I've been wondering recently why Time Machine has been taking so long to do its hourly backups. For the most part, not a lot changes on this machine, yet the backups often take up to 20 mins (including the pre- and post-processing). This can slow the machine down a bit as both the internal and firewire disks grind away.
After a bit of investigation, I discovered a blog post which said that large mailboxes in Mail can slow down Time Machine. Aha! That makes sense - Apple switched to using a maildir-like format which means that all emails are stored as individual files. While this makes sense from an application performance perspective, it really slows down backups as it looks at each file. Being subscribed to quite a few mailing lists (including most of the major FreeBSD lists), I receive quite a lot of mail, so my mail folders are all very large - tens of thousands of messages in each folder - plus the main archive of my Inbox.
I store all of my mail on my IMAP server, so I decided to tell Time Machine not to bother backing up ~/Library/Mail anymore - et voila! Backups are now much faster - usually only a couple of minutes, or up to 10 when it's purging expired backups. This is much more reasonable.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Snow Leopard is not a minor update.
For those who aren't aware, Apple is due to be releasing the next version of Mac OS X in September - version 10.6, aka Snow Leopard.
Many websites seem to be describing Snow Leopard as a "minor update", hence Apple's decision to offer upgrades to existing Leopard users for just $29 rather than the usual $89. The simple truth of the matter is, Snow Leopard is not a minor update. Seriously. Sure, most end-users won't notice a difference, but that doesn't mean it's just a minor update. Plenty has changed under the hood. The coders at Apple have been hacking away converting everything to run 64-bit. There are lots of performance tweaks. Finder has been completely rewritten. Faster Time Machine. OpenCL. Grand Central Dispatch. All fantastic enhancements.
I'd say that all these changes do warrant a major release. Snow Leopard is looking like it's going to be a fantastic release (and hopefully the most stable .0 yet!), so please, all of you who keep insisting that it's "just a minor release", please stop!
Many websites seem to be describing Snow Leopard as a "minor update", hence Apple's decision to offer upgrades to existing Leopard users for just $29 rather than the usual $89. The simple truth of the matter is, Snow Leopard is not a minor update. Seriously. Sure, most end-users won't notice a difference, but that doesn't mean it's just a minor update. Plenty has changed under the hood. The coders at Apple have been hacking away converting everything to run 64-bit. There are lots of performance tweaks. Finder has been completely rewritten. Faster Time Machine. OpenCL. Grand Central Dispatch. All fantastic enhancements.
I'd say that all these changes do warrant a major release. Snow Leopard is looking like it's going to be a fantastic release (and hopefully the most stable .0 yet!), so please, all of you who keep insisting that it's "just a minor release", please stop!
Saturday, July 11, 2009
No love for Android
Warning: rant alert.
I've had my T-Mobile G1 for around a month now. At first I thought it was great. Fairly nice UI, some decent apps available and relatively good Internet connectivity. I noticed straight off that flicking/dragging to scroll isn't as smooth as on my iPod Touch.
Now I've had it a while, there are some things which are really starting to get to me. First is the battery life. I know it's an Internet-connected device and network polling will have extra load on the battery, but seriously, I'm lucky if I get a day's charge out of it. Second is the notifications bar. It's a neat idea, but constantly having to drag it down can get annoying, especially when it isn't always easy to drag it down. This kind of links in with another point about text message notifications; I'd prefer it if it had the option of giving a popup for text messages. Yes, there's the SMS Popup application, which I use, but it's not great and viewing the message from that doesn't acknowledge the notification, meaning I have to close the popup and then drag down the notification bar and clear it. Bleh.
But perhaps one of my biggest gripes is when actually using the device as a phone. Sometimes when I have an incoming call, the display turns on and shows you who's calling. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to press Menu several times to get it to show me who's calling. wtf? There's also the fact that the dialpad is hidden by default when in a call, meaning if you do need to press a key, you first have to unlock the screen (yes, it actually locks while you're in a call! Very helpful!) and then drag up the dialpad.
