This User’s ExperienceThe blog of Matt Henderson

A while back, there was quite some chatter about DabbleDB, “a better web database to share, manage and explore your information.” The web application is apparently based on some impressive technology, at least based on a cursory exploration of the demos.

So today a friend of mine created an application at DabbleDB, and shortly thereafter an email arrived in my inbox inviting me to participate. I clicked the link, logged in, and was greeted by the following screen. I was left speechless. Regardless how good the technology is, in my humble opinion, the chances of this (or any product’s) success in the marketplace are severely handicapped by such disregard for the importance and critical roles that user interface and experience play.

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I use rsync running on MacOS X to mirror some remote Linux file systems to an externally connected Firewire drive (“Mirror”), and to archive changed and deleted files to a second externally connected Firewire drive (“Archives”). In general, it works fine, but there has been a long-standing tricky problem, that my system administrator (Niall O Broin) and I finally solved today. Since I couldn’t find anything about this in Google, I figured a blog post was in order.

Here’s the basic problem: Every single time I run the rsync command, a certain set of files are always viewed as changed, and subsequently downloaded (and archived.) And I’m talking about static files like JPG images, not constantly changing stuff like log files.

Well, we finally nailed it. Have a look at this directory listing from the Linux server:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 webrun   www         42648 Nov  7  2005 Uirapuru.jpg
-rwxr-xr-x    1 webrun   www         67248 Nov  7  2005 uirapuru.jpg

The problem is that the Linux filesystem is case sensitive — you can have two files with the same name, if the case of their names is somehow different (as above). However, on most MacOS X formatted drives, the file system is case insensitive.

So, every time rsync would run, it would compare the two Uirapuru files with the single local file, and, of course, one of them would be different, and get downloaded (and subsequently sending the alternate file to my archives.)

What’s the solution? The solution for me is to reformat my Mirror and Archive drives to case-senstive HFS+. (The problem, though, is I don’t have the additional space to copy my files temporarily, in order to reformat the volumes. So, I guess I’ll just live with this for a while…)

Since I really enjoy blog articles where people present the tools and equipment supporting their work and play, I thought I’d do the same. We’ll start from the top, and work our way down through the details.

On the beach…

Our office is located on the mediterranean sea, in beautiful Marbella, Spain. It’s a wonderful place to work! (PS: If you happen to be a cream of the crop hacker, looking to work in a cool company in a cool location, please do get in touch!)

Office desk…

I used to sit at the other end of the office, with the sea view, but I was spending half the day walking back and forth to the big room to chat with Alex. All that chatter, in turn, bugged Arto, who likes his quiet focus space. So I then traded desks with Arto, and now sit directly across from Alex, where we can bug each other all day long. (And Arto can now work around the clock in solitary confinement.) Here’s my setup:

• Apple MacBook, sitting on a Griffin iCurve
• Apple 23″ Cinema Display
• Belkin USB hub
• Apple Bluetooth keyboard
• Logitech MX 500 mouse
• iPod Shuffle dock
• Herman Miller Aeron Chair

Backpackin’ it…

My buddy Narayan and I share a common affliction, we’re bag freaks, and always have been. We just can’t seem to control that urge to own a bag for every possible occasion. During an instant message therapy session one time, Narayan pondered whether the secret to long-term bag satisfaction is modularity, and I tend to agree.

It wasn’t long ago that I was having a close look at this bag, from Timbuk2. Like many bags today, it’s got a pocket for every imaginable item you might want to carry. That’s fine and dandy, until you need to switch bags for some other purpose (like from your office laptop bag, to the weekend beach bag). Then you’ve got to rumble through every little nook and cranny of the first bag, extracting all the bits you need to transfer to similar nooks and crannies of the second bag. Inevitably I’d end up somewhere and realize, “Oh crap, I don’t have my wallet. It’s sitting in the custom wallet slot in the outside accessory pouch of my office bag.”

The solution to this is, of course, modularity. Buy big open bags, and then carry your bits and pieces in smaller interior bags. Then, when you need to switch purpose bags, just transfer your one or two interior bags, and you’re good to go.

