Kaspar's blog

This is a blog about my work, music, technology and other subjects that catch my interest.

Moblin 2.0 and Ubuntu NBR 9.10 on MSI Wind U100

This week I have been playing with some of the latest interesting Linux releases on my MSI Wind U100 netbook: Moblin 2.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 Beta Netbook Remix. This post will try to sum up my experiences so far.

Moblin 2.0

I've been following the Moblin distribution for a while and have been watching several videos on YouTube of the system. I was especially interested in the new Netbook optimized interface and really wanted to see it in action. So I finally grabbed an image and installed it onto my MSI Wind.

Installation went smooth and I was quickly up and runing. The boot time was just amazing. It boots up elegantly without too much terminal output and quickly starts an X session and the interface slides in. The interface looks really slick and polished and it feels great to use. When I started playing around with it there were naturally some rough edges that needs more work.

• The browser is really bare bones at the moment and I can't really imagine using it as a power user. The location bar doesn't even autocomplete URL's yet and there is no real bookmark and extension system so there is still a long way to go. I hope it will be possible to get Firefox customized with the look of the built-in browser. You can install Firefox now but it doesn't really fit in and is not integrated with the system browser menu.
• The mail program is based on Evolution and seems to adapt a GMail style of interface with conversations. I find it a bit annonying that I have to scroll past all messages in the conversation to answer an email. You can't really customize the program as the settings of Evolution is not available. At least I couldn't find it.
• The people section is a good idea and it is nice to have direct access to my contacts. My chat contacts became hard to find though when I synced with Google which was bit of a shame. It would be nice to have some kind of distinction between chat contacts and address book.
• The concept of zones also confuses me a bit and I often found it bit difficult navigating between applications. It really miss the overview of the dock on Mac OS X or the process line on Windows. Ubuntu NBR is also better in this aspect I think.

Many of these things are of course to be expected at this early point. But it looks really promising so far.

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta NBR

After having played a bit with Moblin I discovered that Ubuntu had just released a new beta of 9.10 that featured an extensive redesign of the Netbook release. So I naturally had to try this out as well. I had some trouble downloading the image for some reason but in the end succeeded only to realise there was no USB stick image so I had to install using a cd.

The live cd booted fine and I could see my hardware was working fine except my camera so I decided to install the system. The installation program worked beatifully but at some point the installation procedure stalled at 83% creating users? After waiting a long time I decided to give it another go but installing outside the live environment and it worked a lot better though some of the installation screens didn't fit the screen resolution.

Ubuntu doesn't boot as fast as Moblin but it boots a lot faster than 9.04 on my netbook. The new login greeter has a face browser as the default taking a hint from Mac and Windows.

The redesigned Netbook Remix interface looks really great compared to the last release and has a lot more unified look. The icons, scroll bars and the way the background image is blended in from behind makes the system feel really polished. The status bar icons now have a more Mac-like skinning using gray colors and some nice default backgrounds are now available. All these improvements must come from the recently established design team. It is great to see improvements are starting to appear and it looks amazing so far - well done.

There are still a few weak spots in the interface though imho. It would be nice to have a better visual coherence between the window, the menu bar and the window title bar on the top. Perhaps it could look a bit like the tabs in Google Chrome.

The default theme for the NBR is now a dark brown variant of Human which looks fine but there are a few problems e.g. in the Firefox location bar where it is hard to read entries on the dark background.

All in all this seems to be a really good release with a lot of improvements. I'm especially fond of the UI and graphics changes made so far.

Conclusion

After having spent some time with both distributions the winner for me is clearly Ubuntu. Their interface just feels more polished and easy to use for me even though I really like some of the ideas behind the Moblin UI. And Moblin can't beat Ubuntu's large repository of software and configuration options yet.

Posted in Linux, Software by Kaspar | 1 comment

Snow Leopard Tips

I discovered some neat features in Snow Leopard that I want to share with you.

First is the possibility to use Exposé within the App Switcher described here. This tip makes it possible to select an application in the App Switcher and press the up or down key and activate Exposé for windows in the application. Nice to see that they made an alternative to clicking and holding the dock icon for the application for heavy keyboard users.

