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Safari stability and speed on the iPhone 2.0.1 is still quite poor. Safari crashes regularly. Page rendering is quite slow, even when connected via wifi. Hopefully Apple are working hard on a firmware update that will address the causes of the instability and slow rendering.

The lack of support for flash content is a major deficiency.

A port of a browser based on the gecko rendering engine as used by Firefox would seem to be quite a challenge but a useful addition. Apple may also not be too embracing of competitors for Safari.

This post has been brought to you by the Wordpress 1.1 app on the iPhone 3G (and the letter Z).

I had one of those frightful experiences in the wee hours of this morning! My MacBook crashed for some unknown reason and it was then hanging during boot! This gave me a perfect but somewhat unwanted opportunity to see how well my backup strategy would apply to a minor catastrophe.

My backup strategy is a two-stage process. I decided in December that I wanted to take a weekly mirror of my MacBook’s hard disk and supplement this with the hourly incremental backups provided by Time Machine. Since my MacBook’s hard disk is 150GB I decided that 300GB+ should be sufficient for storage of one weekly mirror and several months of time machine backups. I went out and purchased a Western Digital MyBook Essentials 320GB model.

Western Digital Mybook Essentials 320GB 

Once connected to my MacBook via a spare USB port, I used the OSX Disk Utility to split the drive into two equally sized partitions. The first partition was labelled “Mirror” and was configured to be a bootable partition. The second partition was labelled “Tardis” to provide a volume for the Time Machine backups.

Time Machine was simple to setup. Since I run a virtualised instance of Windows XP via Parallels I decided to exclude the XP instance from Time Machine backup. I don’t run XP much these days and it would be backed up on a weekly basis when the main volume is mirrored. This would prevent 10+GB virtual machine files from filling up my ‘Tardis’ Time Machine volume.

For disk mirroring I am using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner. This is an elegant disk cloning solution that makes the process of mirroring a hard disk rather simple.  It’s a great utility so consider donating to the author.

Early this morning when my MacBook crashed I had several unsuccessful boot attempts. I tried repairing the permissions and the hard disk via the Leopard installer DVD’s disk utility. Whilst these utilities repaired errors successfully, OSX would not boot beyond the blank light-blue screen (suggestion for Apple - provide some meaningful information on the screen during the boot process). I also tried to use the Leopard Installer DVD’s “Archive and Install” facility, however this failed to result in a bootable disk.

I checked that my MacBook would boot from the ‘Mirror’ volume on my external drive. Once I was certain that the mirror was functioning okay, I used the disk utilities on the Leopard Installer DVD to erase and repair the faulty MacBook’s drive. The ‘Mirror’ volume was then booted and Carbon Copy Cloner was used to copy the Mirror volume onto the MacBook’s drive.

Now that the contents of MacBook’s drive had been restored, I used Time Machine to progressively restore files that had changed since the mirror image was taken approximately six days ago. The directories I paid attention to were:

•  /Users
• /Applications
• /Library

I use Mail.app for my e-mail and Time Machine has specific support for that software. This enabled me to select mailboxes in Mail.app and restore them via Time Machine.

My opinion is that the mechanisms for restoring data via Time Machine could be improved. The interface seems to be geared towards restoring individual files and directories. I found that I had to selectively pick out directories and Mail.app folders to restore. There was no (obvious) way to rollback to a specific time interval and restore everything.

Does anyone have positive or negative  experience to share about time machine? How do you think Time Machine can be improved?

I’ve just launched a new site bbpressraw.com. The site provides a set of lean & mean bbPress themes that are designed to enable you to quickly develop your own custom bbPress themes. They should save you a great deal of time if you are trying to create your own theme from scratch.

The themes are compatible with and have been tested with bbPress 0.8.3.

A number of layout variations have been provided, including:

• 1col_fixed: bbPress blank 1-column theme with fixed width
• 1col_fluid: bbPress blank 1-column theme with fluid width
• 2col_fixed_left: bbPress blank 2-column theme with left sidebar and fixed width
• 2col_fixed_right: bbPress blank 2-column theme with right sidebar and fixed width
• 2col_fluid_left: bbPress blank 2-column theme with left sidebar and fluid width
• 2col_fluid_right: bbPress blank 2-column theme with right sidebar and fluid width

For now the themes have been made available. During the next week I’ll be posting some tips at bbpressraw.com to get you up and running quickly!

Enjoy!

Coding is more than syntax. Coding is both art and science. It can be difficult to write software that has sane structure, is understandable (by others) and maintainable (by others). The book Simple Program Design by Lesley Anne Robertson lays down some very important principles of software design.

The book covers the steps and thought-processes for designing an algorithm as well as important characteristics such as coupling and cohesion that can be used to assess the strength of a module’s design and the way it communicates with other modules.

I was first introduced to the book in 1990. I was in my first semester of undergraduate study for my software degree. This book was used one of the core texts for the foundational programming subject. Since completing my degree I have recommended this book on numerous occasions to people interested in just developing their coding skills or studying towards a software-engineering qualification.

I’ve signed up for an Adsense account. Whilst waiting for it to be approved I have been thinking about the tax implications as an Australian publisher. Do I need to pay US tax? Fortunately Google have provided tax information that provides an overview of the US tax categories that apply to adsense publishers. These categories are:

• U.S Business;
• Non U.S. Business (No U.S. Activities); and
• Non U.S. Business with U.S. Activities.

If you are a foreign publisher, you will need to carefully think about how your website is hosted. Most publishers go for rented or leased hosting and this is unlikely to present a problem. You’ll need to be careful if you own a server in the US as that may put you in the position of paying US tax (see footnote 1).

If you are an Australian publisher, there is a good example to read here. It touches on some important issues for Australian taxpayers.

Footnotes:

1. This post does not constitute professional tax advice and you should seek the advice of a tax professional or your accountant.

This tech journey started with an Atari 2600. Being uncoordinated I was never able to build much of a score in any game. It was the popular text adventure game Zork that maintained my interest. That was when I was about 11 years old and on a school friend’s Commodore 64. I also remember tinkering with an Apple II in my first year of high school.

Time-warp 6 months and my parents moved the family out of the city to a nice town on the coast. They bought a hardware store. One of the old fashioned ones where you could buy nails by the kilo. We the aid of my brother we eventually convinced my father that we should buy an Amstrad. I think we even suggested that it could be used to manage the accounts for the hardware store. My father splashed out and bought us the CPC6128 - the one with the fancy 3″ disk drive!

I had a delusional period during high school in which I was planning to eventually become an accountant. This was the stage where I was also spending a great deal of time in the school computer room - programming in basic and Pascal on the Microbee. It was lucky I came to my senses eventually because I only just passed my Financial Accounting subject in first year of Uni and then I failed Managerial Accounting - twice! This is sad really since my father is a (now retired) accountant. Fortunately I’ve avoided situations in work where I’ve had to use Earned Value Management.