iPhone Wish #3

Dear Steve Jobs,

I am certain you have seen the YouTube videos and countless photos of children and toddlers demonstrating the ingenious simplicity of your iPhone. My two year old daughter loves getting a hold of my iPhone. She unlocks it, launches the Photo app, clicks and few times, and proudly shows us her favorite picture, “Big Daddy!”

My 1 year old isn’t quite so proficient, but also enjoys the iPhone in his own way. It turns out the iPhone is a fantastic toy for entertaining young children. I’m not normally interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a child toy but I have an idea that would certainly increase the sale of iPhones and the iPod Touch: toy mode.

Yes, that’s right. I’m asking for a way to turn my $400 phone into a child toy. The gist of ‘toy mode’ is to allow either of my babies to push buttons, navigate around, see my photos, read my email, and otherwise play. The catch is that in toy mode, they can’t change anything. No deleting Daddy’s email. No changing the minimum font size. No placing phone calls to my colleagues.

Imagine of how many iPhones you will sell when babies are teething on them and toddlers are dropping ’em in toilets because parents feel ‘safe’ letting them play with it unsupervised. The prospects of, or horror, actually having to use our old Palm or Windows Mobile phones will spur us back to the Apple Store.

Running Windows on a Mac

You have two good options for running Windows on your Intel iMac: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. I use and recommend Parallels although lots of people prefer VMware. If you aren’t the adventurous type, just get Parallels. If you are using the same thing I am, there’s a much better chance that I’ll be able to help you.

If you plan to run Windows XP or Vista, make sure you have at least 3 and preferably 4GB of RAM. Any less and you’ll have severe performance problems when your system runs out of memory and starts paging. It won’t be an enjoyable experience.

If you have an older Intel iMac that only supports 2GB of RAM, then forget about either and use Boot Camp which comes with Mac OS X 10.5. Then you can partition your drive and use part of your disk for Windows. The disadvantage is that you’ll have to reboot to use any Windows apps. But that is far better than trying to run Windows without enough RAM.

My PowerBook G4 is was on Craigslist

It’s spring cleaning time. I just posted my PowerBook G4 for sale on Craigslist. Update: it sold already.
I have a few more things I’ll be listing soon:

Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11 b/g) – $50
Griffin iTalk (iPod voice recorder) – $20
iPod Shuffle 1GB + spare battery – $40
iPod Nano 8GB Black – $100
iSight Video Camera (firewire) – $70
23″ HD Cinema Display (plastic bezel) – $450

FreeBSD, Compact Flash, ZFS, and minimum root partition size

The day I booted a FreeBSD system off Compact Flash I was hooked. CF is an extremely robust storage medium with no moving parts. CF cards have emerged completely intact from washing machines, clothes dryers, and impacts that would destroy any spinning disk. After setting up a system to boot from CF, I am confident that henceforth and forevermore, that system will have a functional boot disk.

I’ve stuck CF cards and USB thumb drives into servers in our data centers, our server room at the office, and my server closet. The practice has served me quite well but that is not to say that CF is perfect. Write speed is slow. There is a finite number of write cycles each block can endure. Some CF cards claim DMA support but don’t support it well enough to be useful. Some server boards do not include internal IDE or USB ports. But everywhere else, we use CF.

Because of CF write limits, I always mount the root partition read-only. Files on the / partition are not frequently altered so this rarely causes any inconvenience. We recently built a 6.7 terabyte storage array at work using a HP 320S chassis, a pile of disks, and ZFS. ZFS volumes aren’t bootable in FreeBSD but we had already installed a USB thumb drive as the boot partition.

After working with ZFS, I decided that gmirror was no longer sufficient for my personal file server. It needed ZFS, which meant upgrading to FreeBSD 7. This server has been running off a 256MB CF card for years. The CF card is so old it was actually made in the USA! While upgrading to 7.0 I ran into a snag, the FreeBSD kernel (and modules) now use over 100MB. That means 256MB is no longer enough space for the new kernel and the old one to both fit.

Texas Michigan driving stats

One way mileage: 1,290 (Garland to Cadillac)
Total miles driven: 3,294
Total gallons of gas: 129
Avg. price per gallon: $2.94
Total gasoline purchases: $380.40
Gas stops for Odyssey: 4 (one per state: AR, MO, IN, MI)

Travel Cost for 4 persons Cost Time (1 way)

NOTES:
Flight costs include auto rental ($300) and airport parking ($84).
Flight times include drive to airport (1 hr), checkin and security (2 hr), rental car pickup and drive from GRR to Cadillac (2 hr).

Flight, direct ($300 ea) $1,584 7 hrs
Flight, 1 hop ($200 ea) $1,184 9 hrs
Auto – Honda Odyssey (fuel) $300 16 hrs

On the drive to Michigan, we hit snow in Lansing and saw almost a dozen cars in the ditches on I-96. The GRR airport was already shut down so if we had flown, we’d have been diverted to another airport and stranded with many other holiday travelers.

During our stay, I made a day trip from Cadillac to Lansing, hitting snow near G.R. on the way down. The entire return trip was in near whiteout conditions. Cadillac gained 8 inches of snow during my half-day absence. Kayla now confidently asserts that if it is snowing, we’re in Michigan.

The return to Texas was similarly exciting. When we left Michigan at 8 PM, a winter storm was in progress and the temperature had plummeted. The traffic grooves within each lane of the freeway had iced over. For those daring enough to drive “in their lane,” the roads were treacherous. We saw two tractor trailers, an Indiana police cruiser, and an assortment of other vehicles inadvertently parked in the snow filled ditches along the highway. Progress was slow but once past Indianapolis, the ice was gone and the roads cleared up. We drove through the night while the kids slept, arriving around 2 PM.

It is easy to imagine that flying would have been better. But both flights would have been delayed, erasing the time benefits. And when flying, we are separated from our luggage, making it onerous to placate travel weary companions. Driving was definitely the right choice.

Backing up my Mac

Last September I wrote an article about backing up a Mac. I’ve received several inquiries about how best to back up while using Time Machine.

I find I have two distinct needs for backup. The first is total disk loss. If my system disk fails, I need to get back up and running with a new disk. If that disk is pre-populated with the OS and all my data, then I have an extremely fast and reliable way to recover. I consider this part of my backups absolutely essential and I use SuperDuper for making and updating these disk disks.

Creating a bootable snapshot requires a spare disk. My dual G5 had extra drive bays so it was easy, buy and insert a spare disk. When I switched to the Intel iMac, I connected those same backup disks to the iMac and laptops via my Wiebetech ComboDock. That worked but wasn’t very convenient so I picked up an external dual drive Firewire to SATA enclosure with a spare hot-swap drive tray.

My other backup need is file recovery. If a file is deleted, incremental backups allow recovery from a specific point in time. A bootable snapshot can only help if that particular file existed when the snapshot was taken. Fortunately, the few times when I really needed to recover a file, that was the case.

Time Machine fills a void in my backup regime and works out perfectly with the dual disk enclosure. One disk stays in the enclosure and is my designated Time Machine disk. Time Machine manages incremental backups automatically. I maintain my bootable snapshots using two disks and the other drive bay. Every other month I swap out the snapshot disk and store the eldest offsite.