iMac Repair Post #2 -- the Backup Regimen

We're taking a brief break from the chronicle of how our iMac got its new hard drive to describe our backup regimen. Here's what I want my backup strategy to accomplish:

• Survive the failure of any single hard drive.
• Be able to restore all our documents, especially media files (music, photos, videos).
• I'm not interested in restoring my system files, as I prefer to re-install the operating system over restoring a whole system backup. This recovery takes more time but results in (even on a Mac, and especially true on a Windows machine) leaner, speedier, and more stable machine.

The Main Ingredients
The two main ingredients to our backup strategy are Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine feature and a HP MediaSmart EX 485. But alas, as simple as Time Machine is, backup is a little more complicated than just hooking the two up and turning Time Machine on -- mostly because we also have to take into consideration how our media applications (primarily iTunes, iPhoto, but include a host of other less commonly used applications for accessing our music, photos and video) need to use the files.

For all our documents except for our media files -- music, photos, and videos -- it is actually just plug and play. The HP MediaSmart comes with software that makes it look like a Time Machine disk. To set this up:

• Plug the iMac and the MediaSmart into the same switch (in our case, a Linksys WRT54G)
• Install the HP MediaSmart software on the Mac
• Login to the HP MediaSmart Server Control Panel using the MediaSmart's admin username/password (same credentials you use to manage the server itself)
  
• Decide how much space you want to set aside for Time Machine backup (we're using 500GB).

Once you've down this, fire up Time Machine and select the 500GB disk named "Backup to HP MediaSmart Server" as your Time Machine backup disk.

Note: I've heard plenty of horror stories from folks trying to use generic SMB volumes for Time Machine backups. Do so at your own peril, and read up on best practices before you go down that treacherous path.

In the Time Machine Options... window, I've chosen a few directories not to backup:

• The Backup to HP MediaSmart Server disk itself
• The external hard drive containing my virtual machines and photos -- more on this later
• System Files and Applications

Time Machine then goes to work, automatically and continuously backing up all our documents, applications, application settings, and local mail directories.

For our media files, here's what we do:

Music files live on the HP MediaSmart server, managed by iTunes.

• I let iTunes manage the contents of the directory, so there's a folder called iTunes inside the Music directory, and iTunes is mostly ok with pointing to that directory -- provided you make that volume available automatically when you login. Use System Preferences | Accounts to make that happen.
• I let the HP MediaSmart automatically backup the contents of the Music folder to multiple hard drives automatically.
• Finally, I sync the entire contents of my Music library to my 80GB hard-drive based iPod once in a while.
• This means our music library lives on at least 3 hard drives: two inside the HP MediaSmart server, and one in the iPod.
• Since the audio files live on the HP MediaSmart server, most any client can access the music -- our Tivo, other PCs and Macs (via iTunes or Windows Media Player), my iPhone (via HP's iPhone app), and authorized folks on the Web (via HP's Flash-based streaming app).

Photos and videos live on an external hard drive, managed mostly by iPhoto, and which I manually sync to the HP MediaSmart

• I have a Photos directory on an external Firewire 800 hard drive.
• The iPhoto library lives on this external drive.
• We currently have >250GB of photos and videos.
• We use an external drive for performance reasons. iTunes is ok with files living on a slow-to-access network drive, but I doubt iPhoto and iMovie would be ok.
• After loading new photos with iPhoto, I sync the files to my HP MediaSmart from the Terminal:

rsync -avnr --progress /Volumes/MyExternalDisk/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/ /Volumes/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/

• In the above -- MyExternalDisk is the name of my external drive; Photos is the name of the folder the HP MediaSmart exports to the iMac.
• As with Music files, I let the HP MediaSmart duplicate all photos in this directory to multiple internal hard drives.
• So our photos are also on 3 hard drives: the external drive connected to the iMac and 2 drives inside the HP MediaSmart server.
• In addition to this backup, I usually upload photos to Smugmug, where we have an unlimited account which lets us upload anything we want. But we didn't start using Smugmug until about 2.5 years ago, so the archive there is incomplete.

