Defenestrated

Mozy for Mac - backup does not start [updated]

I've been a Mozy for Mac user for a couple of months now and my backup (which is admittedly very large) still hasn't completed for the first time, despite my machine being left on pretty much 24x7. I am backing up a LOT of data (over 85GB) so I knew it was going to take a while but one problem seems to have been recurring, preventing the backup even starting on many occasions. Here are two typical sections of the Mozy.log file.

BBC's Olympics movie is fantastic

The Beeb has collaborated with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (of Gorillaz fame) to produce this fantastic sequence to promote and introduce their Olympics coverage. Only the BBC could possibly have pulled this off with such aplomb. During my childhood, a dubbed-for-English broadcast Chinese series called "Monkey Magic!" was shown on BBC2 regularly. It's something of a cult hit. That show was inspired by the same story as this Olympics sequence, so it's doubly sweet for Brits like me.

Dr. Horrible

This looks fun! A sci-fi, action hero musical, directed by Joss Whedon? Count me in.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Capitalism's evolution?

The image of George Washington on the left, outside the Corcoran Gallery, has the title "American Evolution". That's Mao Tse Tung on the right. Is this suggesting that America will become more like China, or the other way around?

iPhone now up

Seems like I suffered enough like everyone else, and my phone came back up and was restored with the luvverly version 2.0 software earlier this afternoon. It was definitely worth the hassle! If you're having trouble with either of the messages I posted earlier, stick at it; eventually you'll get through it.

iPhone 2.0 update - Apple's servers go kaput

When I tried to update my iPhone to version 2.0 today, everything went smoothly until it came time to access the iTunes Store. It didn't return any result for about 30 minutes, so I disconnected the phone from the cradle and reconnected it. I got this message:

"We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-9838). There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again."

Yikes! "Happily" (hem hem) I wasn't alone in this, as this discussion shows.

After a while, iTunes seemed to be connecting to the iTunes Store and then I got this message:

"We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-4). There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again."

And now I'm waiting waiting waiting... Very disappointing from Apple.

UK government launches data mash-up

This is a fantastic idea: opening up government data to enable users to create new ways of using it that might be beneficial to the country as a whole. The government's admittance that its people are smarter than itself is the first step to recovery. <grin>

Firefox 3 on OSX: Empty toolbar fix

I upgraded to Firefox 3 yesterday and it's certainly a lot faster on my MacBook and Mac Mini than Firefox 2, as well as being cosmetically a lot more pleasing. One perplexing problem, though, was the appearance of a gray bar at the top of the window, like this:

When a browsing action was taken, a spinning pinwheel (the "Activity Indicator", apparently) would appear in that gray bar. I couldn't figure out how to eliminate this gray bar for a while but then hit upon a "Duh!" solution that I thought worth documenting here, and on the Firefox support forums. The bar is there because, for some inexplicable reason, the upgrade process moved the Activity Indicator into a separate space from the rest of the Navigation Toolbar. To fix it, right-click on the toolbar, select Customize... and then drag the Activity Indicator into the regular Navigation Toolbar. Click OK and the empty toolbar should disappear.

Shlomo, human beatbox

I had to watch this about five times to believe that it was one guy's mouth making all this music...

Office 2007 converter for OSX

After receiving a lot of files with the dreaded ".docx" filename extension, I discovered that Microsoft has a converter available for OSX that transforms these Windows Office 2007 files into Mac Office 2004 format. It's not perfect (it's in beta right now) and doesn't work on everything, but worth having available. You can get it here. At the bottom of the screen, in the bottom-right-most window, scroll down to the "English (.dmg)" file. Download that, double-click it, and install the application, and then drag-and-drop files onto it to convert them. You can also convert a batch of files at one time using the menu commands.