Worse than that, once the dialpad is up, it continues to keep locking it, so if you're using an automated menu system, like voicemail or a customer services line, it gets very tedious. It doesn't always like the way I double-tap to unlock the dialpad either, meaning my responses to the menu are delayed which often results in the system saying I gave an invalid answer. Sheesh.
The virtual keyboard is also rather lacklustre, but I can live with that. I just don't use it unless I only want to reply ":-)", for which there is handy button on the virtual keyboard.
So all in all, I'm rather despondent about the G1 and Android. Had I not just signed another 18-month contract with T-Mobile to get the G1, I'd be very tempted to get an iPhone right about now, but don't really fancy spending another £35 a month.
I've had my T-Mobile G1 for around a month now. At first I thought it was great. Fairly nice UI, some decent apps available and relatively good Internet connectivity. I noticed straight off that flicking/dragging to scroll isn't as smooth as on my iPod Touch.
Now I've had it a while, there are some things which are really starting to get to me. First is the battery life. I know it's an Internet-connected device and network polling will have extra load on the battery, but seriously, I'm lucky if I get a day's charge out of it. Second is the notifications bar. It's a neat idea, but constantly having to drag it down can get annoying, especially when it isn't always easy to drag it down. This kind of links in with another point about text message notifications; I'd prefer it if it had the option of giving a popup for text messages. Yes, there's the SMS Popup application, which I use, but it's not great and viewing the message from that doesn't acknowledge the notification, meaning I have to close the popup and then drag down the notification bar and clear it. Bleh.
But perhaps one of my biggest gripes is when actually using the device as a phone. Sometimes when I have an incoming call, the display turns on and shows you who's calling. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to press Menu several times to get it to show me who's calling. wtf? There's also the fact that the dialpad is hidden by default when in a call, meaning if you do need to press a key, you first have to unlock the screen (yes, it actually locks while you're in a call! Very helpful!) and then drag up the dialpad.
Worse than that, once the dialpad is up, it continues to keep locking it, so if you're using an automated menu system, like voicemail or a customer services line, it gets very tedious. It doesn't always like the way I double-tap to unlock the dialpad either, meaning my responses to the menu are delayed which often results in the system saying I gave an invalid answer. Sheesh.
The virtual keyboard is also rather lacklustre, but I can live with that. I just don't use it unless I only want to reply ":-)", for which there is handy button on the virtual keyboard.
So all in all, I'm rather despondent about the G1 and Android. Had I not just signed another 18-month contract with T-Mobile to get the G1, I'd be very tempted to get an iPhone right about now, but don't really fancy spending another £35 a month.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
New beginning
Well, after creating this blog some time ago and having done nothing with it, I've decided that perhaps I should! I thought Twitter would satisfy most of my tell-the-world-what-I'm-doing needs, but sometimes you just need to say more! So, here I am.
My main reason now for wanting to post a bit more detail than Twitter allows is because I am attempting to take my first real steps in the open source world [1]. As a approach my first anniversary of my shift into Unix sysadmin - specifically Solaris - I've discovered that projects already out there dedicated to creating third-party software packages for Solaris are somewhat lacking and inflexible. Inspired by FreeBSD, I've decided to "borrow" their idea of a ports collection and have started a project called SolPorts.
So far it's coming along nicely. It actually builds usable packages, for a start! I just need contributors/volunteers to help me out now.
[1] I'm already a member of Box Backup (and maintain a FreeBSD port for it), however my contributions are very minor.
My main reason now for wanting to post a bit more detail than Twitter allows is because I am attempting to take my first real steps in the open source world [1]. As a approach my first anniversary of my shift into Unix sysadmin - specifically Solaris - I've discovered that projects already out there dedicated to creating third-party software packages for Solaris are somewhat lacking and inflexible. Inspired by FreeBSD, I've decided to "borrow" their idea of a ports collection and have started a project called SolPorts.
So far it's coming along nicely. It actually builds usable packages, for a start! I just need contributors/volunteers to help me out now.
[1] I'm already a member of Box Backup (and maintain a FreeBSD port for it), however my contributions are very minor.
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