I'm told the new HP MediaSmart servers will do a better job of automatically scooping up media files, even when they live on a Mac. Hopefully folks like me who own the EX485 will get that improved media syncing next year.

Next up: because we don't backup our system files, restoring the OS and applications requires a bit of manual work which I'll describe in the next post. Is it worth the manual tweaking? I think so.

Even on a Mac, systems accumulate crud over time, and a fresh install gets your system back to its factory-fresh -- read: speedy -- state. A factory fresh install of Snow Leopard feels snappier than one that started as 10.4.x and eventually made its way to 10.6.x. This is of course even more true for Windows machines, which I'll routinely rebuild every 6-12 months as a matter of system maintenance completely independent of backup needs. We'll see if Windows 7 makes this unnecessary, but, as one of the new Mac ads point out, this seems unlikely:

iMac repair post #1

As promised, here is my first in a series of posts about our experience getting our beloved iMac fixed. We got our iMac in April 2008 off Craigslist from someone who was planning to get a Macbook instead. She originally bought it in the fall of 2007 and had bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it. Boy, am I glad she did -- and that the warranty was transferrable. (The seller was a paralegal and had carefully highlighted the clause authorizing transfers in the warranty agreement -- nice!)

After transferring the warranty online, I promptly forgot all about it. Until, of course, when the hard drive started acting funny last Friday. Since the original warranty had expired, I was sure glad we had gotten AppleCare. We don't usually buy extended warranties on our consumer electronics or computer parts, but this purchase turned out to be a good gamble.  (At the store while picking up my machine a few days later, I asked how much it would have cost to just pay out of pocket for the repair. The reply: $85 to troubleshoot, plus around $300 for the 320GB drive. Ouch!)

Sometimes we would see that question mark at boot time. Once or twice, I got the machine to boot, but it will take 10 minutes. "What is this," I thought, "a Windows machine?"  :-)

Next stop: Google. 

• I tried rebooting while holding down various keys down to reset the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. No dice. 
• I tried booting from the Mac OS X installation disc which came with the machine to run Disk Utility, which "saw" the drive. I tried tried running Disk First Aid, which took about 15 minutes and failed halfway through its session. Uh-oh.
• The next time I booted from the OS X installation disc, Disk Utility didn't even "see" the drive. Double uh-oh.

Next station: AppleCare tech support. I called in Saturday morning.

The technician had me basically repeat the above. When that didn't work, he tried to have me boot from a utility CD-ROM which came with the AppleCare Protection Plan. It had TechTool Deluxe on it, a diagnostic utility, but it wouldn't boot for some reason. During one of our reboot-while-holding-down-the-option-key sessions, the Startup Manager launched and "saw" the drive.  So we selected it and the iMac got through about 1/3 of its boot sequence in 5 minutes.

At that point, we gave up, and the tech support rep made an appointment for me to take it down to my local Apple Store later that afternoon. It's nice that he was able to do this so I didn't have to.

Overall, the session lasted a little under an hour and would have been way better if (1) the phone connection had less delay (call center in India?) and (2) the technician  had listened more instead of just walking through his troubleshooting checklist without listening to what I had already done. Overall, I'd give them a B for the overall phone tech support experience.

  

Next post: the Apple Store repair experience.

Our iMac is back, as good as new

You do not want to see this icon when you boot your Mac. It means your Mac can't boot off its internal hard drive.

The best case is that the disk's volume data (essentially, your hard drive's table of contents) has somehow gotten corrupted or the Mac has forgotten which disk to boot, both of which can be fixed with special reboots or Disk Utility from your Mac startup CD or DVD.

The worst case (as it was for us) means that your hard drive is dead and needs to be replaced.

In my role as "tech support for my friends and family", I've gotten a bunch of questions about what happened and what my backup regimen is. So over the next few posts, I'll describe what happened, what I did to restore our data, my experiences with Apple tech support, and what we do to backup data.

