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This article could have also been titled, “Bootable Mirrored Backups are a Computer’s Best Friend.” I avoided a small catastrophe today thanks to a bootable mirrored backup created by SuperDuper! Believe it or not, my MacBook crashed (I think due to MacFUSE). In the few times that it has crashed in the past, it usually just takes a reboot to bring the machine back to life. I wasn’t so lucky this time.

When the machine rebooted, I was not greeted with the usual login screen. All I saw was a blank blue screen (not the Blue Screen of Death Windows users are familiar with, but just as ominous). Every few seconds it would flicker as if something was trying to restart. This was not good news. I tried booting into single user mode to see if running fsck on the disk would help, but it was no use. There was something corrupted in a system file that was causing the login screen (and just about everything else in the system) to crash while launching. Luckily, a few months ago I had started a fairly rigorous backup routine.

Every Monday night, I use SuperDuper! to mirror my MacBook’s hard disk. The key to this is that this is a bootable backup. In addition to the mirror, I also do incremental backups of my user files using Apple’s Backup available as part of .Mac. I rebooted the MacBook while holding down the Option key. This allows you to select which drive you want to boot from. I chose my bootable mirror, and it came up just fine. Once I logged in, I was able to copy the System folder from my mirrored backup to the hard drive in my MacBook using the ditto command. At this point, the only thing left to do was restart the MacBook from the internal disk and hope for the best. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. My machine booted up beautifully, and I was back in business in under an hour.

Please let this be a lesson to you. Always make sure that you have a good backup plan that includes a bootable mirror. If I had only done backups of user files, it would have taken hours to reinstall the operating system, updates, then restore my files.

I’m in Wisconsin now for a user group meeting where I am giving a couple of talks about ODS. Anyone that knows me at all knows that bad things always happen to me when I travel: delayed flights, cancelled flights, guaranteed hotel rooms not being available when I get there, etc. If it doesn’t happen to me on the way to my destination, it gets me on the way back. I didn’t figure that this trip to Wisconsin would be any different.

The line at the airline I was at was so long that it actually went through the door to the outside. I made it through the line in about 45 minutes, which was better than I expected. Fortunately, I got through security rather quickly so I made my flight pretty easily. Once I got to Milwaukee, I had a rental car waiting for me. I decided to splurge for the Garmin GPS navigation system since I heard rumors about heavy construction in the area. Boy, am I glad I did. The directions that Google Maps printed ended up being useless because the main exit that I needed was closed. However, the Garmin navigation system easily navigated me around the construction. Absolutely, brilliant!

I got to my hotel for another bit of drama. As I approached the front door to the hotel, I noticed an ambulance right outside the door. Apparently, an elderly woman had fallen on the front steps and she was still laying there. She was conscious, but they had her strapped to a backboard.

While it wasn’t uneventful, my trip here went fairly well. I guess that means I’m in for trouble on the way home.

I recently moved from North Carolina to Colorado. I knew that it was dry in Colorado, but it never hit me just how dry until today. I went out for my usual lunchtime walk at noon. The temperature was about 90 degrees. Now in North Carolina, that would probably mean a heat index of close to 100 degrees because it is so humid and the air is so still. However, in Colorado where it is much breezier and currently only has 9% humidity, the heat index is actually lower than the measured temperature.

After getting back from my walk, it was 96 degrees and I was completely parched from breathing the dry air. The weirdest part was that I had to turn on the A/C when I got home, not because I was so hot, but I just had to close the windows and crank the humidifiers full-blast to get some humidity in the air. In North Carolina, you’d do just about anything to get the humidity out of the air in Summer. What a crazy world.

Guido van Rossum posted an update on Python 3000, the next big Python release that is due out in alpha form by the end of the year. What’s interesting about this release is that it is throwing backwards compatibility to the wind. It will definitely be fascinating to see how that turns out.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about this new release. The Python crew is trying to do away with a lot of cruft that has been building up over the years. One of the biggest changes is in printing and formatting. There will no longer be a print statement. Printing message will now be done with print() function. The % string formatting character will also be removed. The most interesting part though is the new formatting strings. They are no longer in the form of “%s” or “%(name)s”. In fact, they look more like a page templating language now with ways to reference attributes, mappings, and sequences.

One thing I’m looking forward to is unicode everywhere. Working on plasTeX has shown me just how vigilant you have to be in programming to keep all of your strings in unicode form. This should make things easier.

It was a beautiful morning this morning so my wife and I decided to do some hiking in Boulder. We went to the Anemone Hill trail. This is a fairly easy hike and is very scenic this time of year. After we had gone down to the end of the trail and started heading back, we had the sight of a lifetime. We stopped on a small bridge in the shade for a break and to watch the creek and noticed some movement about 50 feet down the creek bed; it was a deer munching on some branches. Now, being from Michigan, I’ve seen plenty of deer but this one was fairly close. Then about a minute later we noticed a baby deer off to our right in the tall grass. This fawn couldn’t have been more than a couple of days old and wasn’t any more than about 20 feet away from us. The mother deer came back to corral the fawn in, but didn’t seem threatened by us at all. She licked the baby for a minute or two then they calmly walked away. I was really regretting leaving my camera at home.