Casting Out Nines

Last week, my wife had to reboot our Mac mini, and she got… the blinking file folder icon. For the uninitiated, the blinking file folder is the OS X equivalent of the blue screen of death. I spent an evening trying all the tricks on Apple’s support pages and trying to get it to boot from the OS X install disc, but no dice. 

So today the Mrs. and I took a trip up to the Apple Store to get a Mac Genius opinion. The verdict was what I suspected: the hard drive is dead. Fortunately we don’t keep a lot of critical data on the hard drive (the iPod has all our iTunes stuff, and our photos and movies are on an external drive) so the data loss is not catastrophic. We could possibly replace the hard drive, but we’d be looking at spending $400+ on parts and labor to fix a computer that’s four years old and was showing its age. So we’re declaring the Mac mini deceased. 

It looks like we’ll be replacing it with the low-end current model of iMac. We’d get another Mac mini, but after seeing the iMac’s gorgeous monitor up-close, both my wife and I suddenly couldn’t deal with the 8-year old CRT we were using as the mini’s monitor. Just the 20 inch size for us — after spending all my time on a 17-inch laptop monitor I kind of got lost in all the space on a 24-inch monitor. 

While at the Apple Store, we got a good look at the Macbook Air. It’s not the machine for me — I need more stuff on my laptop than the MBA has — but it is certainly very impressive and visually striking. It is so light, you’d almost think it was not a real computer at all but just a prop. 

And the Apple Store itself is something of a marvel. While so many mall stores are foundering and depressingly empty, there were at least 100-150 people in the Apple Store and they were all buying stuff. (Well, we weren’t.) It was crowded, loud, and active — more like an exclusive club on a Saturday night than a mall store on a Saturday afternoon. I think Apple, as a company, is in pretty good shape these days if this is the pace of their business. 

After saying that Apple needed to add more storage to the iPod Touch before they could count on me buying one, they have obliged. Unfortunately the prices haven’t changed, and the 16 GB (which would just barely be big enough for me) is still $399. The new 32 GB model is $499.  Look: $500 is way too much for a music player, sorry, no matter how much stuff it does.

Now all Apple has to do is make the 32 GB model $399 and the 16 GB one $299, and we’re in business. or better ye, make the 32 GB model $299. Or maybe $29.

Information design guru Edward Tufte has posted his analysis of the iPhone’s user interface, which includes this video which you simply must see. If that video doesn’t make you want to run out and venerate buy an iPhone, there’s something wrong with you.

He’s generally very positive about the UI, although he points out some “cartoony” elements here and there (really thick buttons, wasted space in the Weather app, etc.) that I don’t think I would have ever been bothered by until I heard what he had to say.

Some interesting comments in the article about the Weather app, too. I get the feeling there are tons of developers out there (some of whom are likely among the commenters) raring to go once the iPhone opens up to third party apps.

It’s not just Wilkes University that is contemplating an institution-wide switch from Windows machines to OS X machines running both OS’s under Boot Camp.

At Princeton University, 31 percent of students’ computers connected to the campus network in fall 2006 were Macs, compared with 10 percent in 2003-4. Similar gains have been reported across the country. In fall 2006, 20 percent of freshmen at the University of Virginia owned Macs, compared with 3 percent four years earlier. At Dartmouth College, which has historically had strong Apple support, the numbers are even higher, with 55 percent of freshmen last semester reportedly using Macs. [...]

n 2006, two colleges separately took the unusual step of switching to Mac lab environments with the dual-boot option: Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Bemidji State University, in Bemidji, Minn. Both began purchasing iMacs to gradually replace their existing PCs over a several-year upgrade cycle, and some other state institutions in Minnesota are following suit. Already, other colleges across the country have begun contacting the IT directors behind the shift as they consider whether going Mac-only makes sense for them as well.