Here's the Reader's Digest version:

• After a call with Apple tech support where we tried various reboots and software-based repairs, I took the iMac down to the local Apple Store and they replaced the drive with a brand new one.
• We had a Time Machine backup on the HP MediaSmart server, so we didn't lose any data.
• After restoring from Time Machine (my first successful computer restore experience ever, I think) and a few application re-installs (most Mac apps don't need this, but I'll name names for the few which do), we're back in action. Hurrah!

Details coming soon, but if you have not backed up, please please please do so. This is 100x true for the drive with your completely irreplaceable videos and pictures. These days, even Quicken data doesn't seem that sacred to me -- but our pictures and videos absolutely are. (Thankfully, our photos were on an external drive which is itself backed up to two separate drives in the MediaSmart server, so they weren't on the drive that failed.)

Our family does not have a physical disaster emergency prepardness plan (yes, I know -- it's on the list with getting our trust notarized), but we do have a data disaster plan. You should too, if any of your data is important to you.

Snow Leopard

So I've upgraded to Snow Leopard on two machine (my latest generation work Macbook Pro and my home, slightly older iMac). The upgrade process itself was very smooth: the installer does all the work, reboots the machine a few times, and freed about 20 gigs of space on my boot disk. Can't remember ever seeing that any software upgrade.

Only a few things changed, none of them dramatic but all of them useful in their own way. It boots, sleeps, and resumes even faster than before. Day-to-day use feels marginally speedier -- mostly because it the Finder and Safari are both faster. I have not encountered any apps that won't launch or devices that don't work. I was a little worried about the scanner in my Canon Pixma MP500 because the Apple site reported it did not ship with Canon scanner drivers baked into Leopard, but the Canon software worked just fine.

On the flip side:

• iPhoto 08 won't play videos anymore. This one makes me mad, because Apple should have caught this trivial-to-fix bug in their own product family.
• Symptom: If you find the files in the iPhoto library from the Finder, they'll fire up just fine. But if you double click on videos in iPhoto, nothing happens.
• I'm surprised they didn't fix this in 10.6.1. I hope they fix this in the next week or two. Handling photos and videos is one of the reasons I switched to a Mac in the first place.
• My Logitech mouse's special buttons don't work. The Logitech forums speculate that an updated version of Logitech Control Center is coming soon.
• Suggested workarounds seemed to work for me the first few days but have since quit working (the Control Center stopped recognizing my MX700 mouse).

Other than that, I'm pleased overall. It does seem a little lame that Apple is charging as if this was an upgrade rather than a dot release. But I guess by comparison, it seems like way smaller a rip off than what Microsoft is charging for Vista Service Pack 2, er, Windows 7.

Also, not looking to the complete re-install Microsoft is going to force me to do to upgrade from my Windows 7 Release Candidate.

Update on 9/15/09: For some reason, the Logitech workarounds worked the 2nd or 3rd time around. I ran the installer from inside the Logitech Control Center 3.0 package, rebooted, and it recognized my MX700 mouse. Then copying Expose from the /Applications/Utilities folder to /Applications got the Expose mouse button shortcut working. OK, Apple, it's all you now: get your own products to work with your own operating system, please.

Recommended Firefox extensions

I have the following confession: it's hard to write down paragraph-sized blog thoughts when it's so much easier to post word and sentence-sized thoughts via Twitter and Facebook. Pathetic but true.

Image via Wikipedia

Anyway, to buck the trend, I'm here to recommend a few extensions: three for folks who run Firefox on a few different machines (e.g., work, home, in a virtual machine) and one for the dwindling numbers who still blog (though also good for the increasing number of Gmail users).

First an aside about Firefox. I've definitely flirted with a few other browsers in the past 3 months (Safari, Chrome, and Opera) -- primarily for speed. The new Javascript engines in Chrome and Safari are super fast, and you can definitely tell in everyday browsing. But Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is pretty fast too and also offers the killer feature of supporting a wide variety of extensions. So until Chrome or Safari create a rich ecosystem of must-have extensions, I'll always have Firefox on my machine.

