Category: General

Dropboxing my way out of a crisis

Dropbox

So in my previous posting “Poking a hornets nest” I had to deal with a dead XP box at a clients. Fortunately for me I had moved the company files over to dropbox a couple of weeks prior. So when this computer went down I knew not only did I have copies of their files independently on two other computers I had a copy too.

After a comprehensive check of the other PC in the office I established that the virus had not spread, I have to say I did have some concerns that dropbox might make such a spread easier, but fortunately for the moment virus writers haven’t seemed to cottoned on to this method of transferring viruses! Phew. But I think that this is something they had perhaps better consider as a potential risk in the future.

One of the reasons I spent so much time in attempting to restore this PC rather than wiping and starting again was the accounts files for the company were stored on it and we had been using a service provided to the company for the last couple of years by Barclays Bank called iSure, though Barclays had sold them an unlimited account, it’s primary purpose was to backup the accounts files.

Not only was there limited documentation in their business subscription pack telling you what to do when a disaster, like the one we were experiencing, happened, an hour or two worth of phone calls to their support line (where I had to give limited security information (it would be very easy to fake)) I managed to log onto their site and find the files we needed.

Unfortunately although the computer was left on 24/7 so that backups could run twice daily and it had gone down on a Friday morning, the most recent copy of the accounts they had was from the three days earlier. So to save having the work done that week have to be repeated, as well as the lost days, I had to recover the data from the hard drive that had been affected.

If we had been relying on this to backup the company’s main set of files, some 30,000 files or so they would all have had to have been checked for validity. And though files might not be changed on a daily basis we would have needed to check just to be sure. Though I had to rescue the account files, with the others once my re-install was complete I just added the new computer and hey presto the files downloaded. Genius.

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ClicktoFlash

We all love browser plugins, it’s one of the reasons that Firefox is so darn popular. But if you prefer the cleaner interface of Safari 4 (as I do) you needn’t miss out from some of these essential improvements to your browsing experience, the most important of which (in MHO) is Click to Flash, your own flash blocker.

Click to Flash is the wunderbar creation of Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch of Chicago it’s basic job is to prevent flash from loading until you want it to. Replacing flash files with this nifty clean-looking replacement image:

Click to Flash Replacement Image
Click to Flash Replacement Image

Which you just click when you want to view the flash file in question. So no more annoying ads, preloading videos, Flash basically, which as I am sure you all appreciate is now a bigger preverbal pain in the butt since it was relegated to a sandboxed status is Snow Tabby.

So download, install and get back to browsing the internet quickly and efficiently, only seeing flash where you want to. Importantly it’s designed to allow sIFR images to load automatically, replace youtube videos with their H.264 equivalent played in quicktime where possible and allows whitelisting of sites where you always want flash to load.

I’m really enjoying this plugin, I hope you will too.

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Poking a hornets nest

So I’ve been absent for over a week now from posting, with good reason. One of my clients who still uses Windows caught a nasty virus. Oh how I love viruses. Trojans in particular. Naturally as I was managing the system I ensured that they had adequate virus protection in place, we were running the free version of AVG (cost conscious client), as well as the Spyware Doctor Starter Edition provided by Google Pack for XP.

Our virus protection was good enough to detect the virus, but unfortunately not good enough to just heal it. So after disconnecting the machine from the network I switched over to my MBP to google my way out of the situation. I found out that I was dealing with a generic version of a normal everyday trojan, the type that patches and replaces your windows system files. And generally does lots of nasty stuff.

At first it looked like AVG had the solution and had a specific remover for the file. So off I went, read the instructions, downloaded the file and ran the remover. I rebooted the system. And voila a non-functioning machine. Great. I had to drive over to my house and grab some more specialist software to deal with the problem. After a quick search on trusty google. I figured out that it was probably most likely that I was dealing with a corrupted registry.

Anyway after a couple of hours of running diagnosis software and playing with the Windows terminal via booting by CD. I stumbled upon a great mess, apparently the person before me had left a previous hard-drive installed in the machine with XP installed on, and inadvertently because the primary hard drive was connected via SATA rather than PATA my XP boot disk was ignoring the SATA drive and booting straight into the PATA drive.

So after most of an afternoon wasted. I went back to google to figure out how I might be able to resolve this. The answer came in creating a new boot disk. So I downloaded nLite and set about creating my own custom boot disk. Then to add a little more power to the mix. I installed Ultimate Boot CD and created my own special mix of Windows busting fun.

