Cristiano on Tech/Life

Last week I did a quick review of my favorite iPhone apps that I had tried until then. Since then I managed to try a few more that I really love. So here it goes.

Facebook - I never liked Facebook, way to messy and time consuming. But with the Facebook application for the iPhone, using Facebook becomes a breeze. Dare I say it is easier to use and loads faster than the site? Plus when you load your Facebook contact list it is like having the Web2.0 address book that Tim O’Reilly has been talking about that much.

Instapaper - This little app is great for reading on the road, but it took me a while to get what it was. The concept is actually fairly simple. Get an Instapaper account (free) and install the bookmarklet. Then, when you want to read something later, press the bookmarklet. Instapaper will save the link and strip the contents for you. Now, before you go on the road, open the iPhone app, sync the app, and voila you can read all your articles on your iPhone. Doesn’t sound impressive enough yet? The best thing is that once synced, you don’t need an internet connection to read your articles! Real Insta-Paper!

Wordpress - I just love application for the iPhone that make stuff that you “could” do in a browser work way better in a native application. The Wordpress application is great for writing that first draft of that blog post on your phone while sitting in the tube or bus.

Twinkle – Twinkle used to be the best illegal 3rd party iPhone Twitter application for the pre-2.0 firmware. When it was released in the AppStore though, it was slow, buggy, and just not what it used to be. The 1.1 version changed a lot though and I think this has become my new favorite Twitter client. Why? Because in contrary to Twitterific it doesn’t have advertisement!

Exposure – This is not an alternative camera software application, but a Flickr client. It allows you to view, comment, favorite and read your Flickr activities. Again, you could do this in a browser, but somehow doing it in a native application that uses the Flickr API is faster and easier. To bad you can’t use it to make photos and upload them yet, but that will definitely be a later add-on.

Aurora Feint – This is probably the best game for the iPhone. Clearly not just build to be a proof of concept old-game for iPhone port like the many break-out clones, but truly a great game. I got Melinda to play it and she was instantly addicted to it. Best thing again: it’s free!

I use Textmate as my favorite editor, especially when I’m working on a Symfony project. Recently though I decided to switch to integrating the Symfony installation as an external dependancy to my project. This had some major advantages but one very big disadvantage.

When I want to open a file in the project that I have open, I just type Command-T for “Go to File..” and start typing the file name (very much like Spotlight). When I added Symfony as a dependancy this added quite a few more files to my project, which made the search dead slow and returning numerous useless results.

So I decided to do a quick search on how to exclude folders from this search and found it. In the project’s side panel, select the root of the folder structure. Then press the I in the right-bottom corner. This opens an information window in which we edit the folder pattern to add an extra exclude. For Symfony I decided to exclude the “vendor” folder so I added a “|vendor” after the “|CVS”. Be sure to save the project afterwards or all settings are lost.

You can do the same in the general advanced settings of Textmate but keep in mind that any existing projects need to be updated manually to include this new pattern.

So, I’m finally done with my new design. It was already active on the blog but now also on the rest of the site. I personally like it as it is a bit more structured and cleaner.

It is still a bit far away, but on the 10th of September we invite the team of Carsonified to be our guests and tell us about their many endeavors, ranging from their conferences – including FOWA London which is to be held in October – and their products including their latest little pet project called Matt.

Although the event starts at 6:30pm, the food won’t arrive until 7:30pm and the talk won’t start before 8pm, so no need to get hit by a bus hurrying to make it on time to our venue

We are going to meet up in the same nice Thai restaurant that we went to last time, and have been able to arrange a nice variety of food again, costs will be £8.

So go to http://signup.geekdinner.co.uk/event/carsonified/ to sign up and maybe even pay in advance. Don’t forget to mention any special messages like whether or not you’re vegetarian.

• Mac users: Disable iPhone backup for faster sync – Getting annoyed with your iphone doing a 60 minute backup. Turn the backups off! Not the best solution but it might be the best for now.
• A Video A Day: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture – Neil Stephenson on science fiction and culture.
• You out of your fucking misery yet? – great little 12 minute short about a post apocalyptic zombie world.
• The Silicon Roundabout – Want to know what the Silicon Valley of London is? Well, it's called the silicon roundabout! Apparently all mayor startups are located near this one place in London.
• Bedpost – Keep track of what bed you spend time in and what you "did" there.

Quite a few people have been asking me recently how I do my backups, either because they are geeky enough to want to know another geek’s opinion, or because they simply have no idea where to start. So here is my view on making backups and a little insight into my backup strategy.

A bit of “theory”

The reason for making backups should be obvious to all, but apparently it isn’t so here is a little reality check. Let me put it simple: unless you have your data at least twice, you don’t “have” it at all. Whatever media you use to store your data on, it is not a question of “if” that data will ever be lost, but the question “when” it will. If a hard drive dies and you permanently lose some data, it’s your fault, not the disk manufacturer’s or anybody else’s.

Do realize that “backing up” your data to CD or DVD and then deleting the data from your hard drive does not count as properly backing up. You need to have every data twice!

So I need two versions of all my data?

Theoretically, yes. Having your data twice protects you against any of these 2 versions getting lost. In practice though, your main data storage (your pc or notebook) and your backup (your external drive) will often be in the same place together (your house, flat, office, studio). This means that you only need one flood, fire, thief or other disaster to destroy all your versions.

So, to cut to the point you better make sure you also have a second off-site-backup at a different location.

So if I backup I can retrieve any of my data I ever had?

Most backup solutions don’t offer backup versioning. To put this in human terms, this means that you can only go back in time to the last backup you made, nothing before that. Every backup in these cases overwrites the previous backup. There are backup solutions though that offer versioning like Subversion, CVS and the Apple Time Machine software.

The problem of versioning backups is that they tend to grow quickly when your data changes a lot. This is because every change is saved. In other words: if you download loads of videos per week and watch them the same week and trow them away, your disk space might stay constant but your backup will grow fast as it is saving all those videos. Versioning is often only used on very small (but important) data like documents because these sizes tend to be manageable.

(more…)

I decided to revamp my blog’s theme a bit to fix some issues I was having. I really like the look now and it is just more flexible and consistent. The new look will in the future be added to the rest of the site too.

Additionally I added an iPhone optimized theme that gets automatically loaded if you browse the blog with an iPhone or iPod Touch. I do believe in One Web but I guess reading my blog just becomes easier like this.