Jeff Atwood has declared December 14th, 2009 as International Backup Awareness Day, and with good reason, as his blog, Coding Horror, experienced catastrophic data loss. Long story short, a disk drive failure on a external hosting server resulted in complete data loss and a recent full backup was not available. A lengthy, manual restore procedure is under way. Lesson learned: Jeff suggests maintaining your…
Mac OS X contains the handy at command for scheduling commands to run at a later time. at is used to schedule the commands, and the atrun utility is used to execute the jobs. However, by default the atrun utility isn’t enabled, any jobs scheduled via at will never run, with no particular warning. The reason given in the man page for atrun is…
Here’s a step by step breakdown of how to build Chrome OS under Ubuntu 9.10 (running as a virtual machine with VMware Fusion on Mac OS X) and testing the built image also via VMware Fusion. At this time of the original post I couldn’t get chromium (the browser portion) to actually build, as it had compilation errors, and it required a pre-built browser…
Many modern operating systems offer compression at the individual file level. This is most useful when it is transparent, allowing all programs and utilities to take advantage of compression without a need for specific programming. Contrast this with compressed file or archive formats, such as zip, bzip2, gzip, which aren’t typically handled directly by applications and therefore cannot be described as transparent. As we…
A common question asked by Mac users is: Does my HFS+ file system get fragmented and what should I do about it? This question is most often asked by those who have experience with the Windows operating system, where defragmentation tools are readily available, visible to the user, and frequently recommended (at least historically). Apple does not generally recommend defragmentation for HFS+, but let’s…