Unfortunately this sort of work is boring, time consuming and irritating. And it wasn’t until my seventh pass with UBCD’s anti-virus software I was finally sure that I had rid myself of the virus. I spent my time checking the other computer wasn’t infected (fortunately not) and looking for their startup and installation disks, in case I had to do a wipe and re-install. But joy of joy no disks.

I had started on a Friday morning, worked through Saturday and was now looking at having a delightful Monday. I was a bundle of laughs that weekend I can tell you. Though I did have time to conduct a complete re-organisation of the company’s shared files. Fortunately I had moved them off this computer to the wonderful dropbox a couple of weeks earlier. As I waited I gave them structure. No more dumping files in a single folder!

So come Monday. I was left with no choice but to wipe. The tech support on this was going to be too expensive. So I booted up with UBCD and wiped away. Wiped both drives to be sure. I then installed XP on the PATA and allocated the SATA as a backup drive. A much more sensible solution. But with no software CDs I was left with an interesting experiment, what should I buy to replace the software that was lost?

I’ll return to that in a later post, as well as assessing how well the backup routines we had in place to ensure no data was lost performed. Suffice to say I think that this is salutary lesson in why PCs are more expensive than Macs. It’s the IT support silly. At £25 an hour, three days of tech support to restore that PC had been expensive. It might have been cheap to buy but it ended up much a much more expensive purchase than a virus free Mac would have been.

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The 64 bit Question

So I upgraded to Snow Tabby almost a month ago now, and despite constant checking of appfresh there are still a few programs that have not got on the 64 bit train yet… despite me crossing my fingers! So here is a delightful image of my Activity Monitor (unfortunately it doesn’t include all the 32 bit programs)

Activity Monitor

The most annoying of these has got to be the flash plugin, which frequently crashes and often wreaks havoc across my system. Adobe has had a year to correct this problem. Why hasn’t it been done already? What its really shown me is how many pages have flash installed, most seem unnecessary and could be easily replaced with HTML5 features (#dieie6 or if you must keep it add Chrome Frame! cheers google) For me the long death march for Flash has begun.

There are some programs that I expected to be converted to 64bit much more quickly amongst these are:

Google Quick Search

A great program, a worthy successor (or at least quickly becoming one) to Quicksilver, still very much beta – so why no 64bit love?

Evernote

Another essential program, no clear mention about 64bit yet – their most recent blog post on the topic doesn’t go into details. :-(

Mozy

I use this program on all my computers to give me a secondary backup for libraries and essential files like contacts, calendars and the like. It’s particularly useful for my MBP and my Mac Mini, which I don’t care to try and backup using Time Machine over the network. But it’s had real problems since I’ve updated and it’s rather driving me nuts, so maybe I might start to look for a solution if it doesn’t get fixed soon, which is a shame really. :-(

Update – After posting I thought I’d give it another go. But it seems to be stuck at the magic 60.5% complete. Crazy. Bye bye Mozy, it was good whilst it lasted.

Update 2 – So it’s been updated to version 1.5, still no 64 bit loveliness but maybe it’s going to be stable?

Coda

This is the most user-friendly web html coding program I’ve used, now I’m also partial (after some pressing from my web-designer bro) to Textmate, but I still regularly use this program for its great inbuilt previewing features and its easy-to-use ftp management. I can’t really live without it, but I’d really like it to have some 64 bit love soon!

iTerm

I like all my apps to be tabbed and a tabbed terminal was just a must. It’s updated frequently but no 64 bit love yet…

Skype

It’s just been upgraded for more Snow Tabby compatibility, but still no 64 bit version! Maybe the new owners will give it a more radical update in the near future (I’m hoping for proper integration with Apple’s Address Book)

Adium

Multi-IM compatible goodness, allowing me to log in to all my various chat accounts everywhere. I’m looking forward to it’s upgrade to 64 bit (and again Address Book love soon please – I’ve had some success with a program called AdiumBook but I hope for more)

and some that have been upgraded, but might have problems!

VLC

The 64bit version is working great for me, but apparently not so great if you use handbreak.

I’ll keep you updated as my conversion to 64 bit loveliness… later

UPDATE –

Growl

My favourite notification system has just been updated to include 64 bit loveliness. Yey!

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Dropbox for Cooking

Dropbox

Stumbled across this great use of dropbox’s new iPhone App courtesy of Kevin Purdy at lifehacker earlier today: as a kitchen aid to help you follow your recipes whilst preparing that culinary masterpiece.

