The Practice of Code

Changes in 10.6.5

Unfortunatley, things have changed in 10.6.5, and I haven’t quite determined how to correct the automatic rotation part of this article. However, there are some workarounds in the comments

I like Time Machine. It’s automatic, incremental, efficient and easy to use. However, there are two features that Time Machine doesn’t have that I really like: encryption and rotation (for offsite backup). With the help of others, along with a bit of hacking around on my own, I’ve successfully enabled Time Machine to backup to an unlimited amount of rotating, encrypted hard disks. Here’s how…

Ever had a disk that wouldn’t mount under OS X? In my case, it checked out under Disk Utility and fsck just fine. A look in Console revealed errors like:

Jun 24 11:38:31 computer kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s3: open: journal magic is bad (0x0 != 0x4a4e4c78)
Jun 24 11:38:31 computer kernel[0]: hfs: late jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).

We were able to resolve it by disabling the journal. We had to use the diskutil command line tool to accomplish this, and we had to add the force parameter. Use diskutil list to identify the device ID of your volume. In my case, it was disk2s3. So the command to forcibly remove the journal was:

diskutil disableJournal force /dev/disk2s3

While App Store rejections or removals are never a pleasant experience, many times they have illustrated what’s up ahead on Apple’s roadmap.

This morning, I was saddened to see the news of an active frame application being pulled from the app store:

@rustyshelf:

Just got off the Phone with Apple, they are going to pull My Frame out of the App Store! Get it while you still can! http://bit.ly/b1m2wr [twitter]

I’m in shock. I’ve heard of Apple being jerks but never in person. Apparently they don’t like anything ‘widgety’. It’s not widgety! [twitter]

Firstly, my condolences go to Russell and his team. Russell is an Australia developer I follow because he makes the wonderful Pocket Weather iPhone app.

But the reason is curious, isn’t it? The idea of widgets for the iPad is not new, and some consider the absence of core applications like Clock and Calculator to be glaring omissions. Will we see some type of OS level support enabling this kind of functionality at WWDC? Will it be open to developers?

UPDATE:

@rustyshelf

Got a response from Steve Jobs: “We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.” on the My Frame removal.

So there’s been an awful lot of talk about what is open and what is not open in the past few days. And what is “Open”? There’s quite a few different kinds of open:

• Open Source
• Open Standards
• Open Formats
• Open Platforms

In today’s highly heated and publicized Mobile Wars, each party is bashing their competitor(s) with a different “Open” stick, but all of these different types of sticks really only serve one purpose: anticompetitiveness.

Of all the great tips in the last post, I was moved to go and try out mtr, aka Matt’s Traceroute (or My Traceroute?), which is a command line tool that integrates ping with traceroute. When run, you get great, constantly updating results like this: