Benz Blog

Many thanks to Alf who in this blog entry pointed out (among other things) that you can configure Firefox to allow tabbing into all form fields. Simply enter about:config in the address bar, and change the tabfocus settings to either 3 or higher. According to this page, the default is supposed to be 7, but mine was set to 1 for some reason.

I thought I had a good backup solution in place with BounceBack Express, which came with my Seagate external hard drive, so I upgraded to the Pro version for about $40. Within the first few days, my scheduled daily backups started crashing, and eventually I lost my file selections and exclusion list. I contacted tech support, and 4 days later they responded and asked me to make sure I shut down all other apps before backing up, including any apps that seem like “benign background apps”. Here was my response:

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Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, it took 4 days and it was not the response I was looking for. Allow me to explain…

I’m a recent convert to the Mac, and I was hoping to find a backup solution that would allow me to schedule nightly backups and have them run reliably regardless of what apps are running. If I could use the built-in Backup program in Windows XP to do this, surely I could find something on the Mac to do the same. If I have to go through the trouble of shutting down my apps before doing a backup, even background apps, then I might as well run the backup manually.

I have since re-installed the software twice, and I suppose I’ll give the scheduled backup one more try before starting to look for another solution. There are two things I still don’t understand, though:

1. Why the crashing didn’t start until the first scheduled backup after installing Pro. (Note that at that time I did not uninstall the previous version, which is the version I received with my Seagate external hard drive).

2. Why I can keep all my apps open and run a backup manually with no problem.
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I decided to try out Retrospect, which did not make me feel too comfortable after seeing this dialog (hint: where’s the Cancel button?)

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After figuring out the rather non-intuitive user interface (e.g., you don’t “delete” things, you “forget” them), I performed a manual backup of my home directory with no problem.

I’m sure Retrospect will work just fine, but I got to thinking that the Mac should really come with something out of the box that can do backups. Well – it does – sort of. There’s rsync, which looks great but doesn’t handle resource forks, which if I understand correctly will still be around for a while even though Apple is moving away from them. ditto seems to handle resource forks, but I don’t think it can backup just changed files or delete files from the backup that are no longer on the hard drive.

It was then I discovered psync, a command-line/Perl-based utility, and a nice GUI tool that sits on top of it: psyncx. My first full backup of my home directory was MUCH faster than Retrospect, and I was able to easily schedule a backup to run with no problem. I think the developers of BounceBack need to look at the “man” page of psync – after listing the backup times for several backup trials, they’ll find this:

Note screensaver was on with some other background programs. I used this program happily with my PowerBook G4 (Ti) while I am surfing the web and listening to iTunes at the same time letting SETI@Home search for cosmic programmers With MacOS X, background backup is no problem

Needless to say, I think I’ll stick with psync and make a donation for psyncx if it all works out.

Time to get my ideas out of Stickies and into the blog – I’m going to try and create 1 entry/day until I’m caught up.

Although there are many things about Firefox that I really like, I’ve switched to Safari. The biggest reason is HTML form support, which really stinks in Firefox. In Safari, HTML form fields appear to be “1st class” Aqua elements, while in Firefox they look like Windows components:

Safari:
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Firefox:
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Appearance alone would not be enough to make me switch. As someone who builds HTML forms as part of my living, I find myself filling out forms probably much more frequently than your average home or business user. Because of this, I’ve become quite speedy at it, at least until I tried Firefox on the Mac. The problem is that Firefox doesn’t allow you to tab into anything other than text fields. It skips right over dropdown lists and checkboxes, making me reach for the mouse, which in this case tends to slow me down. Safari allows this (although I think you have to enable full keyboard access in the System Preferences). Furthermore, the home/end key remapping technique doesn’t work in Firefox, but works great in Safari.

Another big problem for me is that I can’t use Firefox to access the WebLogic admin console because it refuses to display the Java applet in the left pane. This doesn’t make sense to me – it’s just Java after-all.

But wait – there’s more – in the upcoming release of Tiger, Apple is claiming that Safari is now faster than Firefox, although I honestly don’t have any speed issues with Safari under Panther.

It’s been quite some time since my last post, but stay tuned – I’ve got a bunch of notes to sift through and some interesting stuff to write about. I’ve been very busy with work and I’ve also been tending to a very sick dog who is finally starting to come around.