I once suggested, tongue in cheek, a "learning outcome" for my department where I teach somehow that made it into our final report (something like "Students will learn to overthrow the current economic system and build a workers' paradise"). Years later when we were up for accreditation review, the consultant we met with, with a completely straight face, wanted to know how we planned to measure that outcome. We had no idea how that got into the report.
I'm just saying that edits can be remarkably persistent.
@stuffe Both for us and for the folks in Cupertino.
@Daniel nowhere near as fun, but I once put a full page print of a tiger from some clipart collection into the appendix of an essay without any explanation. No-one ever questioned it.
Back when Lion was announced, its major draw was the fact that it contained several iPad-style features. I use some of them a lot, but there are others that I do not use at all. I am trying to figure out if this is normal.
The features I am most curious about are:
Launchpad
Full Screen Apps
Mu...
I just got a new MacBook Pro since I was due for a new machine and needed Lion for the new Xcode. I also got an Apple TV with the idea of centralizing all the digital media in my house by hosting it on my old Snow-Leopard MacBook Pro using iTunes.
I set up the new machine using my USB drive's T...
Am I understanding the answer to this question correcty: if I want to backup more than one machine onto a shared Time Machine drive I either need to use a Time Capsule or run OS X Server on the machine hosting the backup drive?
@daviesgeek Ok. So I guess it's time to install OS X server. I'm planning to make a separate partition for each backed up machine. Does that seem sensible? (I've been doing that manually by moving a drive from machine to machine, but I'd like to make the whole thing happen over the network.)
@daviesgeek Yes, I know it's not necessary. It just seems to be neater in some way, and I suppose it shouldn't cause any problems. One advantage might be that it would avoid the problem of machines with lots of changed files filling up the disk over one with fewer. If each is on its own partition, the deletion of old backups will be per machine rather than driven by one machine.
@daviesgeek I don't know anything about Lion. All my machines are still running Snow Leopard. But basically there are significant differences between the Server and Personal File Sharing. (In fact that was part of what the answer/comments mentioned: you can't share a Time Machine drive using Personal File Sharing.)
So you think that the question I linked to was particular to Lion? My reading of it was that although it's possible to use AFP, it's not robust enough unless you're using Server.
@daviesgeek Well since I can easily set up a machine as a server, I'll probably just go that route so that when I do end up upgrading any of the machines to Lion I won't have to start over.
@daviesgeek Thank for that. It's helpful. I'm mainly trying to avoid spending time setting something up that ends up not working. I foolishly thought that I could simply attach the drive to my Airport Extreme base station, but that doesn't work. (Luckily a question here saved me from that too.)
bmike will explain it better, but partitions is bad because it's possible to then fill a partition and have to start removing old backups even when there is space available. better to have individual sparse bundles per backup, that you can grow dynamically if required.
Great conversation on backups. I've gotten a lot more experience with Time Machine and Lion server since that answer was posted.
In a nutshell - partitions are still very undesirable on the server side and any time Time Machine is backing things up. Moreso with the tools available to determine the fill rate for a specific machine and to thin out files. I'm really, really impressed how well a mac mini with spinning hard drives is taking file backups from a design firm with 5 iMacs hitting it hourly.
Most of the iMacs are SSD drives and when backups change large amounts of data - the throughput is very fast - almost no delay due to network or file sharing overhead.
@stuffe Yes - it's so much easier to see what machines and directories churn space rapidly and control with exclusion lists.
@bmike The upsides I could see for partition-based backup would be if you could somehow run block-level copy (for speed, for instance), or if there were a risk that one machine's files might clobber another's. But TM doesn't do block-level, and it segregates different machines into their own directories, so those upsides go away, and the downside of partitions, as you point out, is that you lose size flexibility for space management.
@Daniel Server puts all the backups in one directory. Each is a sparse disk bundle - so each is encoded in bands in different directories. Really no path for clobbering. Not only do partitions pre-guess where you will have resource constraints, they make it harder to resize when guesses are wrong.
@bmike @stuffe @daviesgeek @Daniel Thanks very much for these comments. They've been extremely informative. It's nice to see that the Mac Stack Exchange site seems to be as friendly and helpful and we try to be on the TeX site where I hang out.
@daviesgeek It seems kind of weird to both flag and vote to close a question, but if there aren't enough people voting to close, then flags get action, and close votes are where opinions go to die.
And it's not really double counting, because flags aren't added to close votes, and anyhow, if a moderator gets involved, that settles it.
Or so I'm told.
I was just looking at statistics for new users, and most users with my length of stay on the site and reputation have, like, 3 profile views, and I'm at 20. Is that odd?
Wow. You are only an AD (Ask Different) user. That's is a somewhat surprising number of profile views. However, you are in chat and most new users are not. I viewed your profile as soon as I saw you come into the room. If there's a user that's not a regular in the chat room, I usually view their profile, see what they've done, etc.