OK, onto the extension recommendations. First, for the nomadic Firefox users:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) synchronizes bookmarks (and saved passwords, though I don't use that feature -- see below for why) across IE and Firefox. It mostly just works, though does insist on alphabetizing the contents of your Bookmark Bar which I found somewhat annoying. I use separate work and a home profiles to keep a separate set of bookmarks. For those into the teams behind the features, Xmarks was cofounded by Mitch Kapor, the guy who built Lotus 1-2-3 and was the founding Chair of Mozilla (the fine folks who build Firefox, Thunderbird and more).
• LastPass stores your username, passwords, and profiles (for filling out those pesky forms) "in the cloud" and features browser plug-ins for both Firefox and IE which will leap into action and offer to fill out your password when you hit a site that needs one. When I was on Windows, I used something called Roboform which did the same thing -- but Roboform didn't have a Mac version when I converted. So I gave LastPass a whirl, and it's generally the first plug-in I donwload after I install a fresh version of Firefox. (Try 1Password if you are addicted to Safari and don't need something that works across platforms and browsers.)
• FEBE does for Firefox extensions, themes and preferences what Lastpass does for passwords. It allows you to back them up and import them. Super handy if you find yourself installing Firefox on lots of different machines and dread the task of downloading all those extensions into your brand-new Firefox installations. It supports saving your stash-o-goodies on Box.net for storage in the cloud.

Image via Wikipedia

Finally, here's a recommendation for bloggers or Gmail'ers who want to create fancy email messages. Zemanta is a plugin that will automatically recommend tags, links, pictures, and other resources for your blog posts or email messages as you are typing them. Some might find this a little big brother-ish, but I find it super useful. It might even get me to blog more.

As I've been typing this entry, for example, it's offered to insert links for Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks, Opera, Xmarks, and more. In other words, I didn't have to insert the links manually.

It's also offered to insert a list of relevant tags on ths blog post (not as relevant to me, since this mostly just a personal blog).

And it's recommended a set of images to insert such as pictures of Mitch Kapor and Jon Stephenson von Tezchner, the cofounder of Opera, the Firefox and Opera and Foxmarks and Facebook logos), and so on. When you drag-and-drop them into your post, it automatically inserts the images as well as the reference links below the images. Genius!

Yes I've been blogging less

• Yes, I've been blogging less.
• Yes, I blame it on Facebook and Twitter.
• Yes, I really shouldn't be constraining myself just to the sentence-sized micro-thoughts I can share there.
• No, I don't see it getting much better: it's too easy doing it the other way.
• Yes, the Web browser needs to make it easier to upload pictures.
• Yes, even finding pictures to upload on a Mac using the built in pictures browser is too much of a pain.
• No, Picasa for the Mac doesn't solve this problem because it has difficulty keeping itself synced up to the iPhoto photo database.
• No, Windows 7 doesn't solve this problem either.
• Yes, what we need is a way to right-click upload files to whatever social network/blogging platform you want. Kind of like Pixelpost but built into the file system. And not just for pictures.
• No, I can't think of a way to turn that into sustainable revenue. Otherwise, I'd start it.
• No, I don't know if someone is already doing it. But tell me if they are.

Comcast brought fiber to my neighborhood. Woot!



I wonder if the explains the connectivity hiccup we had last week? Anyway, no problems since then -- though the hiccup forced me to do a big conference call from my cellphone, which really doesn't work well. Oh well, onwards and upwards hopefully.

Colin and Cameron on Easter Sunday

Posted via Pixelpipe.

This is one of my favorite shots from Easter Sunday (the rest of the album is at Smugmug). Colin and Cameron are delighted because it's their second Easter egg hunt of the year, they got to leave the Sunday service early, it's the start of Spring Break -- and I've got the week off as well, thanks to HP "recommending" that we all take this week off. What's not to like? :-)

Separate topic, this time on how this photo got published to this blog. I've been searching for an easy way to post pictures from iPhoto to Blogspot (which hosts this blog). I installed Picasa for the Mac, which I like in general. But it was taking a long time to refresh its database with the iPhoto pictures. Plus, I'm not sure I want my entire photo collection re-thumbnail'ed and re-indexed just so it's easier to post to Blogger.

