David Alison's Blog

After the near miss I had in losing a considerable portion of my personal digital library I decided to do something about it and look into a cloud based solution for keeping my files safe. I’m still using Time Machine locally to back up nearly everything, I just wanted a final line of storage just in case. I’ve been using DropBox for years for my documents and miscellaneous files. I have several Google Apps for Business accounts that store my emails and shared docs and spreadsheets. The code I write is versioned and stored in GitHub . For the most part I live off the cloud already, the only thing missing was my large collection of family photos and videos, which totaled nearly 140GB. iCloud is cool and all, and I love the way it keeps my little iPhone photos synced, but at $100 / year for only 55GB, this is a pretty expensive solution. I looked at a variety of different cloud backup solutions and found them to be ill-fitted to my needs. While many of them have plenty of capaci...

As I wrote last week, the SSD upgrade for my Mac Pro went very smoothly. There were two important things I found out after I started reading the comments from that entry: An SSD is a good performance upgrade but the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 provides incredible performance. Though quite a bit more expensive than a standard SSD, if you want the absolute best performance for a Mac Pro you may want to consider it. At 820MB/s it is over 5 times faster than the SSD I just installed. Hat tip to Eytan for pointing this out to me. After adding a 3rd party SSD to your Mac, you need to investigate TRIM support. Derek brought up the issue in the comments and I spent some time investigating it. What is TRIM? TRIM is effectively a garbage collection model for SSDs. There is some great information on it on Wikipedia’s TRIM entry . The bottom line is that without TRIM enabled the performance of an SSD will suffer over time. This is something you’ll want to address. I contacted Crucial tech...

Mac Pro circa 2008 I bought my Mac Pro 5 years ago and other than the hard disk failures I just had with my add-on drives, the machine has been rock solid. I’ve kept it up on every version of OS X that’s been available and it runs Mountain Lion like a champ. Even though my Mac hasn’t slowed down with age, it feels relatively slow ever since I added my new 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display to the mix. Between the 16GB of RAM, stunning display and ridiculously fast SSD, the new MacBook Pro seemed to run circles around the larger Mac tower. Upgrading the processors didn’t seem reasonable. It already has 12GB of RAM and for the way I use the machine that provides plenty of headroom. The one area I figured could see dramatic improvement was by swapping out the 320GB boot disk with an SSD drive. This was the route I took. Finding the Right SSD I did a lot of reading on SSDs, looking at Amazon reviews and finding guidance from a variety of different sources where I primarily f...

It had been a long couple of months. We’d been working furiously on the launch of EasyGrouper and were just a few days away from having it go live. As I sat in my home office working on my new MacBook Pro I heard a deeply disturbing sound coming from my older Mac Pro tower a few feet away:    ZZZZ-click     ZZZZ-click    ZZZZ-click That’s never a good sign. My Mac Pro is my main home machine and runs a lot of stuff for me. It’s got a 320GB main drive (“BootDisk”) running my apps and working documents, a 1TB drive called “BigDisk” that contains my family photos, videos, music, etc. and another 1TB drive called “Backup” for... you guessed it... backups. I tapped the keyboard to wake up the screens and could see that the icons for my drives were all on my desktop when suddenly the BigDisk icon vanished and OS X gave me an error message that said I had not ejected the drive properly. Not good. My Mac could no longer see my BigDisk internal d...

When I bought my new MacBook Pro I used the applications I had running on my previous MacBook Pro to help me determine what I would need in terms of horsepower. It was an interesting exercise, mainly because it gave me a good sense for all of the things I need my Mac to handle throughout the day. I'm a software developer and do some of the development for SharedStatus , so my needs are a little biased towards that. I've broken down what's running on my Mac into two sections, Basics and Development. To give some perspective on how many apps I have loaded up as I write this, here's a snapshot of my current Spaces window zoomed out: I've always been fascinated by these types of lists because it helps give people exposure to some apps they may not know about. Here are the ones I nearly always have running: Basics Safari I love the speed of Safari and this remains my default browser. Nice and fast, Safari does have a tendency to crash on me if it's been run...

It was a perfect late winter day outside - abnormally sunny and warm. I decided that rather than spend it in my office I’d grab my MacBook Pro and take it out on our deck, feel that nice breeze and work through some code. I got comfortable, flipped it open and started to plug away in Xcode. Everything was ideal - so much so that I’m sure photographs of me sitting there would have made for great stock photography for some web site. After about 15 minutes of moderate use I looked at the status bar and noticed that my battery was already down to 79% available. This was not good. 30 minutes in, I was down to 50%. iStat menu was trying to predict how much longer I had and the number of minutes of power left were dropping like some kind of warped time traveling machine. I went from Carpe Diem to Carpe Power Cordus. Total buzz kill. I’ve now had my MacBook Pro for nearly three years. This particular MacBook Pro is the last generation before the unibody models debuted and as such has a r...

I've long been an advocate of people in a technology-oriented job being able to work from home, even if it's just a day or two a week. I've even provided some tips on working from home on this blog. In the early days of my software engineering career, working from home had some significant obstacles that really don't exist today. I tried to work from home once I had a serious commute. Back then I lived in Los Angeles and had to spend an average of 50 minutes commuting to work and back every day. Over 400 hours a year spent staring at tail-lights and bumper stickers in LA traffic. It was just awesome. My bosses at the time didn't like the idea of me working from home because they didn't think I could be productive from there. Relative to today's technology, I can see why. A Different Time Back then (1988—1994) my ability to work remotely was severely limited. I used a modem to dial into my office computer using PCAnywhere and hoped that my wife didn...

Passwords. PINs. Security Codes. It seems like every place we go online someone is asking us to either validate who we are with a password protected account or asking us to create an account so that we can access something. We are inundated with so many requests for account names and passwords it can become easy to be lazy about the passwords we choose and who we give them to. As the Gawker Media hack showed us, poor password discipline can lead to a compromise of your personal data security. I’ve compiled a list of tips that can help you become a lot more secure in your online travels. Tip 1: Don’t Use The Same Password Everywhere If you use the same password in multiple locations you are going to run the risk of that password being exposed. All it takes is one poorly secured system or an unscrupulous web site operator to collect your email address and password. At a minimum have different passwords for your primary computer login, email account and any financial systems you access (...

As I observe casual users working with a Mac (my wife falls into that category) I often see them doing something that is very Windows like: trying to close an application by clicking the close button in the top of the window title. My wife also says she hates the Maximize window button because it doesn’t maximize the window like it did in Windows. On a Mac the series of buttons in the top left corner of a window are called the Title Bar Buttons. Much like the window controls found in virtually every version of Windows, these allow the user to perform actions on the window they are attached to. In Mac OS they appear as a series of traffic lights in the top left of the window, in Windows on the top right of the window: This is probably the one area that most people struggle with, and the underlying design philosophy is both subtle and complex, mostly because the buttons feel like they should work the same way in Mac OS and Windows but have some different behaviors. They are named nearly ...