Pinterest is a fantastic way to discover content, styles, products and ideas. As such, it’s crucial that websites make it as simple as possible for their content to be ‘pinned’ on Pinterest.

Sadly, it appears that many web developers are struggling to get their content on their due to silent errors. Many pages around the web give workarounds for clients but they don’t address the issues faced by the website itself.

I tried a few ways to find solutions for the websites I manage.

If you’re OSX disk usage is being reported incorrectly then you’ve probably got caught by a Time Machine feature introduced in Apple OSX 10.7. This typically happens where your free disk space erodes over time or when you delete some files and yet the disk still claims to have the same space usage as before.

This is a silently introduced feature where Time Machine can operate on on laptops (Macbook Air / Macbook Pro) when the TM volume isn’t available. The system essentially snapshots your changes for backing up later.

Read about it here http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/18

If you want to disable the feature and reclaim your space go in to Terminal and enter:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

followed by return, and after entering you password and hitting return again, it should delete the local snapshots and free up the missing space.

Carbon Copy Cloner – micro review

Carbon Copy Cloner a.k.a. CCC is a donation-ware disk duplication application for Apple Mac OSX. I recently used the app to successfully move my data from a HDD to an SDD and I decided to give it a go as part of my regular backup system. Here’s my mini review…

My gripe with the app is that while the scheduled events do start on time, even waking the computer up to do so, the app doesn’t keep the system awake. This means that your power settings are likely to cause your system to sleep and therefore the backup to pause in the middle. This of course means that it will resume when your computer wakes again and that will most likely be when you get back on your system in the morning to start work and be faced with the rest of the backup job.

Further to this last point, if you have ‘sleep when done’ as a setting then it will do just that. Good in one sense but not good when it’s resumed because you’ve woken it up and you’re in the middle of some work and then your system just drops to sleep. I appreciate this is as designed but the app should recognise who woke the system up and only sleep if it woke it up.

Summary

On the whole, it’s a great free disk duplication software for OSX with a few gripes related to scheduled backups that can be worked around.

References

• Carbon Copy Cloner
• SuperDuper

I walked into a minefield of problems when attempting to connect back to my Synology DS210j after a regular firmware update. The approved desktop application DSAssistant was used to upload and apply the firmware but something just went wrong. DSAssistant claimed the IP address was set, but the device wouldn’t accept web connections. I eventually found a solution that helped me get the device back up & running.

While most of my work is Mac/Unix based some of my business work is built on VB.NET/ASP.NET inside a Windows development. While striving for more robust, predictable code I chose to implement a Continuous Integration (CI) system. I had already used CI in large scale game production environments with great success following the TDD model.

Setting up a Continuous Integration server was the 1st task and I chose Jenkins for the task in hand. This had to be setup on a Windows system so that it could invoke Visual Studio 2010 in order to build the required projects parts that were a mix of VB applications and ASP.NET web services. We also had a requirement to use Perforce as the SCM of choice.