In Googling for a solution, I happened across Pixelpipe, which is a much more general purpose publishing service. I'm giving it a whirl. You'll see this picture here and in Twitter and in Facebook all at once, something I did just by exporting the picture from iPhoto once. Still have work to do on making the posts more friendly (by default it labels your post with the filename), but seems very useful.

Mind-blowing visulization of population data

I've been watching TED Talks and Hulu while treadmilling (wireless video inside the house seems more reliable now that we're on Comcast's super-fast Internet service) and randomly chose this talk from the Top 10 list by doctor and researcher Hans Rosling. Bottom line? It's must see TV.

If you are a fan of data visualizations, population trends, government policy, comparisons between countries, or just even mildly curious about changes to our world in the last 30-40 years, prepare to be blown away by this video.

The TEDTalks site blurb has it right: 

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

After you've watched the video and are hungry for more, visit Gapminder.org, Dr. Rosling's nonprofit venture to help people create visualizations like the ones you saw in the video.

First week with Comcast Digital Voice: it just works

We've been on Comcast Digital Voice for about a week after nearly 5 years with Vonage. Verdict? I'm pleasantly surprised: just like Google, the service (so far) has the "it works" feature.

I must say it is a relief that I don't think about my phone service anymore: people can hear me and I can hear them (I actually had to turn down the volume on my handsets because the VOIP box must be pumping out a stronger signal to my phone). Things with Vonage had gotten so bad, I'd have to do phone calls with two phones -- listening to my regular phone (Vonage) with speaking into my cellphone (AT&T). Not a pretty picture.

Anyway, a few other feature advantages to Comcast Digital Voice vs. Vonage for people thinking about taking the plunge:

• Again, it just works. I've read calls get routed over a private Comcast-managed network as opposed to the public Internet. Apparently this is how they are delivering the "it just works" feature. To me, it feels like the phone and Internet service are totally separate. Not sure if this is technically accurate, but I've had (shhh, don't tell anyone) moment where I'm on the phone, watching YouTube, doing a Webex, and doing a broadband speed test all at once. Phone call quality didn't glitch once.
• Local dialing is local dialing again. Just like the old phone company but unlike Vonage, I can dial 7 digits for local calls. Kinda refreshing actually. (OTOH, long distance calls actually need to prefaced by 1, unlike Vonage).
• Better voicemail on the Web GUI. Comcast's voicemail-on-the-Web feature lets you forward the voicemails to other people, a nice feature. Also the UI for listening to messages is friendlier since it doesn't pop up a separate external media player for every message you listen to.
• Easier voicemail from the phone. There's an option to skip the password check if you're fetching voicemail from your home phone. Nice.
• Automatic E911 service. You don't have to explicitly register for E911 service. For some reason, even though Vonage knew exactly where I lived by virtue of having sent me their VOIP box, I still had to manually sign up for E911. Go figure.
• Phone calls without power. The integrated cable modem and VOIP box has a battery backup. In theory I can talk for 8 hours even without power from the mighty PG&E.

On the flip side:

• Different Web interfaces. Switching between the many different Web front ends for managing your phone service, billing, and email is needlessly confusing. Because Comcast outsources billing (Convergys), email (Zimbra), voicemail, and basic account management to different companies, there are at least 4 completely different Web interfaces for reading email, managing your phone features, looking at your bill, and managing your Web features. They didn't even try to make them look like they are offered by the same company.
• Confusing Website navigation. The Comcast family of websites is disjointed. The product teams (e.g., phone, TV, billing, video-on-demand, Web) obviously don't talk with one another, and navigation is confusing. And don't even get me started on their completely retarded cable TV Web site. I dare you to go find out what the channel lineup is in your area. Even after you've logged in and they know enough to route your E911 call.
• No SimulRing. Comcast does not have Simultaneous Ring, only Call Forwarding. So if you had gotten addicted to that Vonage feature, Comcast flat out just doesn't have it. Call Forwarding places a "courtesy" ring on your main number and forwards it on to the number you pick. It's a courtesy ring because no matter how fast you pick up the phone, there's no way to answer it.
• Typically inaccurate and impossible to read bill. Naturally, the first bill from Comcast after the switchover was completely incomprehensible and nearly twice what I agreed to pay. At some point, I'll have to call and figure out what that's all about.
• Long time to port my number. It took them about 3 weeks to schedule the appointment for the technician to come out and swap my cable modem. Apparently negotiating the number port with Vonage is tricky, so not sure this is Comcast's fault.
• Took the better part of a day to get me running. It took a village to get me hooked up and to the point where I wasn't dropping phone calls and my Internet connection every 3 minutes: two technicians (one of which I had to call 4 times and summon back to my house twice), 4-5 phone reps, 2 cable modem/VOIP boxes, and 3 replaced physical network doohickeys. Total elapsed time: 6.5 hours. Percent of time I was on work conference calls during that stretch: 100%.

