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Mike Bombich has finally released Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0.  For years, Carbon Copy Cloner was the best way to clone MacOSX hard drives.

The new version has been a long time coming and includes many heavily-requested features.  I’ll admit I jumped ship to SuperDuper! years ago after tiring of waiting for this update.

Among the new features are:

• Support for block-level disk-to-disk clones.
• Synchronization built-in.
• Support for backing up across the network to another Macintosh.
• Advanced scheduling capabilities—Backup tasks can now be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or you can indicate that a backup task should run when the backup device is attached (e.g. an iPod).
• CCC recognizes iPods specifically, allowing time for the iPod:iTunes synchronization to complete.
• The ability to drill down into folders to select exactly what gets copied and what doesn’t (you can drill down indefinitely).
• Built-in software update feature notifies you when updates are available.
• Universal Binary
• A pretty new interface

Best of all is the fact that it is “Uncrippled shareware” meaning that you can use it without limitation.  Just don’t forget to drop a tip in Mike’s jar at some point.

Well, it was bound to happen.  I found a fairly severe Safari 3 beta bug.  If you’re a web developer or blogger I’ll bet you’ve seen it too.  Have you ever noticed odd characters like: ? & or html entities like &lt &gt appearing in your data? 

The bug has to do with the way Safari submits forms containing data in textarea fields- it randomly corrupts form submissions. 

It really sucks to have to check for randomly changed characters. I think I’m uninstalling safari 3.

I’ve submitted this bug as radar #5470536:

——-
09-Sep-2007 08:25 PM David Bills:

Summary:
The Safari 3 beta corrupts form data submissions from textarea fields.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a webpage containing a form with Safari 3 beta
2. Submit data using a textarea field
3. Check submitted data
4. The data will begin to show corruption
5. This may take several tries as it seems to happen at random

Expected Results:
I expect the data to be clean with no extra characters inserted.

Actual Results:
I’ve found the appearance of odd characters my data since begining to use the Safari 3 beta at public launch. Most often, I see a ? at the top of the textarea data field. Occasionally, I notice that a double quote turns into a semicolon and that certain characters like a “greater than” get encoded into html entities.

Regression:
Submitting data to blogs seems to be a good way to trigger this bug. I see it on and off while working on several blogs I’ve developed.

Notes:
This bug has been reported across the web, but I was not aware of the severity until this evening.
——-

I wonder if Apple sees this bug appearing in their own radar forms.

I’ve often predicted that Google will buy Apple in the near future.  As of today, my prediction has changed.

A bit of quick math has shown me that Apple’s stock has surpassed a price of $138 with 869,640,000 shares reflecting a market capitalization of 120 billion. Meanwhile, Google’s 312,140,000 shares were valued at $515 totalling a market cap of $160 billion.

As of today, it looks more like a merger. 

When you reload a Web page in Safari 3 (by clicking the Reload icon or by pressing Command-R in Mac OS X or Ctrl-R in Safari Beta 3.x for Windows), cache files are bypassed. You don’t need to hold Shift or any other modifier keys. What a breath of fresh air!

I’ve been using the excellent CrashPlan software from Code42 pretty ever since I saw it demoed at MacWorld.  CrashPlan allows you to do nearly effortless secure, offsite backup. 

Each release of the software brings more control to the operation of the backup engine, but I wanted more control.  I wanted to completely turn it off while I was at home so that it wouldn’t be using any of my precious bandwidth.

After a bit of investigation, I found that the java engine was controlled with SystemStarter.  By issuing certain the following commands, I was able to start and stop the engine at will.


sudo SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

sudo SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”


Using this knowledge, I put together my final system crontab:

30 7 * * * root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 23 * * * root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

It seems that there are no current NES emulators on MacOSX that can play the NES verison of Super Mario Brothers.  I just spent nearly 3 hours trying to get it to work.  I finally resorted to some very old versions of RockNES in order to play.  ugh..

Quentin at Rogue Amoeba reports that he’s found requests for track ID information being sent out from the Airport Express following the latest firmware update.  Could a display or TV-out be far behind?

At long last I’ve managed to configure dual network interfaces on my mac.  With the help of split-routing and Alberth Matos, I’ve managed to get two interfaces working simulataneously.

Interface 1: Airport Extreme (my fast internet connection)
Interface 2: Gigabit Ethernet (for lan connections)

The order of the interfaces is set in the Network Preferences as above.

Each interface is configured as it would be to access its respective network.  DNS for the local network is entered in both configs and the following command is used to configure the routing table:

sudo route add 10.0.0.0/8 10.2.204.20

Where 10.0.0.0 is the local netmask and 10.2.204.20 is the local router address.

The route tables need to be updated upon network location change or reboot.  I’m now investigating the best way to handle this.

I just reinstalled Fink 0.7.1 and found that it does indeed work in Tiger.  Release notes state that not all packages are updated, but most do work.  I’m recompiling now.

I haven’t found Tiger’s Network Diagnostics application too useful yet. 

Very thoughtful of Apple to have added such a feature, but woah!  A “Server connections interrupted” dialog? 

The OS is actually asking me what I want to do instead of hanging indefinitely.

What’s going on here?  We’ve had ten major systems and we’ve never seen this before. 

It’s almost as cool as killing the AppleTalk stack under Macsbug in the classic MacOS.. but, I suppose I’m losing people here..

Mac-kind are used to the process of losing network connections and having the computer hanging.  If you we’re lucky, you might get a dialog- but this.. wow.