how I use it.

Unfortunately, despite it being easy to get new tasks into iGTD, it wasn’t so easy for me to use on a regular basis. This is primarily because of lack of ability to get any kind of real summary about where I was overall and what I should be doing next.

So, despite the very real cost of breaking up with my previous app. I went questing for a new GTD app last week. I went “on the market”, taking several out for a figurative cup of coffee. Thinking Rock and Things were early contenders, but the chemistry wasn’t there.

But I’ve found the one. I’ve even paid for the app as an alpha user. I’ve found my new love, OmniFocus.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Macintosh