So, apart from a Timbuk2 messenger bag, my main open bag is a Salewa Cumbra 38 Backpack. This is, without a doubt, the best backpack I have ever owned. Every little detail is well thought out, and just perfect. I use it in my daily transport to the office. I use it on the weekend for mountain climbing. And I use it for almost everything in between. (In the above photo, the top of the bag, which can be used independently as a fanny pack, has been detached.)

When traveling back and forth to the office, I carry the following four things inside:

• Waterfield MacBook Sleeve Case
• Semi-transparent document folder.
• Outdoor Research ditty bag
• Waterfield Cable Bag

I’ll explain the purpose and contents of each below.

Outdoor Research ditty bag:

The OR ditty bag carries the things that are almost always with me. This is the single bag that I transfer to any other open bag I use (like the Timbuk2 messenger bag). Here’s the contents:

• 5G iPod, enclosed in a Waterfield iPod case.
• 2G iPod Shuffle, piggybacking in the elastic strap of the Waterfield iPod case
• Jack Wolfskin zipper wallet.
• Leatherman Juice S2 knife and utility tool.
• Nokia 5100 ruggedized mobile phone
• Philip Nike Sport Skylon headphones
• USB/auto/wall-socket Nokia phone charger
• Garmin GPSmap 60Cx GPS
• Spare batteries for the GPS (four AA)
• Faber Castell e-Motion pen and pencil set
• Conceptronic Wifi network detector
• Canon IXUS 850 camera, spare battery, spare 1GB SD card, enclosed in a slim Case Logic case.
• Canon PowerShot camera battery recharger
• Advil (for when those jiu-jitsu sessions take their toll on my joints.)

Waterfield Cable Bag

Waterfield make some of the highest quality bags and pouches out there. Construction quality is superb, as is attention to detail (like the orange colored internal fabric, to provide contrasting visibility to bag contents.) Here’s what I carry in mine:

• Firelite 120 GB 2.5″ external hard drive, with firewire cable
• Sharper Image USB Skype phone
• MacOS X-bootable 2GB USB memory card with repair utilities installed.
• Elgato Turbo.264 USB hardware H.264 video encoder
• iPod cable
• IOGEAR USB SD card reader

Waterfield MacBook Sleeve Case

My MacBook travels safely, and in style inside a Waterfield sleeve case. The sleeve, as you can see from the image, contains a velcro protective strap to keep the laptop inside. It also contains a loop on the other side, the function of which I’ve never quite figured out.

Semi-transparent document folder

Finally, to carry around all my papers and Moleskin notebooks, I purchased a plastic, semi-transparent document folder. I also never did quite figured out what that small hole in the cover flap is for…

So, there you have it — my personal road warrior kit!

It’s kind of cute or weird or funny or something when your music system is about a fraction of the size of your headphones. This is the case with my new Apple iPod Shuffle, and trusty old Audio Technica ATH-ES7 headphones.

For mother’s day this year, I decided to order my world’s greatest mom a little pink (pronounced, “pank” by southern rednecks like me) iPod Shuffle. While browsing the Apple Store, I got to thinking that I sure would like to have one too…

Problem was, as usual, finding a justification that I can successfully slip by the boss wife. You see, I already owned a 4G 60GB iPod and an 2G 8GB iPod nano, making it kind of difficult to justify a Shuffle. But after 79 years of marriage (well, it seems that long…), I’ve become a master at this. Watch how this goes…

Let’s start with the purchase of my new (and amazing) Apple TV last month. Given that I consequently no longer used the 4G for videos, and had started toting it around for serious listening, the undeniable truth is that I actually haven’t been using the nano that much. In fact, about the only thing I used the nano for at this point, was jogging, and, clearly, the Shuffle would be a preferable jogging device, right?

So, how to get rid of a nano…

Once again, my office colleague, and design critique buddy, Alex, saved the day. (Alex and I often support each other’s needs to find justifications for gadget purchase — and bag purchases, and software purchase, and t-shirt purchases…)

Turns out, through a bit of justification creation of his own, Alex came to the realization that he really needs a nano!