Another nice feature is the ability to minimize windows to the dock icon described here. Hiding using CMD+H works well to but there are times when you want to get a single windows out of the way. I often found myself using it in Mail.app. Minimized windows can be accessed by right clicking the application's dock icon or by activating Exposé which now shows minimized windows a small thumbnails at the bottom of the screen.

Posted in Apple, Software by Kaspar | 0 comments

Snow Leopard Upgrade

Today I received my copy of Snow Leopard by mail and I naturally had to install the beast on my Mac right away even though I was sick. The upgrade process was very smooth. I just ran an application, agreed to the license term and clicked "Continue". Then it took about 40 minutes while my system was upgraded and after a restart it was ready to use. It ended up saving me about 8 gb of space on my hard drive.

Even though I have only used for a short time it seems like a nice upgrade with lots of small tweaks and improvements throughout the system. One new feature is that you can option-click most of the black menu items in the menu bar like battery, wireless and time machine and get additional information (e.g. battery condition, wifi channel, security type etc).

Quicktime has also been upgraded with a new UI and icon. The new UI looks great and I like the way you can share and convert your movies easily. In many ways it feels like a downgrade to me though. There are no preferences in application like before so I can't make it auto play a video. I use this when I double click a movie in iPhoto I like to have it play right away (still can't understand why movie playback is not integrated into iPhoto?). Another thing which seems to be missing is the possibility to rotate movies. I often use it when we have accidently recorded the wrong way and want to correct this. Hopefully some of these options will be restored in future upgrades. Until then I will have to check if it is possible to run the old version alongside the new version or maybe use iMovie for the rotate task.

Only a few applications I use didn't work. One was iStat Menus (an upgrade is on the way within the next few days) and another was Coversutra (a beta with SL support was already released). A few Mail.app plugins I have installed also broke but I have never used them heavily so it was not a big issue.

Other than that it seems like a good release so far. We will see if any bugs turn up over the next few days :)

Update: It is indeed possible to run the old version of Quicktime alongside the new. It is included on the Snow Leopard DVD as an optional install. More information at MacOSXHints.com.

Posted in Apple by Kaspar | 0 comments

Twitter

It's been a while since this blog has been updated. Not that I can't think of any topics but it is mostly a matter of time. So I thought I could start twittering (micro-blogging) a bit about various topics such as coding, project status and more that interest me. Twitter seems like the obvious choice for these kind of updates. My Facebook status updates are a bit more general since I have friends from many different networks - co-workers, old classmates, non-programmer friends etc. On Twitter people can follow me if they find my updates interesting. In that way I can "geek out" about more technical stuff that may not be of interest for everyone :)

There are tons of Twitter applications out there. I have tried a few but have settled on the commercial application Tweetie that is both available for Mac and iPhone. It has an excellent feature set and fits in perfectly on both my desktop and phone.

So keep an eye out for maquatre@twitter.

Posted in Software by Kaspar | 0 comments

Creating a Tab Bar Controller with Multiple Table Views in the iPhone SDK

Recently I started working with the iPhone SDK for one of the projects I am doing. It has taken some getting used to but I am slowing getting there and my application is actually starting to do something cool like connecting to webservices and uploading pictures to a server.

One of the things I have struggled the most to grasp is the relationship between XCode and the Interface Builder. A specific problem I had was that I wanted to have a Tab Bar Controller with a UITableView and a Navigation Controller in each tab.

Luckily I managed to find a video burried deep in a forum thread that explained the procedure. Click here to view it - the download link is located at post #68.

I can also recommend a great tutorial about populating an UITableView with a NSArray. The tutorial can be viewed here.

Posted in Apple, Development by Kaspar | 0 comments

Black Cab Sessions

I recently discovered the website Black Cab Sessions that features musicians playing their songs on the backseat of a cab. There are sessions with artists like Brian Wilson, The New Pornographers, Damien Jurado, Okkervil River and some artists I don't know so well.

I discovered the website through the Brian Wilson session which is quite good. He really has a competent backing band both on a musical and creative level which his latest album "That Lucky Old Sun" shows. It is one of his best most coherent albums in many many years. Maybe not as good as "Pet Sounds" or "Smile" but still a quality release.

If only CD WOW could dispatch my order of the album soon... I have waited more than a month now and they don't even know when they can deliever.

Posted in Music, Interesting Links by Kaspar | 0 comments

Hacked!