All in all, I'm glad we switched and I can stop thinking about whether people will be able to hear me when I call them. I completed the phone torture test last night: Webcast and phone call with Asia-Pacific for 1.5 hours -- and it just worked.

Microsoft Office launches in 1/2 second

So I've been running the Windows 7 Beta for a little over a month (on a 2-year old Dell laptop and an even older Dell desktop), and while I still think this is what Vista ought to have been, it's suffering from the dreaded Windows cruftification:

• Everything -- boot, standby, resume, hibernate, application launch -- is slowing down,
• My desktop refuses to shut down half the time, and
• I had to turn the new sharing feature called Homegroup off because it was breaking my Linksys wireless router (symptom: it would refuse to form wireless network connections with the Dell laptop without power cycling).
  

So it looks like Windows 7 has yet to solve one of the biggest problems with Windows: the distressing tendency for applications to dramatically slow down in all the everyday things that really matter to me.

So with that backdrop, enjoy this video about how some extreme hardware can come to the rescue of sloppy Microsoft coding. Skip the first few minutes about how they set up the extreme array of solid-state drives, and skip to about the 2:04 marker to see some jaw dropping performance. I definitely want one of those. Watch to the very end: the last speed race is genius. :-)

Disclosure: this is marketing from Samsung. But I happen to think it's awesome, out of the box thinking from a company you don't usually think of as a savvy social marketer.

So close...yet so far

So I have to talk to a person to cancel my Vonage service. I called the service number, and I was pleasantly surprised that:

• The up front computerized prompts were clear and easy to navigate by speaking
  
• The voice recognition was outstanding -- it correctly understood me when I said my phone number as well as the answer to my security question which I had typed in at registration time
• The automated responses were clear and struck the right tone ("I'm sorry to hear you want to cancel your account. I can help you with that.")

I was just about to record this (FTW, as they say on the Web) as a surprisingly pleasant customer service experience -- until it dropped me off to a recording that said their offices were only open on weekdays. Aaaarrgghh!

From FTW to FAIL in one easy step. They knew that I needed to talk to a real agent early in the interaction -- and rather than take me through more prompts, they should have just told me that immediately.

Comcast and VOIP

So we've been on Vonage for just about 5 years. Aside from some hiccups in the early months -- way back in spring of 2004 -- we've had no major complaints. (Though the simultaneous ringing feature takes some time for both you and your callers to get used to.)

Then just this year we started having serious voice quality problem. People would say I was breaking up on nearly every call. Calls would drop right in the middle of phone calls. People would say they called us but rolled right over to voicemail. Multiply all these small aggravations by my working from home more and routinely doing 6-9 hours a day on conference calls, and I knew we had to do something.

Vonage said it was Comcast's fault; Comcast said it was "congestion in my neighborhood" or my Linksys router's fault. Reading the press about Comcast's bandwidth caps and bandwidth shaping, I suspected Comcast was merrily dropping Vonage's VOIP packets.

So we made the switch to Comcast Digital Voice today. As much as I dislike potentially rewarding the guilty party, I need a reliable phone service -- and a single throat to choke when I can't get that. The finger pointing was driving me crazy, and my phone just wasn't working. (In case you are wondering, the AT&T coverage near my house is not that great, and other VOIP services including both Skype and MagicJack weren't much better, quality-wise.)