The article also points out that Penn State has been thinking about this as well, but “any talk of switching to a single platform is off the table” because of the sheer size of the university and the multiplicity of computing needs among students and faculty there. That seems right; the whole point is not to lock oneself into any particular format but rather to invest in the technology that is going to work the best for the longest amount of time for minimal cost. Which is a pretty good argument against being a “Microsoft campus”.

I’ve noticed an uptick in new Mac users around my college as well, including our president. And the parents of a lot of the prospective students I’ve met this year have said they’ll be buying their kids Macs once they get to college. And the IT people are laughing less and less when I mention us doing an institutional switch…

My two weeks of poring through tenure and promotion portfolios, and writing recommendation letters for those up for tenure or promotion or annual review, are finally over with. It actually ended up being two weeks + 1 day. And those portfolio reviews, far from being dull, gave me tons of material that I would love to blog about — and never can. Oh well.

So I’m going to get back on the posting bandwagon slowly, starting with a three little tech-related  mini-posts.

1. I have finally got Maple 10 up and operational on my Macbook running  Leopard.  As I have written about before, this has been an issue from the day I installed Leopard. And it’s been an issue for many others as well, judging by the number of search engine referrals from queries like “Maple 10 Leopard FUBAR” or something similar. For some reason, the advice given in this email actually worked, although I had to do some serious searching to find and replace the license file. But it’s all good now, and not a moment too soon, as I will need Maple for both my sophomore-level courses this semester.

2. Praise be to the saints who operate WordPress.com, where this blog is hosted. They just upped the free storage space amount 60-fold, from 50 MB to 3 GB! My choice to switch from a self-hosted WordPress blog to a free WordPress.com blog is looking better and better each day.

3. My mom and dad got us a .Mac membership for Christmas. I put it on our Amazon.com wish list as one of those items that I was kind of curious about, didn’t really want to pay for, but wouldn’t mind it if somebody else bought it for me. So now I have it and… now what? I’m having a hard time figuring out what I am supposed to do with it that I can’t already do using pre-existing services. Mail? I have GMail for that. Groups? The Mrs. uses them but sticks entirely to Yahoo Groups. Online photo sharing? Flickr. Backup services? Time Machine, which I now have working as well (although I can definitely see the good behind network backups). So that leaves, er, what exactly? Web page authoring?

Update: I’m getting a ton of visitors to this article, so I just wanted to say “welcome”. After reading this article, please sample my Top 12 Posts list and my other articles on technology and educational technology. 

I don’t run OpenOffice on my Macbook since I use MS Office or iWork for everything, but I have a ton of old OpenOffice files sitting around, left over from my Linux days when I did use OpenOffice. I just discovered that under Leopard, you can Quick-Look an OpenOffice word processing document (with the .odt format) even though OpenOffice is not installed:

And if you double-click an OpenOffice word processing document, it opens up — in TextEdit, fully formatted!

Maybe TextEdit played nicely with OpenOffice documents all along, but it’s still a nice discovery. Leopard’s got its quirks and flaws, but it also seems to have a lot of nice undocumented features like these.

So obviously I haven’t posted in almost a week, because week 10 of the semester is traditionally the start of Crunch Time, where the ratio of (work load)/(student and faculty preparation) is at its highest point. Later in the semester the workload is actually heavier, but everybody is ready for it so the ratio is lower. Right now, not so much on the preparation side, and everybody is stressed out and working like dogs.

And so there’s no better time to talk about GTD, because in situations like this you really need a system that allows you to get your work done without having dwell on it so much. And you especially need that “trusted system” that GTD champions, so that the scatterbrained-ness that always comes with high load/prep ratio is mitigated by not having all that “stuff” in your mind. If you need a backgrounder on GTD, read this before going on.

The last time I blogged about GTD proper I was comparing some ways to implement a GTD system with software. Specifically, I was reporting on the impending alpha (not even beta!) release of OmniFocus, a GTD app from the awesome OmniGroup (makers of two of my favorite apps, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner). I was using iGTD and looking forward to trying out OmniFocus. Well, since then, I ditched iGTD and moved over to OmniFocus full-time. For an alpha version of software, OmniFocus is quite nice. There were (and are) bugs but this is going to be a major piece of software, perhaps the next killer app for Macintoshes once it’s in post-beta format.

