Aug. 31 2009

Nerd Patrol

jstn:

I installed Snow Leopard over the weekend and decided afterwards to reset my Time Machine backup, which I was surprised to find went back more than a year and had grown to 1.5TB. If you ever find yourself in this position, do everything you can to just reformat the whole disk. Because I share my Time Machine drive with other stuff I tried to just delete the “Backups.backupdb” folder normally, but emptying the trash wound up taking two full days. Untold millions of files! While I was waiting I figured out a cool command line trick, which I share with you here so we can both avoid repeating my fate. All on one line, substituting your own variables:

hdiutil create -size 500g -fs HFS+J -volname "Time Machine" /Volumes/Drobo/justinbookpro_001ec1325b6e.sparsebundle

What this does is create a expanding disk image with a maximum size that you can set and that Time Machine will mount and use instead of the whole drive. You can also delete it one quick shot if you ever need to. The trick is naming the file with your hostname, followed by an underscore and the MAC address of your ethernet adapter (get it with “ifconfig en0 | grep ether”). The volume name can be anything.

Now, when I set Time Machine to use my disk “Drobo”, it’s smart enough to mount that sparsebundle and put it away cleanly when it’s done, and it can’t ever get bigger than 500GB.

it’s been almost two years but i’m really back in the saddle.  considering such, i’m probably going to be buying a drobo soon and this is a very helpful tip.  thanks justin.  everyone else?  NAS is your friend.

Nov. 21 2008

Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize. And while “Napoleon Dynamite” is the worst culprit, it isn’t the only troublemaker. A small subset of other titles have caused almost as much bedevilment among the Netflix Prize competitors. When Bertoni showed me a list of his 25 most-difficult-to-predict movies, I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”

So this is the question that gently haunts the Netflix competition, as well as the recommendation engines used by other online stores like Amazon and iTunes. Just how predictable is human taste, anyway? And if we can’t understand our own preferences, can computers really be any better at it?
The Screens Issue - If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize

Jun. 17 2008

Safari Not Created to Promote Openness, Innovation and Opportunity

camh:

Safari Not Created to Promote Openness, Innovation and Opportunity

Earlier today Mozilla launched the third major version of Firefox, after being unavailable for almost half of their much…

click through and read.  cameron makes solid points and back up, partially, why i used safari now instead of firefox.  more so, i’m starting to understand the strong correlations between hardware and software.  apple develops it’s software so closely to the hardware and operating system that you’re always hard pressed to find a better computing solution.