Blog

Welcome to my fourth annual year in review post.

This year, unlike previous years, my blog is less of a good record of the past 365 days. It’s a combination of being a lot busier due to the growth at Crowd Favorite, and working on more client projects that I can’t talk about as they happen the same way I can with things I’m building for myself.

This year was a year of many starts and few finishes. I have too many projects still in a state of “mostly working, not quite ready for release”. I’m pleased with the base that I’ve built in 2008, and I’m hoping that 2009 will see much of this work come to fruition.

• January - I took a quick trip to the Bay Area with ShareThis for the Open Web Awards. By far the biggest news of the month is the new office space and getting settled in. This has worked out quite well, and pretty much feels like home now.
• February - sell some stuff on eBay for the first time, take another quick trip to the Bay Area and continue busting tail to get everything set up in the new office.
• March - I pick up the Air and take it with me to visit the ShareThis team. I enjoy my (almost) annual weekend golfing to Phoenix and a quick trip to Minnesota for a wedding. WordPress 2.5 comes out and my plugins aren’t all ready.
• April - I take another quick trip to the Bay Area, this time for the Google App Engine launch. Other than that, it’s head’s down working. I do get a new plugin released.
• May - Addictomatic launches and I take a trip to Seattle to visit family.
• June - I present at Refresh Denver and Crowd Favorite continues to expand.
• July - .me domains launch, I manage to duck jury duty.
• August - Addictomatic is updated. The DNC is held a couple blocks from our office and I take a trip to New York to see Yankee Stadium.
• September - JabberWerx AJAX is released. I start podcasting with some friends and I present at WordCamp Utah.
• October - The public launch of Carrington and I enjoy a long weekend golfing in South Carolina.
• November - I speak at Widget Summit 08, get Carrington hosted publicly on Google Code and upgrade to the Bold while in Minnesota for Thanksgiving.
• December - Keep my head above water while end of year projects are feverishly accomplished.

For you statheads out there, I’ve continued the blog/site stats.¹

1. Run yours using these SQL queries. [back]

Popularity: 2% [?]

I finally ran into a situation where I wished the MacBook Air had a DVD drive or a FireWire port. I needed to restore from a SuperDuper backup on a disk image on an external drive to a vanilla MacBook Air and was a bit surprised that I didn’t know how best to do it. I called up Adam Tow and ran through a number of scenarios.

Basically it came down to this: I had to boot from a device that wasn’t the drive I wanted to copy to (the MacBook Air’s internal drive. That would allow me to overwrite the internal drive with my backup. I also needed the backup available when I’d booted up from the alternate startup device.

Here are the options I considered/tried:

1. Install from another computer using Air Disk. For some reason, I couldn’t join my Airport network from the Air after bootng up. As such, I moved on to other options.
2. Boot from USB stick that has SuperDuper on it, with both the USB stick and the backup drive hooked up via USB hub. I don’t have a USB drive with OS X on it and was concerned about the ability to make everything work from the USB hub, so I decided not to try this.
3. Install OS X on the external drive I was using for backups, then boot from the Air from that and clone back to the internal drive. This is ultimately what I decided to do.

I think #3 is the best option for several reasons. It’s faster than the Remote Disk option, and also is the same situation I’d have if I suffered a hard drive crash while traveling - which is what the external travel drive is really intended to guard against. I still ran into some issues with this approach.

I’d reformatted the external drive when I first got it, but I hadn’t reformatted it as a GUID partition. I had to copy the disk images with the SuperDuper backups to another computer/drive, reformat the external drive, install OS X and then copy them back again.

I wanted to install OS X on the external drive from the DVD that came with the Air, but when I tried to do that from my Mac Pro it complained about the machine not being compatible. Instead I installed from the DVD that came with the Mac Pro. This seemed to work.

Once I had installed OS X on the external drive and copied the disk image back to the external drive again, I tried to boot the Air from it. No go. It went into a loop where it would boot to a gray screen then reboot.

I realized that the external drive had 10.5.1 on it, which was before the Air was released. On a hunch I decided to see if upgrading the OS on the external drive would make a different. I plugged the drive back into my Mac Pro and updated the OS to 10.5.6. After doing this, I was able to boot the Air from the external drive. Yay!!

Once I had booted the Air successfully from the external drive, I then installed SuperDuper, mounted the disk image with my backup on it, and initiated a clone to the Air internal drive. I was so confident this would work that I set the post-copy action to “boot from Air internal drive”. I should have known better…

Once the clone from the backup to the internal drive was complete, the machine rebooted itself; again, and again, and again, and again… the same thing I’d seen before when booting from the external drive that had 10.5.1. I don’t know how long it did this before I went in to check if the clone was complete - I’m sure it was a totally good thing for the hardware.

At this point I was seriously considering wiping everything back to a basic install and copying over my apps, user dir, etc. However I was going to have the same struggle installing OS X again without a DVD drive or bootable installer on a USB stick, etc., so I decided to give it one more try.

Since I’d fixed this boot cycle issue once before by upgrading to 10.5.6, and the backup was 10.5.5, so I decided to try an upgrade. It’s not easy to upgrade a disk image though. I had to upgrade the original machine, then SuperDuper Smart Update the backup, then boot from the vanilla OS install on the external drive, mount the disk image, boot up SuperDuper, say a quick prayer to St. Steve and try Smart Update the Air internal drive from the updated backup disk image. Then I manually rebooted from the Air internal drive.

This worked.

Thank goodness.

So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I really miss FireWire target disk mode. That’s a feature the Air, as a satellite device, should really support. It would have saved me an absurd amount of time in this process.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ok, maybe less “outrage” and more “mild annoyance”.

After playing with the iPhone a bit I realized that my BlackBerry would be a bit more useful if I had some apps on it for various one-off features. For example, I thought it would be handy to have a weather app instead of loading up a web page.

The iPhone has Weather built-in and also has handy, free apps like WeatherBug for this.

So I did a quick search for “WeatherBug for BlackBerry” and found that they did indeed have a BlackBerry product. However, unlike the iPhone version, it costs money. Not just a one-time “buy the product” license fee either, it’s a monthly subscription fee for data that they make freely available on their web site and to iPhone users.¹ WeatherBug does have a free BlackBerry Direct app, but that only tracks one city and only shows the current temperature - and the icon really looks bad.

Then a couple weeks ago I got the Android Dev Phone and was poking around the Android marketplace. Sure enough, there is a free WeatherBug app for Android too. It’s very similar to the iPhone app, has nice features and the ability to track more than one location. And it’s free.

And in the course of looking things up for this post, I see that there is a new, free app for the BlackBerry Storm.

So why is WeatherBug trying to gouge the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, Bold user?

1. It looks like Windows Mobile users have the same gripe. [back]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Does anyone have success stories/recommendations for phone answering services? I am looking for something that will do the following:

• 24/7 live operator answering.
• Gather basic information about the issue/problem.
• Call the scheduled “on call” person to pass the info on to.
• Call the next person on the schedule list if the first, second, etc. is not available.
• Email the information gathered from the caller to the “on-call” person who is reached by phone.

I’ve found lots of results but few recommendations that I feel comfortable with.

Popularity: 7% [?]