weblog

alex-website.net going down

You might have recognized I didn't write anything here the last months and the contents didn't change at all. Therefore I decided to cancel this webspace and only use our server (which is e.g. used for www.eifelfeten.de) with the domains www.alexander-wilden.de and www.alexanderwilden.de. Both www.alex-website.net and www.alex-website.de won't be available anymore in a few weeks / months.

 Thanks to anyone who visited this page and perhaps we'll meet again on one of the above mentioned domains somewhen in the future :-)

Decay of Days - live

Evolving DSL?

Seems as if the speed of my internet connection increases. Since a few weeks I now have most of the time about 13 Mbit/s. Not too bad :)

This is what "Speedmeter" said today:

The apple gets sludgy, brown spots ...

Indeed, Time Machine backups over network to a host other than a Mac don't work any longer. I hoped the hint I gave myself in the last post would help, but actually it didn't. This is what an apple engineer said as an answer to a bug report (source):

"Network backups to anything other than another Mac OS X Leopard box or a Time Capsule are not currently supported. Time Machine preferences should not have even offered to use a SMB volume as a backup destination. We can't speculate on why it may have appeared to work on 10.5.1, but not on 10.5.2."

Wasn't Time Capsule presented just some weeks ago? No, there CAN'T be ANY link between this presentation and such a "bugfix" ...

And something positive: I finally have DSL here. "Only" about 6000kbit/s but it's much more than with UMTS or DSL-Light which I only had at home in the deep Eifel forests.

More Time Machine issues

Installed Leopards 1.5.2 Update and Time Machine gives you the <irony>well known</irony> error number 11? No error number at all? Yeah, would be to easy to display some information in the error popup. Just have a look at the system logs and you'll most probably find it related to process backupd.  It looks something like this:

Found it and want to fix it? You'll find the solution here. Backups sometimes can be a real pain ...

something new

Long time no new entry and many changes since then ...

First some personal things: I now live in Aachen together with Katja in our own flat. I am still missing my internet connection and being only online via UMTS over my cellular phone is starting to pi... annoy me. But everything else is very cool :-) Second personal thing: I am member of the band "Decay of Days" since december 2007. So please visit our page and come to our shows when they are. Thanks :-) And the last one in this section: From april on (so just after finishing my studies) I'll have a fulltime job here in Aachen. It can't be much better.

Now less personal:
The thursday before last the harddisk of my macbook crashed and it most probably was an issue with bad manufactured Seagate harddisks. After some googeling I found this source for the claim. So on monday I gave it to the macservice and a day later I received it back with a bigger hdd. And everything on guarantee :-) Restoring my user account from the time machine backup worked out as well. As I backuped to network I wasn't able to do this directly on installation but who cares. That's the price to pay if you don't want an additional usb disk.

After reinstallation I again started to backup (everything this time) but it failed. Time Machine just quit with an error message giving no clue what happend (it proves my claim that all operating systems are crap ;-)). After having a look at the log files I found some stuff that was useful. So there seems to be a real big problem for time machine when the spotlight index isn't up to date (which seemed to be the case after restoring my old backup). To solve this issue have a look here.

just a quick note

I just found this video at youtube. Seems like Google's Android is a promising future for my O2 xda mini s. I also tried their SDK (using Java). It integrates seamlessly into Eclipse and provides a nice emulator for tests of your selfmade piece of software. Perhaps this could knock the FIC Openmoko phone from my wishlist ...

Got my Leopard

A few weeks ago I ordered my Mac OS X Leopard at Mac at Campus and received it a few days later. As I'm writing on my diploma thesis at the moment I made a whole backup of everything and checked if it would be possible to continue my work on my linux machine. Not till then (call me a wimp ...) I started the installation of Leopard (I didn't choose update because I don't like the crap of old systems lying around) and it succeeded without any problem.

The best features of Mac OS X 10.5 are Spaces, Stacks and eventually Time Machine (didn't try it yet because my network storage is full and although there is a trick to backup on a network drive there's still the risk of data loss as it isn't supported officially).  Spaces really gives some sense to multiple desktop environments (at least for me). Switching between two desktops is / seems faster than bringing an application to the foreground. So using it speeds up work enormously. Stacks is useful especially for the application folder. Okay, one may open an application via Spotlight (which btw. is faster than in Tiger) but I never got used to it.

Todays update to 10.5.1 didn't bring much new for me but only a laughter about how they reacted to the (justified) attacks against their firewall: They just renamed the Option "Block All" to "Allow Only essential services". Yeah, it's not a bug, it's a feature ;-)

a little late ...

... that I write it down here, but now it's official: The new OS X will arrive on october 26th. Look here.
If somebody knows already whether Time Machine can backup to an afp or smb share on a linux host please tell me. This can greatly affect my decision in buying Leopard.

release of new mac os x leopard announced

The release date for the mac os x 10.5 called leopard is announced. Not really officially, but I don't give up hope :-) It is said that it'll ship around friday October 26th. Source