Not long ago, he bought a shiny new 5G iPod (which, compared to my 4G iPod has 20 more GB of space, a screen that’s not so scratched it makes you cringe to look at it, and, of course, an extra “G”.) But, thinking about how he was using it, it was really just a tad too big for him.

So, we agreed to do a swap — his 5G iPod for my 2G nano.

Bingo– we’re there. At this point, I’ve got a 5G iPod, a 4G iPod, and a whopping big void at the small end of the scale. I could now sell the 4G (anybody interested?), and purchase the (highly justified) Shuffle.

See? I’m good this. I should write an eBook called, “How to justify anything you want!”, and make millions. (Then I could afford anything I want!)

So along with my mom’s pank one, I ordered myself an orange little iPod Shuffle.

There’s several advantages to buying stuff from Apple in the US. For starters, and this must be a dirty little secret, iPods purchased in Europe have volume limits. Can you believe it? The governments here won’t even let me damage my own hearing. Second, Apple, so focused on simplicity, have a pricing structure where all prices are the same, regardless of the currency. So a $79 Shuffle costs 79 Euros here in Spain. (And 79 Euros is about equivalent to $106!)

It arrived yesterday, and I hooked it up to my Audio Technica’s, and it is just amazing. Looks great. Sounds great. Works great. Apple industrial design is just miles ahead of anybody else out there.

This is sort of a summary post related to a combination of recent technological advances, combined with older technology, that’s making my networked life a lot more convenient.

MacFUSE & MacFusion: Mounting Volumes over SSH

Our company is very distributed — we have offices in Germany, Spain and the US, with a number of employees living in yet other countries like France and Ireland. File sharing, for us, has always been a challenge.

In the past, the central file server has been located in the Germany office, and those of us outside Germany have accessed it via SFTP (using a client such as Interarchy). The office here in Spain has kept a local copy of the file server, mirrored using the Unix rsync utility, and manually updated with our files via SFTP.

The lucky people in the Germany office have always mounted the file server on their desktops with standard Mac OS X AppleShare mounting.

The introduction of MacFUSE, MacFusion in combination with open-source Xen virtual machines (VMs) have allowed us a new, more convenient means of working.

• MacFUSE. MacFUSE is a Mac OS X kernal extension that exports the file system API to the user space. In English, it’s the fundamental component that opens the door to various things like SSH accessible directories, Flickr directories, and Subversion directories to be mounted just like ordinary volumes (such as hard drives). You don’t need to know much more than that, just download MacFUSE and install it. (You do not need anything else from Google, such as sshfs.)

• MacFusion. Once you’ve installed MacFUSE, you can then install MacFusion. MacFusion is the tool that lets you mount SSH and FTP servers as volumes in the Mac OS X Finder, and work with them just as if they were local hard drives. MacFusion, when launched, creates a new menu item, where you can quickly mount SSH or FTP servers, as well as create and access SSH or FTP server bookmarks, for quick access.

• Xen. Xen is similar to virtualization technologies like VMWare and Parallels. Basically, it allows you to run any number of “virtual” server machines, on a given “real” server.

Here’s how we hook all this together:

1. On one of our internet connected dedicated servers, we run two Xen VMs: one for staff-accessible documents, and one for management-accessible documents.

2. We allow key-based SSH access to these servers. So all staff SSH public keys are located on the first server, and all management staff SSH public keys on the second.

3. Using MacFUSE and MacFusion, all staff can then mount the file server(s) “Management” and “Staff” over compressed SSH access, over ISP-level access speeds (instead of our office DSL speeds).

This is very, very nice!

My own personal off-site backup…

Yesterday Dreamhost announced the registration of their 500,000th domain, and (thanks to a tip from Arto blogged about a special offer: The first 500 people to sign-up for L1 hosting would receive:

1. 500GB of disk space.

2. 5TB of monthly data transfer

3. $50 off the first year’s cost.

