Personal Blog of Mike Bowden

Ever have widgets that you want to line up? Maybe you’re tracking weather for multiple locations or you have world clocks for different areas? Whatever it may be, from time to time we need to be able to align widgets so they are centered, or grouped together properly.

Since the window for the dashboard is transparent, use a web browser and try to place it as close to the edge of the widget as possible before opening dashboard. Then, once dashboard is opened you can use the opacity of the window and the browser windows edge to align your widgets in a straight line.

Hope this helps, does anyone else have a simple quick tip that’d like to add?

Seems one of my favorite websites has released a mobile version. Not the kind of mobile version that allows you to view it on your iPhone or smart phone. AlternativeTo is a website that is dedicated to pairing applications to other applications.

The concept is pretty simple, but outstandingly useful. Take an application such as Photoshop, a great designers tool, but also very expensive. Search for Photoshop on AlternativeTo and it will present applications that are similar to Photoshop. Then you can sort them by type of operating system, online or offline and free or paid.

All in all it’s a really nicely put together website. Clean and straightforward, AlternativeTo well thought out website and a great resource to find those alternatives to other applications and now, mobile phone applications. Currently they support iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry and S60. Seems they’ve covered the spectrum pretty well.

I’ve been doing web graphics for quite awhile now and throughout my years as a graphic designer I’ve always had a problem with how Safari handles web graphics. Safari is the only browser on the market today that honors ICC profiles within graphics, which seems a bit odd to me but I can understand how it has its place depending on the graphic you’re wanting to view and/or load.

One of my major grips is with the graphic editing applications out today. Not a single one, that I know of at least, will allow you to save images without an ICC profile. They all put some sort of default profile in once the image is saved. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but since Safari honors those profiles the colors within those graphics are never the same. This causes a few different problems, namely a problem when you have a background image that doesn’t repeat and you fill the remaining space with a solid color. The RGB color that you use as your background will never match up with the ICC profile and how Safari renders those images out that contain them.

So the simplest fix to how Safari displays graphics on a web site is to remove the ICC profiles. But how do you do that if none of the graphics programs will allow you to save them without an ICC profile? There are a few different applications that can be used to do this. The most popular being PngCrush.

However, normally a web site that we build can have quite a few graphics with it and doing them one by one, which you must do with the command line tool PngCrush, begins to get tiresome and tends to be a big waste of time. So I did some digging and found a really cool application called ImageOptim that does the trick. Not only that it includes a few more command line tools that it uses to optimize any graphic you drop into its window. I mainly work with PNG files so I drag an image folder over to it and using PngCrush it removed all the ICC profiles and optimizes the graphics for me, saving them back over the top of the old files. Then I can simply SVN them into the proper client account and I’m done and problem solved.

Give ImageOptim a look, I’m sure it will come in handy for any graphic designer or web site builder. Mac only from what I can tell.

We’ve recently been having quite a few clients that have been interested in getting their files backed up and secure. This is a topic that has always interested me and I’ve done a lot of research in the past in order to get my backups setup, secure, automated and fail-safe. I’m going to go over my backup solutions and what I’ve done in the past that hasn’t worked for me.

When I first started to have files that needed to be backed up I started out with what I had at the time. Without having a secondary hard drive to rely on and no money to pay for online backup services (which weren’t even an option at the time, non existed or they were very expensive), I decided to use the only thing I had available to me. At the time I had more Cd-R’s than I knew what to do with, mainly because I burned my own music from the ever growing collection I had amassed on my computer.

This was a form of backup for me, because if I lost it on the computer than I had a CD that I could re-rip back into the computer and the other way around. Other files were backed up to Cd’s as well until they would get out dated and/or damaged, which happened very often. Cd’s aren’t a great medium to use for backups in the first place, they don’t have a very long life span before the data will start degrading and in some cases can’t even be accessed at all. After I got my Mac Pro, I decided that I would install a few hard drives to use for backup purposes.

Current Work-Station Setup

Mac Pro with side panel off.

Brand and Model
Model Name:    Mac Pro
Model Identifier:    MacPro1,1

Processors
Processor Name:    Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed:    2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors:    2
Total Number Of Cores:    4
Total Combined Processing Speed:    10.64 GHz

Memory (RAM)
Size:    7 GB
Type:    DDR2 FB-DIMM
Speed:    667 MHz
ECC Status:    Enabled

Graphics
Chipset Model:    NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Bus:    PCIe
PCIe Lane Width:    x16
VRAM (Total):    256 MB

Displays
Left Display:    ViewSonic Graphic Series VG2230wm Black 22″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
Right Display:    ViewSonic Graphic Series VG2230wm Black 22″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

Hard Drives
Bay 1:    WDC WD2500JS-41SGB0 (250 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 2:    SAMSUNG SP2504C (250 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 3:    ST31500341AS (1.50 TB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 4:    ST3500630AS (500 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 1 & 2:    Striped RAID Set SATA 3.0Gb/s

Ok, enough about my system. The above drives are raided together in a Striped RAID setup. This allows the drives to function as one and I have both drives working in tandem, so I get double the speed on my writes and seeks. This helps because I work with a lot of large files and really need faster drives than what I have, but they suffice for what I currently do.

In order to backup the 500 Gigs of those two drives, I purchased a 500 GB hard drive to use with Time Machine, once I upgraded to Leopard. I soon outgrew this and didn’t really like the idea of my files being on the same drives as my operating system, as it caused bottle necks when working with larger graphics. So I decided to purchase a 1.5 TB hard drive. This drive became my new Time Machine drive and the 500GB drive became my Repository, which houses all of my files.

