A Slight Snag

Here I go with more about backups again! I recently posted about using JungleDisk to backup my documents to Amazon's S3 storage. When I posted that I had still been running the original big old backup to the cloud, plus an annoying update where I moved around a few gigabytes of stuff and so my system hadn't been sleeping for a week or so. I assumed that was because it was grinding away at the backup. Since then I've discovered that TinyGod won't sleep automatically when JungleDisk is running. I can put it to sleep manually (with the sleep option on the System menu) but that's not what I want. I have a support ticket open with the JungleDisk people, we'll see what happens. In all fairness the current version of the JungleDisk software is listed as beta, so maybe this problem will go away soon. In the meantime, after I reboot TinyGod I run this command to unload JungleDisk:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jungledisk.service.plist

 Obviously the usual caveats apply. If you don't know what that means, probably don't run it. If you're not comfortable mucking around at the command line, don't run this. It may not fix the problem. Etc. If you followed my Twitter feed on Friday you know it was a little more complex than this. There are two other issues that complicated my diagnosis. First off is that running this shutdown doesn't seem to always fix the sleep issue. I think the problem is that if I run the JungleDisk Monitor application then sleep is just screwed up until I reboot, even if I later unload the daemon. The second thing is that I had installed an application called FuzzyClock while the big backup was running. FuzzyClock also prevents sleep. I was somewhat amused by getting the "fuzzy times" in my menu bar, but not enough to put up with this side effect so FuzzyClock got the boot. I probably would have normally noticed the sleep-blocking the first day I ran the application, but it snuck under the radar while the big backup ran. At any rate, if you care about having a system sleep automatically when idle I'd recommend staying away from FuzzyClock and JungleDisk at the moment. Personally I'm willing to manually shut-down JungleDisk like this and make it a process I run every week or so as opposed to having no offsite backup, but your mileage could certainly vary.
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Just in case you thought the TV studios/networks were accidentally "getting it"

I haven't written about it but I've been running Boxee on my Mac Mini for a while now. It's pretty sweet. To give one real world example, during the month of December Heroes seemed to consistently run long or late and the TiVo didn't know it so we had like three episodes cut off the last minute or two. No problem, I'd fire up Boxee and we'd stream the show off Hulu. We'd have to watch an ad or two and it wasn't HD, but we'd get the important final line of dialog and be on about our business. Note the most important thing there: we'd end up watching an ad or two. Well, Boxee has been asked to pull the Hulu support. Hulu says they are asking this because the content providers made them. Which is ridiculous. Let's get this straight. Watching the show, plus unskippable ads in a web browser is OK, but watching the exact same content in a program designed to work with a remote control isn't? Why is that again? They do realize that I can get the same show, minus the ads, via Bittorrent right? And feed that into Boxee (or Front Row or whatever)? Whatever these content folks smoke, I gotta get me some of that .... (Word on the street is that putting "rss://thejakemarsh.com/boxee/" in a feed for Boxee patch it up, but the feed is getting hammered right now.) A big tip 'o the hat to Veronica Belmont for reporting both the problem and the possible fix.
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Offsite Backups, the Final Piece of the Puzzle

Back in 2007 I did a whole set of posts about backups, laying out my "clone your drives" strategy and listing what software I used to make the backups, and going through several different choices for Windows. About a year and a half later that's still what I do for the most part - every machine has an external drive and I weekly clone the entire boot drive to the external backup. I've added Time Machine more for the "oh shit, I'd like to get yesterday's version of a particular file" coverage, and since a lot of things are heavily sync'ed between my laptop and my desktop that means I really have something like six copies of my main files. Windows has been mainly ghetto-ized into a virtual machine so it's a single file that gets cloned and backed up that way and to hell with trying to run a Windows backup. (I still have Boot Camp and the Bart PE/DriveImage XML solution for that install, but I don't think I've used Boot Camp in 2009 yet. Which means the first day I want it I'll have to let Microsoft play patch-and-reboot for quite a while. Be nice if they could get their shit together about updates.) There was one remaining glaring hole in the entire system: if a tragedy destroys all of the hard drives in my office and living room then all six copies of whatever can be destroyed at once. D'oh! I finally got around to solving that last week, and my suggestion is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a cross-platform piece of software that backs up data to Amazon S3 storage. When I installed the OS X version it walked me through adding S3 to my existing Amazon account and then configuring the backup process. Jungle Disk can run backups automatically, throttle bandwidth usage, provide encryption, will archive multiple versions of files, and costs $20 for a license on as many computers as you want. It took around a week being throttled during the day to get my Documents folder and my Aperture photo library up to the cloud - that's roughly 26 Gigabytes of data. Now that it's all up there it looks like it will be able to fairly easily handle updates and changes as we go. I just finished installing it on Horton to backup my Subversion archive, MySQL databases, and all of the web pages. S3 charges $0.15 per Gb of storage per month and $0.10 Gb of transfer in (plus some other twiddly charges for overhead requests). My projected bill for S3 as of March 1st is $4.98. So for $25 ($20 for JungleDisk and $5 for Amazon S3) I've backed up every document and photo I have to the cloud. If every hard drive I own is destroyed at the same time, once the insurance claim clears and I buy a new Mac I can pull down everything I care about. Sure it would take a while, but none of it's GONE. That's worth $5/month no doubt. If you care about your data, the Amazon S3/Jungle Disk combo seems pretty solid to me. I'm aware of some free services that do this, but there's no business model there that makes sense to me, and if you're using a backup service you don't really trust then what's the point? I don't think Amazon is going anywhere and since they are charging money (even if it is a piddly amount of money) then if I have a problem I can be aggressive about complaining and yelling. Anyway, so far I'm pretty happy with how it all works and I can sleep easy knowing that even if a meteor crushes my house and demagnetizes the rubble I'm still able to restore my critical data.
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WiFi 2009