I quickly signed up, and for less than $100/year, have 500 GB of offsite backup space! (Nevermind all the hosting options provided, should I ever be interested in that…)

In order to backup my local files, I chose to use the Unix rsync utility since:

1. It’s easy to specify a particular set of source locations (folders).

2. It can do it’s job over compressed SSH

3. It can limit the used bandwidth

4. It can do archiving of changed or deleted files.

I used BBEdit to create a file called “Dreamhost Backup.command” (the .command extension causes the file to be opened and executed by the Terminal application.) Here’s the contents of that document:

#!/bin/sh

right_now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")

rsync -azRv --delete --bwlimit=15 -e ssh \
--backup --backup-dir=_Archives --suffix=.$right_now \
--exclude ".DS_Store" \
'/Users/mhenders/Desktop' \
--exclude='/Users/mhenders/Desktop/Incomplete' \
'/Users/mhenders/Documents' \
--exclude='/Users/mhenders/Documents/Downloads' \
'/Users/mhenders/Library/Application Support' \
'/Users/mhenders/Library/Preferences' \
username@subdomain.dreamhost.com:Backup/mhenders/

With the following notes:

1. I’m creating a variable called “right_now” to add as a suffix to my archived files; otherwise I could only have one single copy of any given archived file.

2. I’m limiting the bandwidth to 15 kilobytes per second, so I can run this thing all day long without killing the ADSL line.

3. I’m archiving to a directory called “_Archives”

4. I’m specifying a list of source directories like “/Users/mhenders/Desktop”, while…

5. I’m also specifying for each source directory, some directories to exclude, like “/Users/mhenders/Desktop/Incomplete”

So I run this file when I startup my computer, and when I connect to the office or home network.

In order to access Dreamhost via SSH without a password, I had to:

1. Create a new SSH user at Dreamhost via their web-admin.

2. SSH into Dreamhost as this new user, and create a “.ssh” directory (with permission level 700) and within that directory a “authorized_keys” file (with permission level 600).

3. Copied the the contents of my local SSH public key “iddsa.pub”, into the “authorizedkeys” file in my account at Dreamhost.

So, that’s a neat system to keep an archived set of offsite backups!

(It should be noted that Dreamhost is a shared hosting provider, so while security is probably high, you probably wouldn’t want details to your swiss bank account stored in the clear there…)

Today’s article will likely go down in the annals of blogosphere history as one of the more profound pieces ever written, as I explain why I’m so happy with my new $5 camera case.

I am a tremendous fan of the Canon PowerShot (“IXUS” here in Europe) family of cameras. They are rugged, compact, and take pictures that to my eye rival digital SLRs (especially after a bit of unsharp masking). I’ve owned just about every other generation of this camera, and after my last one was lost, ended up purchasing the latest, IXUS 850 IS, including a fantastic new wide angle lens.

So how did my last camera get lost? Quite simply, it feel out of my cheesy old camera bag. My former bag had a flap that one day allowed my camera to slip out while I was having lunch. (The bag was attached to my Timbuktu messenger bag strap, which I’d left sitting under the table.)

I should have seen that coming, since the same loose flap also caused me to once lose an extra battery.

So today, while browsing around in FNAC, desperate to spend some money as it’s just been so dang long since I’ve bought something (other than my brand new 3 GB memory upgrade kit!!! for my MacBook, from Other World Computing), when I walked pass the digital camera bag section. That’s when it hit me, BAM!, that’s right– I need a new camera bag!

Something else strange happened, something my wife would hardly believe: For the first time in history, the bag that I decided I want, happened to be the cheapest bag on the shelf! So now I’ve got myself the digital camera bag of my dreams, for five bucks.