So OmniFocus is nice, but a couple of weeks ago — possibly out of sheer boredom, or out of a desire to get away from software bugs — I decided to look around at different software GTD solutions. After Googling a little bit, I came upon this post about Yojimbo, a sort of “digital junk drawer” software, and one person’s method for using Yojimbo to do GTD. It looked promising, so I downloaded the demo and have been slowly learning its zen and building a GTD system with it. Yojimbo is pretty impressive, and I’m going to be blogging about my efforts in using it for GTD in the near future, starting now.

Yojimbo is software intended to collect stuff — stuff of all kinds, including but not limited to web links, serial numbers, passwords, text notes, PDF’s, media files, and so on. The basic idea behind Yojimbo is you add stuff to the “library” that is created in Yojimbo, and then you can add tags and labels to each piece of stuff. You then use the tags, labels, and other meta-information about your stuff to organize and search your stuff for whatever purpose you may need. Essentially Yojimbo is a sort of database program to index and search whatever stuff you drag and drop into it.

To the right is a screenshot of my overall Yojimbo library (click to enlarge). As you can see in the large pane, I have some text notes, a web bookmark, a PDF (which is being previewed in the lower pane), an encrypted text note (”Allocation of Problems”), and something with a yellow label at the bottom… more on that in a minute. These are just items that I either authored directly in Yojimbo or added to Yojimbo from outside the software. The PDF, for instance, was a web page that I printed to PDF and sent to Yojimbo; installing the software adds a very handy print menu item that allows you to print anything — anything! — directly into Yojimbo as a PDF. You can then move the PDF elsewhere later just by dragging it to somewhere else on your hard drive.

The real GTD action takes place over in the left sidebar, which contains what Yojimbo calls “collections”. A collection is just a subset of your stuff. Some of the collections (the first five you see here) are program defaults. But the user can create his own collection, and that’s the real strength of this program for GTD.

You see two kinds of blue folders, which are the collections I’ve made for GTD. One has a little tag on top of the folder, and the other doesn’t. The tagged folders are collections that contain only items with a specific tag, so they function much like smart folders on OS X. The untagged folders contain whatever I put in them.

So Yojimbo has a rather simple, unstructured approach to collecting and cataloging stuff. That makes it very flexible and particularly well-suited for GTD, especially if your house rules for GTD may be a little nonstandard — as is the case for a lot of people in academia.

My usage of Yojimbo for GTD is evolving daily — I’ve only had the demo for 12 days — and so what I’m about to describe as my system is a work in progress. Pretty much my system looks like the one I linked to above. Let me explain.

Every project that I have is given an untagged folder. You can see those in the lower 1/3 of the sidebar. The number off to the right of those folder indicates how many pieces of stuff are in the folder. What’s inside those folders? Glad you asked. One of my advisees is doing an independent study with me next semester on mathematical methods in artificial intelligence. Getting that study ready is a project, which in GTD-ese means that it is a large-scale item to get done that involves a succession of individual, atomistic tasks along with supporting material. Here’s what’s inside the folder:

The top thing in the list is a PDF of an article that I want to include as part of the independent study. Later, once I have the study more fully fleshed-out, I will create a folder on the hard drive for it and move that article there permanently. But for now, this is supporting material for the project of getting the study ready, so here it belongs.

The other things in the folder are my actions. An action in Yojimbo is represented by an empty text note with the action listed in the title. If I have notes for the action, like I have for the one highlighted here, I can add them in the text field. The thing to note here are the tags. When I create an action (just Cmd-N inside the folder) I can add a tag to it just by tabbing into the tag field and typing the name I want. The tags are used to indicate the context. For example, the action I have highlighted above involves doing some web searching about projects in support vector machines, so the context is online. Every context ends in an “@” symbol; traditionally, contexts in GTD start with @, but as Robert Foxworthington points out, it works better if you put the @ at the end because of the way Yojimbo auto-completes the tag name.