Last week I had my laptop in the living room and it was getting miserable wireless performance. This was outrageous and unacceptable because my laptop has a 802.11n card and the Time Capsule that plugs right into the DSL modem has 802.11n as well and it was less than ten feet away, in the same room. This made me decide to make the plunge and set up tiered WiFi in my house. I had the Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and the Airport Express all participating in a single 802.11b/g/n network which meant I had great coverage throughout the house and yard, but performance was pretty sub-par. The first thing to do was to make the Time Capsule run a separate 802.11n only network. This has a much lower range - it only reaches about half of my office, but that's OK, because if my laptop is in my office I usually plug it into the LAN with a cable. This was pretty easy, configuring Airport stuff has gotten a lot easier since the last time I tried it. The next trick was to make take the Aiport Extreme (which was in my office for coverage) and make it the main base station of a new 802.11g only network. I also moved it to Karin's office for a more central location. I suppose in practice I could put it in the living room, but since it can reach the Airport Express in the kitchen as extender putting those on either side of the center of the house is good. Once I got the Extreme running 802.11g then I connected the Airport Express up to that and we're off to the races. The Wii is happy to talk to the 802.11g network, and it's the most primitive home device I had. The iPhones all all of the laptops talk to g without a hassle. Lorax (my Macbook Pro) can connect to N through a large chunk of the house and will gracefully degrade onto the G network at the extreme edges. There are two devices that won't talk to the G network: the PSP and the DS. I'm not sure what the PSP's issue is, a lot of people online claim it will connect to a G network and it does try, but it fails. It used to talk to the exact same hardware when it was running b/g mode, so it almost has to be a G issue. The DS won't even TRY to connect to the G network. The solution for that is pretty simple: plug Lorax into the wired LAN, and run internet sharing on it. Set up a basic poor-man's b/g network and you're off to the races with the PSP. The DS is odd, it complains about not being able to find DHCP. The solution is to give it a manual IP address, which is a minor pain to configure but it works. For the record, Lorax sets up a subnet on 10.0.2.x and becomes 10.0.2.1. I gave the DS 10.0.2.3 for an address (since I had just been messing with the PSP and figured it might have taken 10.0.2.2), 10.0.2.1 for the gateway, and then gave it my ISP DNS servers and it works. A hat tip to Tony who told me how he had configured his DS to work with Mac internet sharing. Speaking anecdotally, the performance of the g-only network seems better than the b/g one. Since the only reasons I was keeping the b network alive were the portable gaming systems and I can't tell you the last time I actually USEED either system online this seems like a win. Plus I have the fancypants n-only network with the "wide channels" for super-plus-fast WiFi for the newer hardware in the house. Of course this means if you've set up your computer or phone to use my WiFi you'll have to redo that on your next visit. :-) Keeping everyone on their toes!
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Video Game Cooperative State of the Union 2009