And that bag is… The Case Logic DesignWorks Function with Style Digital Camera Case (“Sac pour appareil-photo”, for all you French readers, and I know there are many…) The particular model, I’m guessing here, is the QPB11 (that’s the only thing printed on the packaging that remotely looks like a model number.) According the the packaging this baby sports the following features:

• Holds digital camera (man, how I’ve been waiting for that one)
• Form-fit protection (always good, for a number of products…)
• Detachable lanyard included (I’ve always wondered about the origin of “lanyard”)

But seriously, the reason I like this new bag, is that it has everything I want in a digital camera bag:

• Super compact
• Holster strap with a snap
• Zip closure (no flaps!)
• Internal pocket for extra battery and memory card
• Nice logo

I just checked, and Case Logic even have a web page available for the product:

Case Logic Compact Camera Bag

Back in 1999 or thereabouts, I had a Paperport, and loved it. It was small scanner that sat between my keyboard and monitor, about the size of a roll of aluminum foil. Anytime you wanted to get a document into the Mac, you just fed the paper into the bottom of the Paperport, and it got spit out the top. So it was a roll-type scanner, as opposed to a flatbed. Getting document scans into your computer couldn’t be easier. It was gray-scale, but that was fine, since the main things I was scanning in were receipts, bank statements, contracts and the like.

At some point, Paperport left the Mac platform, and I’ve not seen anything comparable since then. I’d love to have something that convenient again (but this time, please, a standard format — PDF, jpg or whatever.)

Today I upgraded to QuickBooks Pro 2007, in order to have an Intel binary version of the application to run on my MacBook.

I went to the site to buy it, $199 (yikes!) and noticed the “Coupon” field on the check-out screen. I stared at this field, feeling somehow left out, as I always do on these online purchasing screens, wondering “Who actually gets these coupons? I don’t think anybody has ever given me an online coupon.”

Then, remembering a tip from my brother-in-law, I hit Google: “QuickBooks Coupons”. Sure enough, I found a link to the Intuit site that gives you a 20% discount on Quickbooks. Cool!

So I purchase Quickbooks, download it, launch it, and am immediately informed that I’m running version R3, and should update to R4, a measly 84 MB download! Why in the world don’t they have the latest version of the application downloaded when you buy the product? Good grief!

Update: So the 84 MB updater just finished downloading, and you know what? –it’s not an updater at all. It’s a whole new copy of the application? I mean, c’mon Intuit, can’t you link your most current application from your purchase download page???

Arto, Alex and I were having a discussion (ok, argument) over coffee yesterday morning about the suitability of email notification for events which are available via RSS. An interesting part of the conversation came when we reviewed the history of RSS, and how it become popular. RSS was created for news syndication, and later exploded in popularity when it became identified as an a potential part of the solution to the problem of following many, many websites.

Clearly trying to follow 100 websites can become time inefficient, when only, say, 5% of them have been updated since the last time you visited. Two possible solutions are email notification (push), and something like RSS (pull). From the perspective of server-side resources, implementing an RSS was dead simple — just publish a simple feed — compared to the alternative of maintaining a subscriber list, a mailing infrastructure, bounce handling, etc. And so RSS, and feed aggregator programs (desktop tools like NetNewsWire and web apps like Bloglines) soon exploded in popularity.

However, following sites via RSS and aggregators still hasn’t seemed to permeate into the mainstream, and we suspect that’s because the mainstream still don’t have the need or desire to large volumes of websites (nor participate in tools like Basecamp, and forums, which more and more are offering RSS feeds.)

We closed the conversation without any real conclusions, except that mapping the right communication mechanism to a given purpose isn’t always an easy task, and one may have to take into account the demographic context of the application. Even among the three of us, we couldn’t really agree on what would be the preferred notification mechanism for, say, a custom-configured Amazon search — email notification, or RSS?

Moore’s Law states (roughly) that the speed of computers doubles every two years, and he’s been more or less on the money. Today I introduce a corollary to Moore’s Law, which I expect to come to be known as Matt’s Corollary:

Except for the first couple days of ownership, the perceived speed of computers, over time, remains a constant (and a slow one at that).

My shiny new MacBook has become dog slow. Some people claim it’s the fact I didn’t do a clean install. Niall probably figures it has something to do with the 25+ apps I run at the same time. But you and I now know the truth — Matt’s Corollary.