It sounds like a great idea (I’m sure my friend @tsmarsh will love it). Great combo; after all your iPhone is eminantly suited to the kitchen: it’s touchscreen might have a little trouble with flour covered hands, but it is wipeable and it’s more flexible than using a dedicated app.

Read the full article here.

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Facebook Sync

Facebook Logo

As I’m in the middle of cleaning up my address book, I thought I’d also re-sync with Facebook (yes it’s possible!).

A new version of AddressBookSync is now available courtesy of Dan Auclair. The short and sweet of it is that it lets you link your friends from Facebook with contacts in your Apple Address Book, which I have to say is pretty neat.

It even lets you match Facebook friends with contacts in your Address Book when the names differ, which is great improvement from the earlier version I was using. All in all it lets you sync: Profile Pictures, Birthdays and Profile URLs. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t let you sync email or telephone records. :-(

Enjoy!

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Contact Sync

Spanning Sync v3.0

Though I’m trying out Google’s sync capabilities in my latest installation its not my sync tool of choice as I’ve been syncing comprehensively since I got my iPhone. I had to find a suitable solution for managing all my contacts (986 and counting) so approximately a year ago I stumbled upon Spanning Sync, which has been taking care of my contacts and calendars ever since.

As Google’s contact API has developed, slowly I must say (why can’t most companies understand this is perhaps one of the simplest problems for them to solve that would rid their consumers of daily irritation?) it has improved and improved, but I have to say it still has some way to go. Anyway despite this being  a critical product my impatience got the better of me earlier this year and I decided to try out the beta of version 3.

Now this should have been fine, but I was one of an unfortunate number of users that ran into a duplication bug that I just haven’t been able to shrug completely from my MBP, iMac, Mac Mini and thereby my iPhone. Now I don’t think I lost too many numbers and time machine on my iMac managed me to rescue those that I had, but it has left my contacts addresses pretty messed up.

See what I mean! 3 Addresses
See what I mean! 3 Duplicate Addresses! Argh!!!

I finally bit the bullet late this evening, after finding my mother’s address duplicated twelve times and bought a relatively new product released by the spanning sync team – their contact and calendar cleaning software. And I have to say it runs like a dream. Now I reckon it will take a good deal of passes to properly weed out these problems across all my machines, but finally I won’t be editing them manually again. Phew.

The interface for Spanning Sync Contact Cleaner is simple and straightforward:

Contact Cleaner Interface

It usefully highlights some of the problems that the google contact API has and presumably most similar contact sync systems. How can BSc be a bad suffix? How about Sir or Lady being bad prefixes? Come on. Real world here. We might not all know a Lord or Lady, but I find it particularly useful to at least be able to add a persons qualification to the end of their name, especially when I’m dealing with a professional.

It is however eminently handy to be able remove blank spaces from the end of words, to change people to companies and vice-versa when it detects an error, as well as removing duplicates properly (why Apple couldn’t have built a better system into address book for this I’m not sure). Anyway once you start to bulk up with contacts all of these problems become tiny irritants for sufferer of OCD like myself and a mostly automated system is very helpful.

At the end of all of this it might occur to any Mac Fanboys out there to ask, why not just use MobileMe? Well. I don’t like to be forced to only use Apple stuff and I’ve tended to find their software, which whilst better than Windows in almost every conceivable way, not that polished in comparison to tools specifically designed for the purpose. Plus $99 a year. Really? After I just spent £2k on a laptop, leased for 2 years, and you want me to pay extra. No thanks!

Oh I nearly forgot to say that there is a $5 discount if you’re already a subscriber to Spanning Sync proper! Excellent. All in all $14.99 isn’t a great price to pay to save a couple of OCD hours tonight spring cleaning and I’m sure it’ll save many more hours in the future…

PS – My results –

95 Duplicated Addresses Removed

10 Duplicated Phone Numbers Removed

23 Duplicated Contacts Merged

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Dropbox Gallore

Dropbox

I can’t help but love dropbox.

A couple of years ago whilst working for a property developer based in London, with offices in Brighton and Manchester I was instructed to bring a unified file system in place for the three separate offices, at minimal cost. This proved to be a difficult task. In the end I ordered three external hard drives and on a Friday after close of business I copied all of the core data from the London office onto the one of those drives.

First thing Saturday morning I got on a train and headed to the Brighton office  where I copied and merged the data from the two drives and spent an inordinate amount of time organising the files into the new filing system we were going to be simultaneously deploying. I then installed a great little piece of software I had found based on rysnc and configured it’s syncing capability over an ssh connection to the London office.

