Tim Corrigan blogs on cycling, trips and programming…

I’m currently working on a web project where the primary language is Mongolian and it’s thrown up a few interesting technical oddities. The Mongolian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but it’s not the same as (for instance) the Russian Cyrillic alphabet – oh no, there are a few extra characters.

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In order to try out a complete Grails development/deployment process I’ve developed a simple Timesheet application.

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For several months now I’ve been using a helmet camera to record first person video footage of all my cycling endeavors! After quite a bit of research I bought a Tachyon XC micro camera – having looked into rivals such as the Oregon Scientific models and the Go Pro. The main reasons I picked it over the competition were battery life, ability to take up to 32MB cards and (based on reviews) good value for money in terms of video and sound quality.

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I recently upgraded the hard disk in my MacBook Pro to a 500GB drive. Apart from all that extra space, another advantage of the occasion was that I got to test my backup restore process. After all – a backup is no use if you can’t reliably restore from it!

So on the whole – it was pretty successful. With the new drive installed I booted from my Snow Leopard disk and in Disk Utilities opted to restore from a Time Machine backup. I connected my backup drive and the restore took around an hour and a half (note: this was a fairly new backup drive with only a few weeks of backups on it).

I then rebooted and my Mac restarted just as if nothing had happened except now I had 310GB of free space…. well… almost! I had a few niggles – here they were:

Spotlight forgot my common searches – this was expected – I’d heard that Time Machine doesn’t back this up. Fair enough.

I needed to copy my Parallels Windows XP image from a separate backup – I have Time Machine ignore this file as it’s a 65GB single file that would really slow backups down. Thankfully – I’d remembered to make a separate backup of this file before installing the new disk.

(most seriously) – Finder started crashing every 5 minutes! I discovered this when I tried to copy my Parallels Windows XP image from it’s separate backup but it kept timing out – then I noticed that all my Finder windows flickered every now and then.. and then I looked in Console and found it was crashing every 5 minutes with severe looking memory register faults. I tried booting in Safe mode (yes the Mac has this too – hold down shift just after the startup tone) and it fixed the problem – so this pointed towards something in my users startup items or contextual menus. Eventually I tracked this down to  Zumo drive (an online backup facility that I’ve been using as an offsite backup for my most important files). I’ve actually switched to DropBox now anyway because the iPhone App is better, but I imagine the Zumo drive problem could be fixed by reinstalling it – for now I’ve just disabled it. (will update this if I get round to reinstating it)

iTunes (and after syncing my iPhone, that as well!) forgot my iTunes account and I had to reauthorize my computer.

So there we go! If you are short on disk space and have thought about upgrading it – go for it! Don’t let a stupid thing like disk space hold back your computing…

Part of the August bank holiday at home was spent messing around with a puppet theater made out of a large cardboard box. It was a family thing – everyone had to make up some kind of puppet show. Well here are my attempts – related to my current project at work – Zingzam! Note that these aren’t in any way meant to be serious – they are just a bit of a laugh playing around with the fun medium of home made puppets and video… What did you do with YOUR bank holiday??

Bob meets Zingzam…

Zingzam vs. Open Source:

Zingzam vs. Ning:

I’ve spent the morning setting up my blog so I can post by email from my phone. This will of course open up all sorts of blogging possibilities! 

Here is my setup:

Nokia 6500 Slide on Three sending emails via a gmail account connecting over imap.

Mails are sent to a dedicated mailbox.

I’m using the WordPress plugin Postie to pick up the mails from that account and post them to my blog.

I tried the built in WordPress support but it didn’t seem to strip out the mime encoding stuff sent by my mobile. Postie worked straight away.

I have the Cronless Postie plugin set to trigger Postie every hour. However this timing seems way off – I can see the WP-Cron job active via the plugin WP-Cron-Dashboard but it doesn’t actually execute for quite a while later. So in addition I have set up a free web monitoring service to poll the Postie fetch url, which it does every 20 minutes. So perhaps some improvement could be made here, but it’s working well enough for now.

I did have a problem where Postie wasn’t picking up my categories and was always posting to ‘Uncategorized’. However this was fixed with the fix described here.