Today my secondary GMail account was hacked by some mean hackers to send spam mail to my contacts (luckily only eight of them since I only use it for redirecting to my primary email address). I must admit the password for that account was not that secure so I have now changed it to an autogenerated password.

It has gotten a lot easier to use autogenerated paswords since I started using the Mac application 1Password. They have a nice free iPod Touch/iPhone client too. A highly recommendable product if you have a Mac.

I found the ip address of the hackers through GMail's new "Activity Info" feature and the hackers seem to originate from Shanghai in China.

Shame on you people!

Posted in Security, Software by Kaspar | 0 comments

NetNewsWire for iPod Touch/iPhone

A while ago I changed from Google Reader to NetNewsWire for reading newsfeeds on my Mac. At first I was sceptical using a desktop client as previous attempts were not that succesfull. But after having used it for several months I must say it is an excellent piece of software. Especially the built-in browser, desktop integration and syncing of read items made it stand out from other news readers. The only serious lack in my opinion is a good web client.

Naturally I was excited when NetNewsWire was announced for iPhone/iPod Touch through the new App Store. I had been using the iPhone optimized website on my iPod Touch and was very happy with it.

I like the application too but it still lacks some features of the web client in the 1.0.8 version:

• It is not possible to toggle read/clipping status. E.g. you can't mark a news post unread after having viewed it. I use it quite a lot to keep interesting posts that I want to read later. I use my clippings for to share posts with others so that's not an option.
• Syncing between desktop and mobile client doesn't seem to work properly. Even though I have read all news posts on the desktop client it is not reflected in the mobile client.
• Syncing is extremely slow. It seems to take forever to download feeds and you don't get a good indication of the progress. You just get the name of the feed. Would be nice to get a "3 of 200 feeds downloaded" style notification like the Mail application.
• News posts are listed in a long list. It makes it hard to keep unread items you want to save for later. In the web client posts are listed on pages so you could easily mark a page read without losing your unread items.
• When you return to the list after having read a news posts you are often just sent to the top of the list making it hard to continue where you left off.
• When you choose to mail an item to a friend you are not returned to the application like when sending a like through Safari. And often when you return you are presented with a blank page.
• An entry for "All Items" and "Clippings" in the feed list would be nice.

Posted in Software, Apple by Kaspar | 0 comments

Backup Solutions for Mac

You know the feeling. Afraid to leave home without some kind of backup containing the pictures of your two lovely children and your important documents. What if the house was burnt to the ground or someone broke into the house and stole both your computer and backups disk?

This post will deal with my experiences getting some peace of mind about my data.

Setup

Basically I have two computers I want to backup. My MacBook Pro laptop I use for development and documents and my iMac at home which keeps family photos, movies and music.

Local backup is pretty well covered. My laptop is backed up at work using a Time Machine disk and a series of rsync scripts copying to a disk attached to an unslung NSLU2. All my development files are stored in a Subversion repository on a server at work. My iMac is backed up wirelessly to a Time Machine disk attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station and some of the content is copied to my laptop and then again to the NSLU2 at work.

This is working just fine but it would be nice to supplement it with an encrypted copy on a server somewhere else. What I want is an off-site backup solution in case of fire, burglary or the like requirering a minimum of user intervention like manually invoking scripts or pressing a lot of buttons.

I have tried a couple of backup services for Mac that I will describe here: Mozy, Memopal, iDrive and CrashPlan.

Mozy

Mozy offers 2 gb of free storage so I decided to try it out for a few weeks. The initial upload took some time but after that only changes were uploaded. So the backup part worked fine. Restoring of files seems to work fine using Mozy's own UI and you can even get them to send your data on a DVD. But it would have been nice if you could mount your Mozy backup as a drive in Finder like Memopal and iDrive can.

An account with unlimited space for one computer will cost you 4.95 $ per month. This makes it almost 10 $ for me which is a bit too expensive for me for a secondary backup every month. Another thing that may speak against using Mozy is privacy. Read more over at Søren Boll's blog.

Memopal

Memopal is a startup based in Italy where you get 150 gb for 49 $ per year. I discovered Memopal in a comment to a blog post while searching for Mozy experiences. I then later found out that the same comment appeared on many other webpages as well. That seems a little odd.

