Today I had to get a lot of work done on the Powerbook, and during that time, it occurred to me that if I somehow screwed up my hard-drive I’d have no real complete backup of everything I’ve been doing lately. So I decided to whip back some of my old Unix tricks and fix that problem on my Tiger install. The good old Rsync backup is back.

If you don’t know what rsync is or what it does, here’s something that should give you the idea (from the manpage):

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network connection, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.

In plain english, it creates a backup of your files, and whenever you re-backup, it transfers only the differences between your backup-files and your changed-files so the whole process is faster. It is a solid way to create backups of any kind of file, and is the usual way mirror sites use to, well, mirror other sites.

So, using rsync is pretty easy (its actually a single line - if you like simplicity as much as I do, you’ll like this):

rsync -av –delete SOURCE DESTINATION

An example: lets say you’re backing up your home directory (like I will be doing), and that you have an external hard-drive plugged in. You’d run this command to backup your home:

rsync -av –delete ~/ /Volumes/backup/

And voilá! Your files would be backed-up into your external hard-drive. But with that done, you’re probably wondering how to get your files back if you ever need to restore your home directory to the way it was. That’s pretty easy too. All you have to do is reverse the directories in the command and remove the delete command because we don’t need it (explanation below), so to restore the example backup above, we’d run:

rsync -av –delete /Volumes/backup/ ~/

Your files would be back to the way they were, just like that. No real reason to lose any of your files now, with a live copy and a stored backup.

The –delete option: what this does is it removes from the target, the files that don’t exist in the source. Meaning, lets say you have your backup files, and on your live copy you delete some stuff you don’t really need. You probably want those files off of your backup too so when you restore they don’t come back.

So, there are two reasons why you probably won’t need it when restoring: 1) you wont have any extra files, and 2) if you DO have files on the directory you’re restoring, you probably need them, so, you maintain them by not using the –delete option

Thanks to Apple’s Developer Connection, I got a hold of one of the latest builds of Tiger before it finally hits the streets next week (this acording to the latest updates) and finally got to install it yesterday. These are a few first thoughts on the new operating system out of Cupertino.

Spotlight: This was probably the feature I was the most curious about because of my interest on how to deal with file metadata, and how to use that data to effectively increase productivity. If you still haven’t heard of it, what spotlight does is monitor file save procedures, reading file metadata, and recording that metadata into a database. This catalogue of data is then searched whenever you click the spotlight icon and type a few keywords. It will automatically filter results on type, date, author and a few other tags.

Basically, it works. After the initial index (which took a while considering it had to go through over 140gb of my earlier work, email and junk), metadata was stored into the database and a few queries were enough to attest that indeed spotlight may be one of the best additions to an OS in the last couple of years. It works generally fast (I’m still not sure how many lines of debugging are still on this build to consider this a final statement), and results are good. The way you can sort everything is apple-like. It just works.

I will write post later specifically about spotlight and its underlying technologies.

Dashboard: Widgets that “do stuff”, Jobs said. Dashboard provides users with a few little applications that provide simple services to the user. You click an icon, or activate it the way you’d activate Exposé, and your widgets show. The standard package includes widgets like a calculator, an english dictionary, a weather monitor, flight tracker, stock monitor, a game and a few other things. Interesting, yes, but the real power of dashboard is what new developers will come up with, and I see a *lot* of potential there.

Service providing is the future of the web (I remember hearing a member of the IBM research labs talking about this on the Web 2.0 conference), and this kind of tiny life-helping utilities may become one major investment for developers. You can go from creating widgets that control stuff on webpages, to widgets that show you statistics on just about anything. Imagination is the key here, I’ll probably find myself exploring development for dashboard and writing about it in a near future.

Automator: Task automation. Basically automator allows a user to create workflows that go from filtering your email into folders on your desktop, to controlling your car and walking your dog (okay, maybe not these two, but trust me you can do a lot of stuff). This seems like apple trying to revive their idea of application services into a nicer package where you can actually interlink them into something automated and useful that users can run periodically to simplify their lives and work. Clever. Read more on automator on apple’s website to see what this is all about.

This is a promising update to an already great operating system. Apple finetuned a few details, added a couple of helping utilities, developed technologies to empower its users, and may just have hit the nail in the head with spotlight. I also like the minor update to the way aqua looks, but WHY is there still metal in here? That’s something apple should have changed a long time ago. We don’t need metal when aqua looks this good.

With the release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 2, Adobe Activation became an issue for most users of Adobe’s software, because it only allows for one installation of their software. This meaning that legitimate users, who did buy the copy, wouldn’t be able to install it on, say, their desktop and laptop, so they can work whenever they’re far from home (which should abide to their terms - they don’t allow simultaneous use of 2 copies with 1 license, and that’s pretty much OK).

One other problem would be when a user changes hardware on their machine, or when they suddenly have to re-install their operating systems (consider users of windows, who from time to time have to burn it all down, or OSX users who’ll be upgrading to Tiger next week) - activation will not allow them to re-install their software without a few calls over to Adobe explaining the situation. This is, I need not say it, ridiculous.

One other thing that needs to be pointed out is that Adobe may increase sales because piracy will be brought down with Adobe Activation, but how does that benefit their own customers? If sales go up, and revenue goes up, where’s the price drop? Where does the money go? They’re making more money, but what are they doing with it? They’re not lowering prices on their software, so, someone’s filling up their pockets and getting some new cars.

Companies should probably take this sort of issue into consideration. And if it is about the users after all, shouldn’t they be doing what the users need them to?

Some people may know about my mild obcession with usability and interaction-design (which goes with my plan of joining Interaction-Ivrea in a near future). So it is only logical that I begin writing about it here at Broqn Labs. So to start things up, I have to link to interaction-design.org, a new peer-reviewed portal/encyclopedia on IA, Usability and User Experience. You’ll probably want to have a look at it if you’re into this sort of stuff.

They’re obviously, as an open encyclopedia project, open to the participation from the general community of people into interaction and user experience, so you may want to consider contributing to the cause. I know I will.