I’ve been busily ripping my CD collection into FLAC and AAC formats since I got the new computer. That’s well over 100 GB right there. In addition, I’ve got a complete archive of every podcast I’ve ever produced with the full uncompressed, unedited audio; some ripped DVDs (DVDs that I own, of course); Final Cut Pro projects; every digital picture I’ve ever taken; and a boatload of software. All told, I’ve got almost 450 GB of data on that disk. Backing up to a few DVDs isn’t going to cut it.

I bought a 500-GB Western Digital MyBook last year which seemed huge at the time. Currently I’m doing weekly full system backups to it with SuperDuper!, an awesome backup and drive imaging tool for OS X. SuperDuper! can be used for free to create a bootable backup to an external drive, or, if you pony up $27.95, it will do a “smart update” on subsequent backups that copies only changed files. That saves a ton of time when you’ve got hundreds of gigs to backup. When I got my iMac back from the Apple Store I did a SuperDuper! “restore” back to the new hard drive, and I was back in business.

I decided that I didn’t want to have the external My Book plugged in 100% of the time so I upgraded my wireless access point to an Apple Airport Extreme because I wanted to use the hard drive sharing feature. It works really well, but I’ve only got a 100-Mbit switch on my home network. That’s a far cry from the Firewire 800 connection that I use when it’s plugged in to the iMac directly. Feeling the need for speed, I just bought a Netgear JGS524 24-port Gigabit switch from Newegg.com ($180 after rebate). That should make the Airport Extreme’s USB 2.0 connection the bottleneck instead of my network.

I’ve shelled out a few hundred bucks at this point, but I’ve got great protection from a system failure or accidental deletion. I’m well on my way to a complete solution, but I haven’t dealt with the tornado or fire scenario. I’m working on that now, and I’ll give the details in Part II.

Who knows how well these tools will actually work, but it sure looks cool so far.

ilife, osx, iphoto, iweb, macworld, garageband, rss

After the session ended I got together with Carlyn, Craig, and a bunch of teachers from Grand Forks, ND for a chat about what we’d just seen. (I didn’t just pick them out of a crowd. I met most of these folks a couple weeks ago at the TNT Conference in Grand Forks.) If nothing else, this podcast illustrates another way that podcasts could be used in schools. Teachers could create an initial podcast and students could be encouraged to podcast their reactions to it. Have a listen.

Download: STP-2005-06-28.mp3 (4.8 MB, 10:34)

The gasp of the audience when Steve Jobs said “it’s true” with the “e” hanging down to mimic Intel’s logo was a seminal event in computing. This is really the third major transition for Apple. And my opinion is that Steve Jobs made a compelling case for this transition. This time it is when Macintosh as a platform is very strong. Most people don’t change much if they are strong and it really is a bold new direction for Apple to do at this particular time and space.

One can make the case for a race between Longhorn and Mac OS X (Leopard) on Intel by late 2006.

Going to some of the labs at WWDC and seeing stock Intel motherboards in a G5 powermac chassis is so freaky not because of the Frankenstein aspect but how matter of fact the developer community has embraced this new path.

There are labs with 75 G5′s with each alternative row of computers with nice shiny brass combination locks in the back. These are the only hints that you are running OS X on a Pentium motherboard.

People want stuff to work. They don’t care about what CPU is in there. This announcement is absent from Apple home page as a major link because they still want to sell Power PCs. And frankly a person looking to surf the web, write an email and store photographs can’t care about endianess and other technological hurdles and developers just care about solving technical problems on a platform that allows them limitless possibilities.

It’s going to be a very interesting two years for Apple.

Less than a week after placing the order, an incredulous delivery guy showed up with a truck full of 650 Apple iBook laptops. We had a pretty good idea where we were going to store them, but weren’t entirely sure how much room it would take. The stack you see in the picture (click for a larger view) accounts for almost 600 of them.

We hired the technician who will be responsible for doing the inventory and installing the images on those machines. He didn’t run screaming from the room when he saw them so I’m optimistic that he’ll work out.

To start Python, open the Termal application that’s found in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. After double-clicking on the Terminal icon, start python by typing “python” at the prompt.

Tim-Wilsons-Computer:~ wilson$ python
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

The >>> is the Python prompt. Simple calculations work just as they do on a regular calculator and will be familiar to anyone who uses a TI calculator. One difference is that you use ** to raise a number to a power.

>>> 4*12
48
>>> 34+89
123
>>> 42.1/83.2
0.50600961538461542
>>> (2+3)*(6-2)
20
>>> 2**3
8

More advanced math functions can be used, but you have to import them first by typing “import math” at the prompt.

>>> import math
>>> math.sqrt(12)
3.4641016151377544
>>> math.pi
3.1415926535897931
>>> math.exp(2)
7.3890560989306504

Here’s a simple example that demonstrates how you can use variables (remember that Python is a full-blown programming language) to store values as you go. The extra spaces around the equals and plus signs are included for readability. You can leave them out in practice.

>>> bill = 19.42
>>> tax = bill * .065
>>> tip = bill * .15
>>> bill + tax + tip
23.595300000000002

These brief examples don’t begin to show the power of Python. Scientists around the world use Python every day for enormously complex tasks. If you’d like to learn more about Python, check out some of the links at the Python In Education Special Interest Group.