I have SuperDuper! up and running again and I have most of my site and everything else setup.  All in all for a disaster, it wasn’t as bad as my first hard drive crash back in 2001.  Of course, I only had my computer a month and Western Digital replaced it right away.  It didn’t take long to rebuild and acquire an operating system that was much more robust than Windows ME.

Snow Leopard is very nice, the load times on reboot or cold start.  The screen switching for Spaces is lightning fast and I have to admit that I am looking forward to running the install for my wife on the iMac.  I will make sure that I have 2 back-ups before I start that install.

iron wil

This does not happen with every App and so, I would recommend doing full back-ups and not making the same mistake that I made.  I am about 90% of the way there. I have to manually add my calendar items back into iCal and I have to figure out a way to recover my data from my Treo without losing it.  Because of the 1Password problem, I am having to go back through and add items to 1Password manually, but that is less of a problem than the passwords I didn’t have in the HTML file I exported about 2 weeks ago.

So, the #1 lesson from this experience?  Make sure you have good back-ups before you monkey with your system.  Man, what a bad example to set . . . well, I ain’t perfect.

iron wil

I like the interface and Expose looked really nice.  So, I am listening to Windows Weekly from TWiT, installing OS X: Snow Leopard, and the surfing on the Mini 10.

I am hoping that my recovery and work-around will work. If not, install Leopard and then recover my data, and update the 1Password db.  Backup the disk and [clean] reinstall Snow Leopard.  Then finally migrate the accounts.

iron wil

1. ‘Available networks’ tool on taskbar — already present in OS X, works great! It was called Internet Connect, but now is just part of the Network pane in System Preferences.
2. Fewer annoying pop-ups — true we get a bouncing dock icon if you want it; but pop-ups aren’t standard.
3. HomeGroup — oh yeah, I think we call that Bonjour.
4. Device Stage — sounds like more work, OS X launches the program and gets ready to work.
5. BitLocker support for removable storage — Now, for businesses, this has promise.  Home users get nothing from what I understand.  There is FileVault; however if you want whole drive encryption, you can get tools like TrueCrypt.
6. Speedier boot-up — yeah, that is working . . . my MacBook was still faster booting OS X than it was booting Windows 7.
7. Libraries — copycat?  Yeah, *Nix systems have been using this model for some time now.
8. User Account Control is less in-your-face — about time!!!
9. Multi-touch — okay, this is only available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and ModBooks; we are still waiting for Apple to release a NetBook or Tablet PC that will blow our socks off.
10. It’s not Windows Vista — yeah, we never thought we would see something more busted up than Windows ME; but that has come & now they are ‘getting it right’.

Commentary added.

iron wil

Mac OS X 10.5.7 Combo Update Page.

iron wil

Make sure that you get your updates.

iron wil

I also know that this is 1 of 2 ‘wild’ malware programs on the net; while there are hundreds of thousands for Windows. Just based on the odds, OS X is in less danger than XP or Vista of getting hacked. Yes, it is true that as Apple market share grows so will the number of viruses, spyware, and trojans for OS X.

With this in mind, we also need to remember that Apple has released it’s Leopard Security Guide and has announced that Snow Leopard will focus on increasing the security in OS X.

No software is perfect, in fact, according to Steve Gibson from GRC.com and Security Now, “code wants to be wrong”.

The War is coming to OS X, but we can be prepared and educated.

iron wil

Hit Ars Technica for more information [Tiger & Leopard] and the hop.

iron wil

Hosts: Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte

Two useful but lesser-known Microsoft security utilities.

get yours here.

iron wil

As some of you know, I got a MacBook [Black] just before Christmas. What you don’t know is what I have been doing with it since then. When I first got it I tried to dual boot via Boot Camp; but there was something wrong with my XP disk & it got stuck in this restart loop until I reinstalled OS X.

A few weeks later I bought Parallels so that I could have Word for school, without having to spend the $$ on Mac Office. To tell the truth I would have been happy with OpenOffice; however, in the MBA program I started we need the Change Tracking . . . so, I got the software up and running without any problems. I got all the needed Windows applications installed and I was go for class.

Several months passed and I changed jobs and of course, Windows is the enterprise platform ‘du jour’. No, big the office gave me a laptop for travel. The only problem is that I was hauling my MacBook and the Dell, ugh. So then an opportunity came up and I asked the boss if I could dual boot my MacBook and run Vista Business. His response, “Sure, I don’t care”. Nice, so after a couple of back-ups, I sat down to run Boot Camp and get things going.

The installation process was painless and straight forward. The process is outlined in detail by Apple. It took about 3.5 hours from start to finish [including all the updates]. The personalization has taken longer, since I have not moved to Vista for everything. I have to say that the UI is very slick and quite beautiful. It has always looked that way – since RC1.

I have to admit that I have been reluctant to use Vista at all. True it is stronger than XP in some ways; however, it still has problems. For example, the one I see all the time is slow down. I will be surfing the web or doing something else and my cursor disappears and then the screen freezes for several seconds to a minute or two. I have to admit that natively on HP or IBM hardware [built just for Vista] I have not seen this happen. No, I have all the updates available and I have 4 gigs of RAM with a Core 2 Duo processor.

So, this is not a piece of junk machine; but Vista can be so slow. I am running XP in my vm and I never have problems with it. I probably just put my foot in my mouth, I am downloading and installing XP SP3. I must also admit that my purpose for running Vista is because I can’t help others if I don’t know what they are talking about.

I know that I have been working on printer problems for friends since they picked up their VistaBox. I also know that some drivers don’t work. On the other hand, if you get that box from a vendor instead of custom building it – it seems to work much better.

Hmmm . . . I guess that is a good start.

iron wil