So here is how my backup system works on the Mac Pro.

Dual 250GB Hard Drives – Operating System, Applications and any other files that run on a regular basis.
500GB Hard Drive – Used as my file repository; all of my work files, documents, pictures, music, movies and so on go on this drive.
1.5TB Hard Drive – Used as my Time Machine drive, all of the above drives use the one 1.5 TB as a backup drive.

The above setup is for in-house use only and has worked great for the past 8 months now. Having such a large amount of space to revision my backups with Time Machine allows me to recover files that were deleted, lost or renamed months ago. This has saved me a number of times and I will never be able to function without having a system such as this.

Now, what happens if something happens to the computer itself? Well I have a way to protect against lightning strikes and/or power surges. First I have a whole house surge protection system installed, if you don’t, do it. They are cheap and your power company will normally spread the payments out over a few months and it’s only around $20 to get them to come out and install it. I think total the system cost us roughly $150, but over 3 months it wasn’t much at all. The next thing I use is a UPS system, that has a very nice surge protection system built in. This saves me from power outages, surges and a number of other problems. This has saved me roughly 30+ times since I’ve purchased it, just from random outages with our power company, storms and the like. I roughly have 5 minutes to get my files saved and my system shut down, then the batteries die.

To cover myself from a fire or other natural disaster, I use online backup services. I used Mozy for the longest time because they offered unlimited space for a great price. Only problem is they have a very bad Mac application and I decided to switch. Now I haven’t been with them for roughly 5 months now, so it is possible that their application is much better, it was in beta when I used it. I moved over to iDrive, which has a great Mac application, but I was paying the same price as Mozy but only got 150 Gigs of space, needless to say I filled that pretty fast and made the decision to move to another company.

While I was searching for companies I decided to give a company a try that is very similar to Mozy, but didn’t have a Mac application at the time. Lucky for me when I was ready to switch, they had in fact released their Mac app, Carbonite. I have been with them now for well over 4 months and I am extremely happy. On my account I currently have around 200 Gigs backed up, with another 300 in the pipe to be uploaded. I keep mine throttled on my system, simply because I work on the web daily, as well as the other 3 adults in my house. So I can’t consume all of the up bandwidth and kill everyone’s bandwidth. I also run a few company servers here as well as a gaming server, which all require bandwidth as well.

My wife has a Carbonite account as well and she has loved her as well. She runs her flat out, mainly because her computer houses all of our family photos and videos, so we wanted to make sure it backed up quickly and also so it backups up fast when they are uploaded to the computer so those files are safe. Currently I have a server running here at the home office aptly dubbed “Obtuse”, which is my companies full time backup server. All of our web servers (A few in the Texas DC), as well as some of the office servers all backup to this one server. I have purchased a pro license for the Linux version of an application called Crash Plan, which runs full time on Obtuse. In a few days I will be setting up all the other computers in the house with this application (which is free for the standard version) and those computers will backup to Obtuse as well. So this will give me another layer of protection, which is still in-house, but having multiple copies of the same data, even in the same place, is better than 1.

So to re-cap. Get a backup system in place and automate it. There are applications for Windows that act the same as Time Machine, you’ll just need to do a little digging to find them. I don’t know of any free off hand, but Retrospect is a paid one that I’ve used in the past and works great. If you don’t want to spend any money, get with a few of your friends and have them all install Crash Plan, it works on Windows, OS X and Linux. Once they’ve got it installed and you do as well, invite each other to backup to your computer. Give them a little bit of space and get the same amount from them, then your computers are backing up to each other and it will be remotely and FREE. The files are all encrypted so no one will have access to the files and vise versa, it’s completely safe. There isn’t any excuse these days to not backup your files.

If anyone wants or needs any help with setting up a backup plan, post a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out. I’ve worked with a lot of the backup software on the market today and if I haven’t, I have all major operating systems installed on my Mac Pro with VMWare, so I can install them as well and help you solve whatever issue you have.

Some of you may have noticed the new page, look up, that I’ve added. Well as you may have guessed, I’m trying to raise enough money to buy a used iPhone on eBay. Why? Well there are a number of reasons for this, the main reason is well, I want one!

But there are other logical reasons that some of you may appreciate more than me just wanting one, cause really, who doesn’t?

Another main reason for wanting to get   of an iPhone is for development purposes. I’ve been wanting to get into developing applications on the iPhone since they were released, but I’ve never had enough cash to purchase one, nor did I want to switch carriers. So with a little research, I’ve concluded that I can in fact run an iPhone with my current cell carrier, T-Mobile. So I figure it couldn’t hurt to have some of my readers pitch in and help me achieve my goal of raising the $300 needed to purchase a used iPhone. Of course I’m going to try and get one cheaper than $300, but that is the average that they are currently going for.

So if you’re in a giving mood, then lend a few bucks to a poor blogger to he can realize his dream of owning one of the greatest cell phones ever to be invented. Way to go Apple!

Now, what’s in it for you if you donate? Well, if you donate $5 or more, I’ll allow a link to be placed with your donation listing until the goal is met on the donation page. Think of the back-link capabilities with Google.. huhh huhh … Come on, you know you want to. :) If you donate less than $5, your name will be displayed and the amount that you donated and all those that think it will be funny to donate a penny, go for it, those will add up quickly.

So how about a donate?