I plugged in the hard-drive, ordered a courier and sent off the hard-drive destined for the Manchester office and headed back to the train station and to the London office. I configured the London office and plugged in their hard drive. I then set the system up and configured the first sync between the two systems and left for the day as it required a great deal of time to go through the first sync.

Come Monday morning I was on the phone to the Manchester office, which had to refrain from using files for the day and began their sync. All in all the process took the better part of three days and required me to travel between two offices. As well as plenty of overtime, which I suppose was good for me, but was a great deal of unnecessary hassle.

The system itself was also very resource intensive, requiring the three computers that managed the service to be left on at night and spend sometimes hours at a time syncing the files. It also always lagged 24 hours behind the data system that monitored the creation of files. It was however a significant improvement over the duplication between the offices and cut down on the faxing and emailing of files back and forth.

At the time I dreamed of a solution like dropbox. It would have handled the synchronisation of three separate file locations without blinking and in real time, not with a 24 hour delay. The idea of having a copy in the cloud is also ideal, not only are backups taken care of, as well as permanent records of what has been deleted (after all who hasn’t deleted a file on a computer and then realised they needed it? try managing that replicated by a dozen or even half a dozen)

I’ve also found it incredibly useful adding in new computers, they’re up and running in minutes and download in the background. I eagerly await the ability to sync over wifi and then I can really start to centralise downloads of large software updates etc between computers. Or add it remotely from home and have it become available at multiple peoples computers for installation at the end of the day. Dreamy.

That’s all without touching on wonders such as 1password synchronisation, which has made flipping between my MBP and iMac at home as easy as pie. I am constantly stumbling across other innovative uses on a regular basis. I know for some the level of such data replication seems crazy, but hey space is cheap.

Trusting the cloud with confidential data also seems worrisome but as I tell my small clients if someone actively wanted to steal your data they so easily could. WAP cracks in what less than 60 seconds, WEP too now and most of them have offices where it wouldn’t be impossibly hard for someone to wander in and stick in a usb stick and steal their data. As a small business owner its simply not possible to protect against everything.

Dropbox is developing fast and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring for it. It is sure to make my life and the lives of my clients more easy.

Share the dropbox love and if you haven’t already signed up for an account do so now: www.getdropbox.com

PS For more info about what you can do with dropbox checkout this lifehacker article.

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Quicklook Magic

Looking through a large set of files has become increasingly easy since Apple released Leopard, and although this feature does not get a great deal of promotional praise from the Apple community it is in my opinion one of the unsung heroes features of the OS.

With the update to Snow Leopard you can now use quicklook just about everywhere, from the finder and spotlight as you might expect, but also from places as diverse as your printer list (to check which document might be causing your printer to play-up or move a file up the queue) to your open dialog box (say to check you are attaching the right file to an email. And I am sure many more places I’m yet to discover.

Apple has enabled Quicklook to work with essential files such as word documents, excel spreadsheets and of course pdfs, as well as just about any image you’d ever be likely to encounter in a normal business environment. It is however possible to extend the usefulness of this system by installing plugins to enable you to look at many other types of files that Apple has not added native support for.

Quicklook plugins are indicated by the file ending: .qlgenerator. To install them you copy them to your /Library/QuickLook/ or ~/Library/QuickLook/ folder.

Install your Quicklook Plugins here
Install your Quicklook Plugins here

The folder should already exist, but if it doesn’t feel free to create it. Out of preference I normally install these files into my root library rather than the user library as they are then available to any user of the computer. I have encountered no additional increase in load on the system of running these plugins.

Once installed you have to run the following command in terminal if you want them to be loaded straight away without needing to logout. This is as easy as cutting and pasting this command into the terminal app (hiding away in utilities):

qlmanage -r

which forces the OS to look in these folders and thereby load the new plugins you have added.

I also take a very broad sweep when installing this type of plugin as it is not possible to encounter every file type that a business or yourself will encounter and I have therefore installed pretty much every plugin that I have been able to lay my hands on, occasionally checking back at great sites like www.quicklookplugins.com or www.qlplugins.com when I need to find another plugin.

I currently have installed on my system the following plugins:

Adium Chat Log

– yes easy peaking in my favourite IM’s chat logs

Photoshop Brush Viewer

– does what it says on the tin, kindly developed by Laura Dickey.

Source Code Highlight

– view source code files with syntax highlighting courtesy of Samuel Toulouse.