Wait wtf it still says 9942. Even though I'm well over 6K on AD and everything.
Apparently this information is only generated on entering this room. I've had this tab open for a long time (seriously like 3 days) and it now says 10.2k. hahahah wow. Awesome.
This is the twenty-third episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein.
We begin with some talk of the Ask Different 2012 Community Moderator Election that is currently in progress. This year’s election is different than last year’s for a number of reasons, most of which are directly linked to the size and participation in Ask Different. We discuss the voting process, STV, and we wish all of the candidates the best.
Also in Stack Exchange news, Jeff Atwood has announced that he will no longer be working at Stack Exchange, beginning in …
@AskDifferentBlog Wow - great show. I was really glad to head Jason explaining why the iOS volume controls are so flexible. You can really tweak things in Sounds portion of the Settings App. Disabling the sound volume change with buttons toggle is under-appreciated by most.
This is the twenty-third episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein.
We begin with some talk of the Ask Different 2012 Community Moderator Election that is currently in progress. This year’s election is different than last year’s for a number of reasons, most of which are directly linked to the size and participation in Ask Different. We discuss the voting process, STV, and we wish all of the candidates the best.
Also in Stack Exchange news, Jeff Atwood has announced that he will no longer be working at Stack Exchange, beginning in …
@KyleCronin You are far from alone. The fact you can control vibrate on/off distinctly for the silent and the non-silent mode is also not widely known, but more often talked about than the decoupling of the sound from the buttons.
I think your observation that iOS sound is designed far differently than Mac OS X sound bears more discussion. The generalization that iOS is a baby OS and the Mac OS is the full OS clearly fails in instances where this happens. iOS is far more sophisticated about sound settings due to the pervasive nature of mobile computing as well as the reduced control surface compared to a home computer where we have keyboards, shortcuts, dedicated buttons, etc...
It's jeopardy time - felt bad that our site didn't have a good answer that directly fielded this (instead of the roundabout question about storing the serial number on the hard drive)
What command can I use to retrieve my serial number from the unix command line? Kind of like uname will output some information about the hardware, I would like to retrieve the serial number from a command to use in a script.
@patrix Hey - I mentioned I'm a duck (duct) tape programmer, didn't I?
2
I'll always use more commands when it's simpler for others to know what's really happening. (unless you're one of the grep pipe awk fan club members and feel right at home with that...)
And a sincere thanks for editing my answer - it's much nicer with the awk doing all the lifting. #getthegrepoutofhere
A short call to scutil should help with testing whether the network is up for a specific interface on IPv4 which should suffice to determine when you can add an IPv4 route. The following command will return a 0 if the first ethernet connection has a viable IPv4 address within the default 15 secon...
but I learned something about awk in the process. Anyone who checks the revision history has a good lesson there. Sadly, most beginners likely won't check the revision history.
Only people used to talking with @JasonSalaz on chat.
Haven't checked the details here so forgive me if I'm talking out of the wrong orfice but might the solution be to provide both scripts assuming they're both valid?
but the average terminal fearing user may be put off from learning unless it's pitched at a level. Just understanding Pipe is a revaluation to most terminal users
awk prints selected fields from selected lines. That's its thing. Using awk at all is pretty intimidating, I'd say, but using its "print selected fields" command isn't any more straightforward, in my mind, than using its "print selected lines" command.
Well, once you mastered the /pattern/ {action} thing for awk, a lot of things will get very easy to accomplish.
and even a beginner understands the content of /pattern/ if he really wants to (by just running the main command (in front of the pipe) and looking at the output
the problem with cat is that while it is easier in the beginning it will make things more difficult when you try to write more elaborate stuff. depends a bit on the point in learning curve you are at
but hey, I've learned shell scripting on systems where each additional executable significantly increased the response time so the difference between awk and grep|awk was often noticeable
When I bought my new Mac at the end of July, 2011, the dealer (Microcenter, Marietta, GA) Renee told me I had 4 months to upgrade to Lion. I calendared the drop dead date at the end of November, and now discover I only had 30 days.
Is there a way to upgrade for free at this time?
Back when Lion was announced, its major draw was the fact that it contained several iPad-style features. I use some of them a lot, but there are others that I do not use at all. I am trying to figure out if this is normal.
The features I am most curious about are:
Launchpad
Full Screen Apps
Mu...
I just got a new MacBook Pro since I was due for a new machine and needed Lion for the new Xcode. I also got an Apple TV with the idea of centralizing all the digital media in my house by hosting it on my old Snow-Leopard MacBook Pro using iTunes.
I set up the new machine using my USB drive's T...
When I bought my new Mac at the end of July, 2011, the dealer (Microcenter, Marietta, GA) Renee told me I had 4 months to upgrade to Lion. I calendared the drop dead date at the end of November, and now discover I only had 30 days.
Is there a way to upgrade for free at this time?
