P: Software hints

Friday, July 9. 2010

When backup software fails (Time Machine)

It is very important to have daily/weekly/monthly backups of own information. I know many people realize the importance of backups only when worst happens - disk failures and a lot of studies show that users do not pay atention to this particular problem until they have to face it. A long time ago I used to monthly or even less frequently burn DVDs of files I assumed I wont need them for a long time (see the About this blog part). And I recall searching through DVDs to find a particular file which can take a long time. In present times I don't even burn my photos to DVDs anymore. There are so many now that if I wanted to show them to someone I had to scan a pile of DVDs. With cheap hard drives I keep them on two computers and an external drive. Three copies should suffice and I do my copying manually every time I empty cameras' memory cards.

I use rdiff-backup to do backups of my laptop to a machine at work to a NTFS partitioned disk. It fails sometimes (due to NTFS disk) and I do have to rebuild the whole backup from scratch. Rdiff-backup never failed me in 7 years when doing backups of ext partition (my desktop machine) to another ext partition (external drive). Once in a while I remember checking the logs and so far so good!

I'm also using the Time machine to backups of my laptop at home. So far I thought that Time Machine can't fail since so many people praise it. It hasn't failed me so far backing up on a USB external hard drive and I do have 200GB of small files. But it might have some issues if used over the wi-fi (Time Capsule) or if it is stopped due to hibernating/sleeping. If having issues with these three cases:

(i)  TM is still saying ‘preparing’ after leaving it overnight!

(ii)  TM starts to transfer to disk, but then gets stuck part way:

(iii)  if you look in the Time Machine preferences it says the backup has failed

then check out this tips.

Checking regularly if a backup software works is AS important AS backing up itself. So many people think that with setting up an automatic backup procedure they have dealt with the job forever. But it often isn't the case. Even the best backing up software (whichever this is for you) can fail!

Friday, June 25. 2010

Rescue photos from currupted memory card with ProtoRec

I have been given the task to empty the family camera's memory card (this is my job to do since I'm the computer guy in the house) a few days ago. I took the card out of the camera, put it in a card reader and plugged the reader in my laptop. A red light turned on it but it turned off immediately which was not a good sign at all. My OS X complained that the disk was not properly dismounted. I tried the reader on other two laptops (two other OSes) but with no luck. I put the memory card back in to the camera and a few more photos were taken since then.

I bought a new reader yesterday, came home, put the memory card in and plugged the reader into my laptop. It took forever to read it (not a good sign at all) but after the card was recognized there were no photos on it!?!? I put the card back in the camera and it claimed that card has no photos on it as well!?!? My conclusion was that the card was probably corrupted. 

There are a lot of good tools out there to restore data from corrupted memory cards but most of them are for Windows. I remembered once using a decent command line software which I tried to find but it took me a while (There's a good paper on how we find information on the web that was found already in the past)¹. It is called PhotoRec and is cross platform as well. Although their web site has detailed instructions on how to use the software I still wanted to share my straight forward procedure step by step on a Mac for less technical users (but you are still doing it at your own risk).

Continue reading "Rescue photos from currupted memory card with ProtoRec"

Saturday, June 19. 2010

Sort multiple citatations in Latex by citation numbers

I was trying to solve this problem a while ago but found it only now on an internal mailing list.
Let's assume we have a text like:

"... Some researchers have argued that the world is flat [43, 5, 16, 32, 22] ..."

Instead it would be nice if the citations would be organized or sorted by citation numbers so the previous sentence would look like:

"... Some researchers have argued that the world is flat [5, 16, 22, 32, 43] ..."

To sort them, two additional packages have to be used:

\usepackage{cite}

\usepackage[sort]{natbib}

And that's sorts the sorting problem.

Wednesday, May 26. 2010

Alt+Tab on OS X

This one cost me one hour today. I used Witch to move between all opened windows of all applications but it stopped working a month ago. Actually it worked but with a delay of 30s after each Atl+Tab which wasn't usable at all. Recently Witch became a payable application and I would consider buying it ($19 is a bit too much for only one feature I used - hack I really liked it) but I couldn't figure it out why its response time was so long. Then I searched half the web and I couldn't find the solution. I played with Keyboard shortcuts and with a bit of luck (damn UI which is not so friendly and not so obvious) I hit the right spot. So here is how to do it:

System preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard shortcuts (tab)

Select "Keyboard and text input on the left"

Double click ON the command sequence on the right of "Move focus to next window in application"

I first tried to double click (and right mouse click) on the whole line since the whole line is marked in blue if clicked! But nothing happened. This really was a weird interface decision - marking the whole line but make double clickable only a small part of it? An Edit button would help as well! And the "oh so great combination" that Apple chose for us is not so great if non-US keyboard layout is used :(. 

Since It was kind of strange that keyboard shortcuts could not be changed I played with it and, as already said, with a bit of luck I hit the right spot. Luck should never be a part of user experience in interaction with an interface! Interface should be more friendly!

Wednesday, April 28. 2010

Texmaker and Xetex on OS X

As I am coming from a Linux world I am quite used to some software that is available for Linux. One of the software I used often was Texmaker. After switching to OS X I used TexShop (as it comes bundled with MacTex) for a couple of years. It is a good LaTex editor and it (besides Latex) also supports Xetex (a TeX typesetting engine that uses Unicode and system fonts) out of the box and it nicely updates PDF documents almost on the fly.

But I recently switched back to Texmaker because of some of its strengths that I really like (most UI related):

• one window
• tabs
• auto completition of commands, references ...
• a lot of icons for math symbols
• document structure on the left side
• quick access to almost every LaTeX command from menus and most often used ones from drop down menus
• a better search box (although I would like it to be incremental like in Emacs :))
  
• ...

But it doesn't work with Xetex right away. There is a simple solution to this, though. All it is needed is to change two preferences fields (assuming you have MacTex installed).
Continue reading "Texmaker and Xetex on OS X"

Tuesday, March 30. 2010

Executable script in OS X for standalone windows software

I often use Windows software on OS X and I do like PortableApps as they do not need installation. For running Windows software I use Wine (the open source version of Crossover) and I always create an icon to click on to open Windows software. This icons can be placed in the Dock or in any other folder (Applications for example). This is a simple guide on how to do it.

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Tuesday, November 10. 2009

Backing up Mac OS X to a Windows machine

I know there's plenty of backing up/synchronizing software for Mac. I know Time Machine is awesome. But none of the software I tried was able to do it my way :). Thus, as I have a Linux/FreeBSD background, I wanted to do it my way and the command line solution seamed to be a good one.

My office Windows machine has plenty of disk space and is rarely used. It was an ideal system (with not so ideal file system) to do backups on.

Continue reading "Backing up Mac OS X to a Windows machine"