Simon Fell > Its just code > October 2007

Costco has the Seagate 750Gb FreeAgent Pro external drive for just $200 (I couldn't even find an internal bare 750Gb drive for that price), just the ticket for Time Machine, plus it glows orange, what's not to love. Thanks to Andrew for the tip.

Got Leopard installed without a hitch, spotlight is still chugging away re-indexing everything. Going back to my earlier Time Machine question, it won't let you pick a CIFS or SMB mounted volume as the destination, so I'd think the chances of Windows Home Server being usable as a TM destination are about 0. (There also seems to be an ongoing question about using TM with an AirPort Extreme hosted disk, which is disappointing)

A quick check of my apps, they all appear fine so far with the exception of SF3 which appears to have some weirdness around timezones in the calendar syncing. I need to dig into that some more. The new conflict and changes dialogs from Sync Services are nice, now you can actually see what's going to get changed when it warns you that 50 calendar entries are going to change.

Does Windows Home Server really work with Time Machine ? Paul Thurrott's WHS review hints that it does, "Mac user? You can access the WHS shared folders as you would any other Windows share, and that means your backup program--like Apple's Backup--can use a share as a save location as well. "We're a great back-end store for Time Machine," Headrick told me, alluding to the new backup feature Apple recently announced for Mac OS X Leopard." But, the Apple Time Machine page says you need a HFS+ disk, or another machine running Leopard, and Microsoft's own WHS page says "Mac users have the ability to save to and remotely access Windows Home Server." which i take to mean you can use the existing Windows/OSX Samba support.

Haven't been all that inspired to write code recently, so I've been catching up on a book backlog, and contrary to what some people think, i do read more than just science fiction, here's some recent favorites.

I found the story of LTCM fascinating, and particularly relevant given the on-going credit crunch, and the announcement of the Fed organized SIV bailout.

Apple Matters has a round up of the frankly pathetic state of personal finance software for the Mac. I've tried a bunch of different Mac ones, including Quicken, which has a weird UI scheme, and either crashed or refused to import any of the downloaded transactions i tried. Guess I'll be sticking with Parallels + MS Money for a while longer.