There's been a flurry of recent activity in the cooperative online gaming front and I thought I'd sum up, in part because a lot of it has been appallingly bad. 1) Call of Duty:World at War - Boy was THIS a disappointment. I enjoyed the early Call of Duty titles but as my gaming focus tightened enough to lose single player FPS titles I only played CoD3 briefly and I didn't play Modern Warfare at all. But the new one is supposed to be really good *and* have a cooperative campaign for four players. Woohoo! Turns out the the "really good" part isn't the "cooperative campaign" part though. We started playing on the hardest difficulty level, because we played Halo 3 on Legendary difficulty. That was a mistake. We cranked the difficulty down one notch and breezed through two levels without much of a scratch. Then we hit the Level of Designer Bullshit™. The level opens with you riding on the outside of a tank that gets shelled and you have to jump off and then run for cover, all while your screen and audio are all screwed up to simulate shell shock. Look that's bullshit already, but whatever. In the four player mode 2 players are on the far side of the tank line. So while you're trying to run through the tanks you can't see they reverse course and run you over. Instant death, let's start the level over. WTF? It goes on like that. The enemies can respawn right behind players, and frequently you checkpoint with somebody spawning in behind a player (close enough to hit them with a rifle butt without even moving). And the AI has an unlimited amount of grenades, which are basically insta-kills. The whole game bogs down into trying to stay far enough apart so a single grenade can't kill everyone. Don't buy this for co-op, you'll be sorry. 2) The Resident Evil 5 demo. Long term readers will remember that I took a minority opinion on Resident Evil 4, feeling that the controls were awkward and annoying. Well, the controls in RE5 are utter garbage. In order to switch your gun you have to press on the dpad, pop up inventory, navigate to to the new gun, hit a button which pops up a menu, then select "Equip" from the menu, then play an animation of swapping the guns. Except the game doesn't pause for ANY of that so you probably get your face clawed off partway through. You have to switch your gun because you ran out of ammo for your primary gun well before you killed all of the first wave of guys. Oh, and guys spawn behind you as well. Bullshit. Also you can't move while firing. At all. Oh and within the first five minutes of play some boss dude shows up who can insta-kill players with a single axe stroke. At the least the demo saved us all $60 on actually buying the game. 3) Left 4 Dead. If you were quick, there was a L4D demo on Xbox Live. For some reason it was time-limited, so you can PLAY it if you have it, but you can't get a friend to download it. WTF? I actually like Left 4 Dead, but it's co-op mode isn't going to have enough content to justify a $60 purchase. Hopefully the price on this comes down in a few months. But if RE5 left a bad taste in your mouth, I'd recommend L4D as a palette cleanser, even if I hate the stupid marketing-driven "Kids like texting" title. 4) Resistance 2. Wa-hey! I actually know three people who play video games and have a PS3 now! We can check out R2! We did on Thursday, and so far I'm glad I only rented it. PS3 online is abysmal. First off, everyone has to buy and configure a headset. If anybody buys a cheap headset then the sound is shitty and echoe-y and everyone suffers. (BTW, the PS3 Bluetooth headset seems the best thing we've tried so far although it's a bit spendy. The PS2 SOCOM USB headset works, but it lacks a mute button or any volume controls.) Once everyone gets their headset set up, and the game installed to their hard drive, and the latest PS3 system patch installed, and the Resistance patch downloaded you can get everyone in a Resistance "party" which allows voice chat. This seriously took us an hour Thursday night and only 3 of the 4 of us were done at that point, one was still patching the PS3 OS. Then somebody can make the co-op game. Remember *every time* you do this that the PS3 will set the "private game" option to off. (gnashes teeth). Then apparently everyone in the party just sort of magically go to the lobby to pick their character class and loadout. If anybody hits the Circle button at this point they are kicked out of the lobby and get stuck. They can still talk at the voice chat, but they can't hear anybody. So they just say "Can you hear me?", fiddle with their microphone, and then say "Can you hear me now?" until somebody calls them on the phone and says "please stop that." Turns out everyone has to abandon the lobby and make a brand new lobby to recover the errant person. Who if they are drunk and are named Alan immediately hit the circle button and drop out again. (sigh) The game seems ... OK if you actually get a co-op game going. The first level seems to start in several different random locations, one of which seems completely stacked against the players. Basically if all players are dead at the same time then the mission fails. We did a little better in the last session we played, but I think that was mainly because I forgot to set the private flag for the Nth time and we got some super-hero players with way more powerful weapons than we have show up. But the last part of that particular sojourn ended up with running from one point of the map back to a previous point 3 or 4 times (seriously - goals kept popping up at the other location and we'd walk there and then a goal would pop up back where we just were), and then ultimately one of the god-like players got into some part we couldn't find an entrance to so we just watched on the map until he killed everyone a door right in front me opened on it's own. Oh yeah, if everyone dies then the mission fails and it kicks you back to the main screen. You'll want to create a new lobby, but you can't use the default name because your lobby is still on a server list somewhere, but you're not in the lobby anymore. Seriously the whole party/lobby system is straight out of the mid-90's PC gaming playbook for everything. It's unforgivably sloppy, especially in Sony's flagship online title. (I guess you can make an argument Little Big Planet is the flagship title, but I think R2 is more mainstream.) We haven't tried Gears of War 2 yet, but at this rate of shitty co-op games it won't be long. I thought going into January that we had a total surfeit of co-op titles, but it turns out that most of these people aren't bothering to actually balance the co-op experience properly, much less make a remotely useful UI navigation experience. Note to developers: Play the Xbox 1 Splinter Cell titles, play either of the Rainbow Six: Vegas titles, Gears of War or even GRAW. If your co-op isn't at least that good then you aren't done.
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