So now, the moment I entered in that action with the “online@” tag, it not only was entered in to this project folder, but it was also automatically entered in to the “online@” tagged folder. Here’s what’s in that folder:

This way, whenever I am online and need to get stuff done, I can view the “online@” folder and see what actions have that context. (You can Cmd-click multiple folders in the sidebar to see multiple contexts. For example, it would make sense to select “online@” as well as “email@” and “computer@” all at the same time if I’m in my office and online.)

Yojimbo lets you not only tag items but also label them. The difference, from what I can tell, is that tagging is adding metadata to something, whereas labelling is merely adding a visual distinction to an item by means of color-coding the item. You can search by label type, though, so this distinction is somewhat fine. Every next action — the all-important element of GTD which indicates the next physical thing that can possibly be done in a project — is labelled as such with a bright orange label. Every action that is not a next action is labelled with a light gray label. Every action that must be completed today is given a bright yellow label. The labels allow me to quickly distinguish between next actions, regular actions, text notes which are not actions at all, and other stuff when looking in a folder.

Once I complete an action, I simply click on it and hit the delete key, and it goes in the trash folder in Yojimbo. Same for projects that reach completion.

I’m getting more comfortable with Yojimbo and GTD each day, although I don’t think I’ve honed it to quite the level of trustworthiness I would like. There are some things to watch out for when using Yojimbo for GTD and some features that I really wish Yojimbo would add. But there are plenty of positives as well which give Yojimbo an advantage over OmniFocus and iGTD. I’ll write about those in the next article.

So I was trying to avoid thinking about how badly the Colts were playing tonight against San Diego by dinking around with Leopard some more. Specifically, I was trying to make a stack that contained aliases for my most commonly-used math-related applications: TeXShop, LaTeXiT, Excel, Sketchpad, and Maple. This way I could take five icons off the dock and replace them with a single stack that would fan out in that cool way Leopard does it.  So I made aliases for all five apps,  made a new folder, moved the aliases into the folder, and put it on the right side of the dock. The good news is that it works like it’s supposed to. The bad news is that the icon for the stack looks like:

It’s all five of the individual icons, layered on top of each other in an indistinct mess.

Is this happening because the icons are transparent? Anybody know how to make this go away, so that only one icon at a time appears?

I’m an Apple guy through and through, but I have not shared in the enthusiasm for the iPhone. I almost never talk on the phone more than 100 minutes per month and hardly ever text anybody, and with the unit itself running $400 and the rate plans starting at $60 per month I really can’t justify the expense.

However, this morning I’ve seen a concrete case for owning one. Up until five minutes ago our cable and broadband were out. And we were trying to plan a trip to the Indy Zoo but the weather was iffy. With no TV or computer, we couldn’t check the radar; and with broadband out, we couldn’t even use our Vonage line to call up potential alternate destinations.  (But of course having a cell phone solved that last problem.) If I’d had an iPhone, I could have used the 3G capabilities of the phone to bypass our broadband outage and get to Weather Underground to check the radar as  well as call other places up to get their hours.

I still don’t think it’s worth $400 + $60/month just to have a device that can be useful for contingencies like this that rarely happen, but there’s something to be said for an internet device which has two independent means of accessing the web, so that one is usable if the other fails.

As a sort of Part II of this post about my experiences with Leopard, I wanted to go into detail about Time Machine, Leopard’s always-on backup utility. When I first heard about this app coming in Leopard, I wasn’t excited; how excited can you possibly get about a disk backup utility? But this ended up being one of the Leopard features I looked forward to having the most, because it meant I could finally cross off that “Make backup of hard drive” task that had been sitting in my OmniFocus task list for… you don’t want to know how long.

It turns out that Time Machine does a decent job of what it is supposed to do — but there are some downsides and some things that aren’t working for me as advertised.

