Fixing Time Machine Backup Errors

Recently, I had been getting an error from my Mac's Time Machine as follows:

That pretty much kept telling me that it couldn't perform the back up.

At first I thought it was a problem with my back up disk as Time Machine had mentioned. So I did the following:

1. Deleted the Time Machine partition on my back up disk through Disk Utility
2. Repaired the back up disk

I tried the process again, but it still gave me an error. 

After searching for similar problem, I came across some posts that advised to disable spotlight indexing, but that didn't seem to help. Finally, I stumbled across a post that mentioned the use of the OS X console application to see what was wrong. 

Through the help of the Console application (which can be found in Applications > Utilities > Console), I was able to determine that what happened whenever I started a back up was that it would give me a error message whenever it tried to back up a particular file. Turns out that the file was locked, and could not be copied by Time Machine, so it kept saying that there was a problem with the back up disk.  Deleting this file fixed the problem, and it seems like Time Machine is backing up things just fine right now.

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Dvorak typing tutors for Programmers

So, chances are that you have been trying to learn the wonderful dvorak layout, and have found your way to this page. Great!

This "tutor" does not teach you how to type English using the dvorak layout, but rather focus on special characters instead. The sort of special characters that come up often during programming. If you want to get started with typing normal words and letters, you're better off with ABCD or some of the other websites/applications out there. If you don't happen to know what (or who) Dvorak (the scientist, not the composer or ) or the Dvorak layout is, head over to the Dvorak Zine site to find out.

Why use a tutorial when you can learn this by doing some actual programming/designing?
Good question. The answer is because this reduces unavoidable frustration.

Often times when you are programming, its no so much a matter of syntax but rather a matter of algorithms. As a programmer, you tend to focus more on the results rather than the way you get there, and typing then (like syntax) just becomes an intermediary step on the way to the final program (or web-page).



But switching from one keyboard layout to another means that the certain special characters (particularly the semi-colon and the dash) will not be in the same place that they used to be, a problematic side effect for programmers. And when you are trying to program, your fingers will tend to reach for the old locations. Then, you'll have to press the backspace key (or some other key if you happen to be a vi or emacs user) and try again. Needless to say, this whole process gets annoying very quickly, not to mention the fact that it results in a huge productivity drop.

And hence is my reason for creating a dvorak tutorial for programmers. So, it would be wise to only completely switch to dvorak, after you are certain that your hands will go to the right place when you need to type a curly brace.

About the "tutor":
This tutor thing, in reality, nothing but plain ol' HTML page. You can download it to your hard drive and start typing till your get the hang of it. All I have really done is tried to formulate some patterns that come up often, to help your hands get used to reaching the right keys.

Download DVtutor.html (or view it in your browser).

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Why should you switch to OpenOffice?

I have always been a Microsoft Word user for a long time, and have used it for almost all assignments and projects (except for the longer ones where using LaTeX was more helpful). But I think now is probably a good time to switch to OpenOffice for personal projects and smaller collaborative projects.

Why so? Recently, I was mailing out some .xlsx files (that is Microsoft Excel 2007 files) to a few people, and wanted them to give me some feedback regarding the contents of the file (the file had nothing special in it, just some numbers and text). But, I soon started getting replies from people saying: "I can't seem to open the file, can you please send me the older version?" Of course! How could I forget that some people were actually still using Excel 2003, and that the 2007 version files won't work for them?

This made me think about the reasons why Microsoft decided to switch file formats. The main reason, I suppose, was to improve the way information was stored in a file. Instead of dumping all the things in one file, it makes sense to separate textual data from graphical data. To see what I mean, rename a .docx file as a .zip file and have a look at its contents. This allows for smaller file sizes, faster loading times and perhaps some other things. The more recent 2010 format is also different from the 2007 one, possibly due to the lawsuit by i4i against some IP infringement.

Another just as important reason for a corporation like Microsoft is revenue. If Microsoft stops innovating, well then they'll go broke pretty soon. More importantly though, with no way of convincing consumers (more so than corporations) to purchase the newer version of the software, profits would slowly, but surely, decrease. One effective way to convince consumers, it seems to me, is forcing file format changes.

One little problem while adding these features is compatibility. First off, if you happen to be using, say, Ubuntu, you won't be able to open any doc/docx files. Sure, OpenOffice tries to open docx files, but the support for this is sketchy at best, after all, only Microsoft (and the Office team specifically) knows how to read the .doc and .docx format. Others can only reverse engineer the format, and figure out a few parts of the puzzle. A bigger problem is compatibility between versions. If I have some conditional formatting (say if the text meets a specific condition it gets highlighted in a specific colour) in an excel spreadsheet on Office 2008 (the latest version available), and I send it over to someone who is using Windows 2007, the conditionally formatting doesn't always work! Sometimes the colours don't work correctly, and sometimes there are other problems.

On the contrary, cross OS compatibility seems to be much less of a problem in OpenOffice, and most bugs (as well as features) are usually well documented. If you need help, or have an issue, you're usually a quick google search away (or sometimes may be a forum question) away from finding the solution. Compatibility isn't much of an issue, because most people running OO.o will likely have the latest software installed (all upgrades/updates are free!), and be able to access the latest file formats. Plus, the files look and work the same regardless of which platform you use!

It seems to me like OpenOffice tries to accommodate users of all operating systems, and has a great community and user base to help you out if you run into problems. Of course, it isn't as full featured as Microsoft Office, or even Apple's iWork, yet, but if many start caring about the software they use I'm sure the project will get there sooner.

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Mail Merge on a Mac

I've been wanting to do Mail merge on a Mac for a while now, but until now Google seemed to have failed me. I realize that mail merges are probaby easy enough to do with Outlook (or may be even Entourage), but unless you have the latest version of Outlook installed on your Mac, you won't be able to do much. Another alternative I've come across is using Thunderbird, and an addon called mailmerge to do something similar, but that too would involve downloading/installing/setting up Thunderbird and therefore would not be the optimal choice. I also came across a shareware app called Emailmerge that claims to send out mail merged emails, but it seems like the free version can only send out 20 mails at a time.

Finally, I came across this idea that was mentioned in Mac Forums (with a video that nicely explains how you do it!) where it talked about using Automator and Mail.app, both of which come installed by default on every Mac to do automatic mail merges... or at least semi-automatic mail merges since I have only figure out how to get Automator to open the mail merged content in a new window.

Apart from the Automator + Mail.app combo, I think that this solution of using AppleScripts for merges is also worth a shot, although I think it takes too much configuration time and may be a little more complicated to do.

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