So we'll see how the grand experiment goes. As is typical, I lost a bunch of hours today managing the 6 Comcast people (two on-site techs, 3 phone support folks, and 1 voice-chat person)
that it took to switch me over from Vonage. But after two new modems, two physical network doodad replacements, 8 cable modem and router resets, I think I'm back to normal now.

Call me if you want to hear that Comcast VOIP sounds like. :-)

The upside: this new package features super-fast Internet access. Check these two bandwidth speed test results from earlier today. Yup, that's 17 Mbps downstream and 8-9 Mbps upstream. Woot!

Stem cell research

President Obama is moving to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Regardless of whether you consider the embryos we use to get these so-called pluripotent stem cells are human yet, I wanted to highlight a few things which the mainstream press is not covering much -- presumably because it's easier to tell this story as a "liberal Obama vs. conservative Bush" story. (I was reading the Wall Street Journal's coverage this morning, and it seems typical.)

• New technologies are turning adult stem cells into pluripotent stem cells. Scientists have had recent successes turning adult stem cells (the ones you and I have in abundance) into pluripotent stem cells -- that is, cells which can turn into other types of cells. Pluripotency is one of the main things which got scientists excited about embryonic stem cells in the first place. (If you the Wikipedia link is a bit too dry, try this article in Nature.)
• Stem-cell therapies working today. Stem cell-based therapies are working today to treat blood problems such as leukemia. Most the media attention is focused on embryonic stem cell research which will take years to develop into effective treatments (if ever), and I thought it worthwhile to remind people that therapies based on adult and umbilical cord stem cells -- neither of which require destroying embryos -- are working today.

US News and World Report has an article by Dr. Bernadine Headey which provides some more context than the typical mass media story.

Also, update on 3/9 -- here is a CBS news story on regrowing body parts, which I learned about, of all places on Twitter via @tonyrobbins. Yes, that Tony Robbins.

Virtual Box

If you've ever:

• Been curious about what a different operating system (say Ubuntu or Windows Vista) looks and feels like
• Need to run the odd Windows application (say Quicken) on your Mac
• Have a Vista machine but long for the simpler, nimbler days of Windows XP without blowing away your existing Windows installation
  
• Wanted to surf in a safe environment without worrying about Bad Things on the Internet (viruses, malware, etc.)
  

Then you should go get the free VirtualBox (the latest release, version 2.1, just dropped today). It helps you do all of those things, it's free, and it's pretty lightweight on system resources. (There are a few caveats, so talk to your resident geek to understand what this approach will protect you from -- and what it won't protect you from, such as phishing attacks.)

I just upgraded to the 2.1 release using my Mac as the host. I'm running Ubuntu, Vista and XP and guests. Now that VirtualBox supports the fancy technology in modern Intel chips (VT-x) to speed up virtualization, it's smoother, faster, and more responsive than ever.

It's not for resource hungry games (this is what I keep my old Dell around for), but for all the scenarios I mentioned above, it's amazing free software. I have no idea what Sun gets out of it, but don't let that bug you: just go get it.

Just as OpenOffice is not quite as powerful and full featured as Microsoft Office, VirtualBox is not quite as powerful or full featured as VMware Fusion or Parallels. For example, its implementation of "Seamless Mode" which mingles your guest OS windows with your host OS windows is a hack compared to Fusion's. But you can't beat the price. For the simple things I need out of a hypervisor (that's what nerds call this kind of software), it just works.

Aside from games, the only thing that doesn't work all that great is streaming video from Netflix. (streaming from Hulu and most of the major broadcast networks works just fine.) But now that the Netflix can do that directly to a Mac, I just watch on my Mac.

Speaking of flirting with other technologies...

...I've been doing some spelunking in the open source world of Linux. Mostly Ubuntu. More on my discoveries later. I've converted my old laptop into a dual boot, and wiped an even older laptop my mom uses sometime into an Ubuntu-only machine (it was getting too old to really run Windows XP).