EPS Files

– look at EPS files courtesy of Eternal Storm Software it’s donationware so if you use it lots donate!

Folder Contents

– if you still us 10.5, seems to have stopped working in 10.6, :-(

GIS Data

– view vector data and raster grids, helpful to those in the property development game courtesy of Bernhard Jenny.

Text and Picture Clippings

– have a look at annoying clippings files!

Adobe Illustrator

– this one is a bit more complicated but it is definitely worth the effort for detailed instructions see: here. Thanks Hrmpf!

Web Page Archives from IE

– helpful for legacy files and archives that your client might have and not realise that they later need.

CHM Archives

– again that legacy file support that can be so useful at times, thanks go to Qian Qian.

Applescript Viewer

– take a peek at any applescripts you might have, thanks go to Kainjow.

Suspicious Package

– for the cautious amongst you who want to checkout what that installer package contains, thanks to Mothers Ruin Software.

Textmate

– essential for all you textmate fans, thanks go to Ciarán Walsh.

Zips etc.

– Look inside those zip files without having to unzip them.

And that’s the end of my list, but I’d love to hear any recommendations anyone might have. Many thanks to all the cool developers who have spent time creating these incredibly useful plugins.

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Essential Communication Tools

When setting up a new system as well as setting up a standard email program such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird I also setup a couple of other essential communication tools, mostly to help me keep in touch with the user, in this case Glyn, but also to maximise the number of methods by which that user can communicate with the world.

Which Email program?

To be honest since 10.3 I’ve used Apple’s Mail as my principal email client, prior to this I used Eudora and I have, to be honest, occasionally dabbled with other programs such as Microsoft Entourage; but the email client I generally recommend to switchers is Thunderbird.

The reason for this is because when I am brought into consult at a small firm I generally find them running un-patched versions of Outlook Express, which is in my experience is the easiest and quickest root to viral infection in the Windows world, in these situations I replace it with Thunderbird, which being free adds no additional cost burden. So when we come to switching it seems best to go with Thunderbird to minimise the amount of adjustment the user requires.

However, as Apple has improved Mail, or more importantly improved it’s integration with the Address Book and iCal adding great usability functions like data detectors, (essential time savers once a user becomes more savvy) it has become an increasingly attractive client. Thunderbird 2 still uses its own address book rather than the system wide one offered by Apple, and although version 3 now offers integration it feels like it has been in beta forever.

The ability to sync Apple’s integrated address book with google mail accounts (including google apps accounts) in Snow Leopard has proved to be a great additional benefit for small businesses, especially as you can hack this to provide a locally available address book to all users in a company by using a single master default email such as info@foo.com to sync addresses to, which is great for small businesses. (if you’re running 10.5 this tutorial will show you how to hack this feature to make it available for you).

Google Sync from Apple Address Book
Just tick the box to activate Google Sync

So after a quick discussion with Glyn as to these pros and cons we decided to setup his email with the Apple Mail program, which ran smoothly, although I think it is a shame that you can’t select the type of mail service you are connecting to when you enter the initial details as this would cut down the setup time significantly whilst you wait for it to determine if there is a mail server present at the address you have given. It would also be great if you could tell Mail that it was a google apps account so it would pre-fill the imap and smtp details for you (come on Apple should be easy enough to do!).

Other tools communication tools…

It is really important for a small business to be reachable by as many methods as possible, as we have moved into an era of increased connectivity it is important that they adapt to this so that they can reach the broadest possible audience.

The first tool I always start with is Skype. Although I tend to use this less and less since the advent of Google Talk, I still find that many of my clients use the program on a daily basis. As Slingsby Interiors didn’t already have a skype account, Glyn and I downloaded the latest client and within minutes had managed to bag slingsbyinteriors as a name, surprisingly easy to do for most small businesses.

Then we moved on to setting up Google Talk, for which I always use a great little open source program called Adium, which is compatible with just about every protocol you can imagine from: AIM, MSN, Jabber to Yahoo to name just a few, meaning you only have to install the one program. As well as integrating with the built-in Address Book it offers tabbed browsing of conversations and all important growl notifications.

After a quick series guide around each of these programs, Glyn is up and running and ready to communicate with the world and more importantly after I installed skype on the PC in the 1st floor office he no longer has to run upstairs or use the intercom when he wants to ask Kay in accounts a quick question!

—

UPDATE –

Apparently you can bypass the automatic mail setup by holding down the option key after you’ve entered your email address and password, changing the button to continue and allowing you to continue as you normally would. For more see macosxhints.com

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