My plan was to put Time Machine to work using this 500 GB Iomega USB hard drive that I purchased over the summer specifically for archiving video, class files from the past decade, and other stuff. Upon plugging the drive in, Time Machine asked if I wanted to use it as my Time Machine backup drive. I said yes, and immediately the backing up began. But a few minutes into the process, the backup abruptly stopped and gave me a generic failure message. This continued to happen after trying again a couple more times.

A little Googling later, I had found the problem — my hard drive was formatted using a generic FAT32 filesystem, and Time Machine only works with Mac OS filesystems. I reformatted the hard drive using Disk Utility, using the Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) filesystem, and plugged the drive back in — and Time Machine proceeded without a hitch. I had thought FAT32 was something like a generic filesystem, but Time Machine is picky about such things. So if you’re having trouble getting Time Machine to even get off the ground, try reformatting using a specifically Mac OS filesystem.

When the external drive is plugged in, Time Machine makes a backup every hour for 24 hours, and then once a week and once a month for archiving purposes, until the disk is full. The peace of mind that comes from knowing I have hourly backups for one day, and archived backups waiting in the wings, is quite amazing. It’s especially nice that once you have Time Machine configured, you pretty much just forget about it and let it do its job.

And if I ever had to restore from a backup, I’d just click on the Time Machine icon in the dock, and then the magic happens:

You just select the version of your system you want to restore from, and click-and-drag files or select “Restore” to restore the whole thing. It’s simple — but oh, the visual effects. Cheesy beyond belief. Apple, come on — what happened to the simple, minimalist design I’ve come to love from you guys? Moving stars in the background? Please.

Apart from the cheesiness of the visuals, there are some issues with how Time Machine works on my system which might be common to others.

First of all, my laptop gets hot when Time Machine is running. Really hot — it actually becomes uncomfortable to use the machine because of the heat, and who knows what it’s doing to the insides of the computer. Here’s an iStat nano readout on the temperatures of the laptop under normal use without the Time Machine running a backup:

And here’s what it reads when Time Machine is running a backup:

That’s a 40-degree temperature swing on the CPU, and that temperature is pushing the boiling point. Macbook laptops were known to run hot when they first came out, but Apple released a firmware update that fixed the problem, and I had not noticed any unusual heating since then — until now. This may be because I am using a particular USB drive — or just a USB drive, period.

Second, the laptop slows down noticeably when the backups are being made. Again, could be because of my use of a USB drive, but I’ve never noticed a slowdown before when using this drive.

Third, I noticed that every time Time Machine attempts to make a backup, it is backing up about 16 GB of information. I know I don’t have that much stuff I use regularly on the hard drive, so I tried to tell Time Machine not to back up certain things. Apple supposedly has this covered, saying on their Time Machine page that

By default, Time Machine backs up everything on your Mac. But if you want to exclude certain files, that’s easy enough. Just go to Time Machine preferences, click Options, then select the folders you wish to skip. You can also delete a single file or folder that you’ve been backing up — and delete it from all of your backups going back in time.

So I tried to tell Time Machine not to backup my Parallels Desktop folder, which has a full installation of Windows XP that I don’t care to keep backed up all the time. That ought to knock a few gigabytes off the backup list. But here’s what I get when I follow Apple’s directions:

Everything’s grayed out — I can’t select anything to exclude! If I try an end-around to get to my Documents folder by going through Macintosh HD > Users, I get this:

All the folders I want to enter are denied.

The 16 GB size of each download, coupled with the less-than-optimum speed of file transfer using the USB drive, means that each backup takes 20-25 minutes to complete — and only 35-40 minutes until the next one, which in turn means that about half the time my laptop is running hot and slow because of the near-constant backing up.

Any hints or suggestions on how to fix the heat problem, the slowness problem, or the can’t-select-files-not-to-backup problem would be most appreciated.

So Time Machine definitely solves a serious problem for me and other busy people — the problem of making the time to have regular, frequent, systematic backups of our important data. But it comes at a price, at least in the meanwhile until I figure out how to work around the problems.