The Mac client is not so good in my opinion. You can't really configure what files to backup besides the entire computer, your home folder or a single folder. If you just want to backup your music and picture folder you are out of luck. The client also lacks an uninstaller so I had to uninstall it using the AppZapper application. Besides that the interface has spelling errors and unused entries in the menu bar that are generated automatically in an XCode project haven't even been removed.

Otherwise backup of files seem to do as expected even though a measurement of the upload speed would have been nice. The client also has the possibility to mount your backup in the Finder but I experienced that the client froze several times while trying to mount the backup.

The webinterface for the service is pretty lacking and seems like it could use some more work. It is not even possible to cancel your account or delete your data as far as I can see.

Overall much of the service seems to be work in progress.

iDrive

iDrive is one of the big players in town as far as I can tell. They have had a PC offering for years now and have begun work on a Mac client as well. They offer you 150 gb for 4,95 $ per month and you are able to sync multiple Macs to the service.

The Mac client is currently in beta and it looks good on the surface. I took it for a test drive and initiallly liked the software. It was easy to use and offered enough functionality in terms of scheduling backups and selecting what files to backup. It was also possible to mount the backup as a drive in Finder.

After a few days of trying to get the software to work I gave up. The scheduled backups didn't seem to work. They would start at the specified time but would keep searching for files to backup up. I therefore tried to do a manual backup of about 8 gb several times and things seemed to work well but at some point the upload just stopped or the application froze entirely. When I started the backup again any progress would be ignored and the upload started from scratch. Not so cool when you have already uploaded 2 gb of data.

In the end I filed a bug report and cancelled my account. They still need to do some work before the service can be considered reliable.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan was the last solution I tried. I read about CrashPlan in the comments of a TUAW post about Mozy. I quickly googled for it, visited the website and decided to give it a go. The website in general makes some good points about backup and the team behind seems dedicated to solving the offsite backup problem. There is a nice video tutorial explaining their take om the problem.

What sets CrashPlan apart from the other solutions is that they encourage you to backup your data to one of your other computers or a friends computer. In that way you don't have to pay a monthly fee for offsite space. Just for the client which is 19.95$ for a limited client and 59,95$ for the full pro version. They still offer online space on their servers but it costs a lot more compared to the other services mentioned in this post.

The client itself is very well done and easy to setup. It is actually based on Java/SWT - it is rare you come across a consumer Java app these days. It is easy to select what folders to backup. One thing I'm missing though is the possiblity to set different folders for different locations but it seems they are working on it. The client also has built-in support for limiting network bandwidth usage, unlimited versioning and other nice features.

To try out the app I decided to ask my mom if she wanted to swap some space. She is also worried about losing her pictures when leaving home. We installed the client on her computer, accepted a friend request and could start backing up content. An advantage of this approach is that it makes it a lot faster to restore data in case of an emergency and you know exactly where you data is.

Conclusion

For now I've settled with CrashPlan as it seems to work the best. It backups your data, doesn't get in the way and doesn't hang your computer. It wasn't the kind of solution I initially planned. I quickly discovered that it takes a long time to upload your data and it will take a long time restoring them in case something goes wrong. Besides that there's the privacy concern. I found the model where you can backup to your friends using CrashPlan works just fine for me.

Of course you can always argue about relying on a closed source solution. Is it possible to extract your data without using the client using standard tools or are you locked into their application now? These are valid concerns but CrashPlan suits my needs for a secondary backup right now. I haven't found any open source solutions offering the same kind of ease-of-use and non-intrusiveness.

In case you know any good ones please inform me in the comments.

Posted in Backup by Kaspar | 2 comments

Syncing iTunes Libraries

I have been searching for a nice way to keep my iTunes libraries in sync for a while now and I think I may have found the solution. It is called Syncopation developed by Sonzea and will cost you $24,95.

My setup consists of an iMac with a library stored on an Airdisk attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station and a MacBook Pro that only keeps part of the music. The problem is that I often buy or import new music on my laptop and want to sync it to the main library in some way. I have tried different software including TuneRanger now but Syncopation gets the job done.

You just need to install the software on the computers you want to sync and then the software will be able to perform a syncronization between the different libraries. In my case I need to do the sync on the iMac to add new tracks and metadata from the laptop. If I do it from the laptop the software wants to sync the entire library from my iMac.

It's nice to finally have found a solution to the problem.

Posted in Software by Kaspar | 0 comments

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