My observations to date: the open source community is astounding in its productivity, and if they could spend less time implementing the same feature over and over again and more time focusing on Apple-quality design and simplicity, the vast majority of users shouldn't really have to upgrade to whatever slow, bloated, internally inconsistent OS Microsoft ships next.

Ubuntu really does seem a major release or two (ok, maybe 3) away from being consumable by most people who are sick of forking over $150 to Microsoft every 2 years for not all that much to show for it. And with so much happening on the Web these days, who cares about what your desktop is doing? Imagine a world in which iPhoto and iTunes were in the cloud -- do we really need another forklift upgrade of desktop OSes which breaks all your applications?

Weclome to our new look

Welcome to the new look. Leave a comment to let us know whether to stick with this one or go back to the old one. Or, for a more radical look, check our our flirtation with Wordpress. Ooooo, dark!

In addition to the new Blogger template, I added a few new items on the right side, including a list of all tags, a blogroll (list of blogs, for people who speak English and not Web-hipster-speak), and links to our outposts on LinkedIn and Facebook and a few other places.

After you visit the Wordpress page, vote for your favorite look (more than 1 vote is ok) on the top right.

(Yes, we are still flirting with moving our digital domicile to Wordpress. But after stumbling across the beta of Blogger, I'm not feeling the urgency. Still, Wordpress does do some pretty templates. How would this be for a tech marriage made in heaven: Google's innovative Web technologies married with Apple's design savvy? I mean, I love Blogger and Google Mail and Google Docs and Google Calendar and Google Reader -- but they sure are dowdy compared to to Apple Web properties.)

We got a Mac!

Well, I had been planning to wait to the end of the year to get a Mac -- or at least until the new iMacs, which are rumored to be announced next week. But I just couldn't resist a good Craigslist deal, so we've begun our transition to the world of Jobs. Here's our Photo Booth inauguration to go along with our very first blog post written on a Mac. :-)

I'll be posting about our transition experience using the keyword mac so you can follow along.

My first Ning social network

I'm getting caught after a long hiatus on this blog. I was on the road, then seriously ill (with bronchitis), then busy creating my first Ning-based social network.

Ning is Marc Andreessen's next startup, and it's providing everyday folks (read: non-programmers) like me the ability to create social networks for their communities. I've created one for my church. (FBCers who haven't gotten an invitation for our alpha test, register here.)

Sorry, the network is for church members only, but I have this to say about how easy the process was:

• Super easy! It took me about an hour to get a pretty full-featured site for the church up and running -- including features like profile sharing, photo and video sharing, blogging, a calendar with upcoming events, a random Bible verse of the day, and more.
• Powerful customization abilities. Ning allows you to create groups in your social network. In a church context, we often call these groups "ministries" instead of groups. In less than 5 minutes, I made the change from Groups to Ministries throughout the site.

If you've always wanted to host a private-label version of Facebook + Flickr + forums for your affinity group, head on over to Ning and you could be up and running in about an hour.

Google Reader

After using Mozilla Thunderbird and a few Web-based apps to read my RSS feeds for years, I've switched over to Google Reader.

Why, you might ask?

Here's the rundown:

1. Access from anywhere. The obvious reason: the list of feeds and unread articles is available from any browser. Now I don't have to be at home to follow the feeds I care about.
   
2. Compelling user experience. This is really a first rate Web application that does almost everything as well or better than a rich client. Don't get me wrong: Thunderbird is a 10x better email/RSS client than Outlook. But since Google Reader isn't trying to double as an email client, it's easier to navigate, supports more features, has plentiful and intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and even supports offline viewing with Google Gears. Speedy, too.
3. Easier sharing. If you look in the right column of this blog, you'll now see a handful of the articles I found interesting. I don't have always have the time inclination to comment on what I'm reading -- so this is the lazy man's way of just saying, "hmmm: mildly interesting...check it out."
4. Spot-on recommendations. Google Reader suggests blogs based on what other people are reading, and the recommendations are much better than Tivo recommendations (which I've found to be generally bizarre).