It's a Doozy!
http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/
Now you can go digging through that chest of crap from the 1990s and pull out your favorite cute puppies calendar. In 2010, you can re-use calendars from 1999, 1993, 1982, 1971, 1965, 1954, 1943, and 1937.
This morning I received a call from a gent with a Boston accent. He indicated that he represents a firm that is displeased with some data I’m using on isnoop.net. According to the caller, my theater listings page is using his client’s intellectual property and I’m not properly licensed to do so. The lawyer seemed nice enough. Perhaps I should have kept him on the phone longer so he could tick up some more billable hours…
Like some other things I’ve developed, theater listings was a simple service I wrote for myself to clean up an otherwise cluttered interface and make the data available in my favorite feed reader. Over the years, many people have written with questions and thanks regarding the page. Thank you to everyone who used the service. I hope you might find some of my other tools just as useful.
As of now, the theater listings page is closed. If you still want this information in your web browser, check out Google’s movie listings service. For you feed reader junkies, Yahoo Pipes is widely known as a useful service for turning any web page into an RSS feed.
I’ll investigate the possibility of re-sourcing the data, but don’t get your hopes up. Also, for those who are already firing up their email clients to ask me for the source code, hold your horses. I’ve been working up a post on ethical screen scraping and now I can finally share it without being hypocritical. I won’t share the source, but look forward to an interesting and useful guide to capturing and reusing data on the web, including some advice that should help prevent you from getting your own C&D.
The Drobo storage device is a beautiful piece of technology. It is quite possibly the most user-friendly RAID (like) device on the market. With very little effort, you can have 3TB+ of failure-protected storage at your fingertips.
The problem with the Drobo is that in order to change its true data capacity on the fly and dynamically share it between multiple volumes, it must create “pretend” volumes in even-sized chunks. 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB are the options currently available. This means that if you have 1.2 TB of actual space, the Drobo will tell your OS you have two or more TB.
This isn’t usually a problem except when you are running low on space (the Drobo is good to warn you when this happens) or when you are using the Drobo as a Time Machine storage device. Time Machine will continue filling up a drive until it is almost full.
In this post, I will provide you with a simple approach that will allow you to isolate your Time Machine data and give it room to grow in the future.
Preparation
If you have an empty Drobo, I suggest you format it with the largest size you feel comfortable with. Drobospace has a good article explaining the tradeoffs of formatting with a larger partition size.
Open Apple’s Disk Utility and click the drive icon (not its nested partition(s)) for your Drobo.
Next, click the Partition tab and examine your data volumes. You should see one or more named segments in the Volume Scheme section.
Most likely you have just one large volume here named Drobo. If you already have more than one volume, we will work with the largest one.
Making the Time Machine volume
If you already have a dedicated partition for Time Machine, you can skip to the next segment.
You should see a small resize handle in the lower right corner of the DLP. If not, you have journaling disabled. See the note on enabling journaling below and then return here.
Press the plus button below the Volume Scheme display to create a new volume. Name this volume something descriptive like Drobo Time Machine. Make sure to use the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.
Next, drag the volume size divider so your new Time Machine partition will have a much space as you can see yourself giving it down the road. I’ll create an 8TB partition and allocate a 4TB volume to Time Machine.
Finally, press the Apply button and let OSX create the new volume. Note that the Drobo may throw some free space warnings during this procedure. This is merely an effect of the OSX partitioning process. This procedure can take a long time depending on how full and how fragmented your Drobo is.
Give Time Machine only what it needs
Now that you have a volume just for Time Machine, you need to shrink it down to just the size you want TM to use for now.
If I have 1.6TB of usable space available on my Drobo, Time Machine will eventually gobble all that up if I leave the new 4TB TM volume as-is. The final step is to shrink that volume down to the right size for now and to expand it only when you are ready.
In Disk Utility, your new volume should have a small resize handle in the lower right corner. Grab that handle and move it up to shrink the volume. I want my Drobo to always have at least 1TB available for usable storage, so would shrink the TM volume down to 600GB.
Press apply and let the Mac resize the partition. Your Time Machine volume is now the perfect size for your backup needs. When you need to enlarge that volume in the future, just go back into Disk Utility and drag the volume handle down to the desired size.
A word on journaling
If the options to resize or split a partition are disabled in Disk Utility, your drive is either not formatted as Mac OS Extended or has journaling disabled. Having the wrong format type will require a volume reformat in order to continue. No journaling is a quick and simple fix:
Open Terminal.app
Run the command “diskutil enableJournal ‘/Volumes/My Drobo’”
Substitute “My Drobo” for the appropriate name.
Once you have completed the volume creation and resizing procedure, you probably won’t need to re-disable journaling. If you have a good reason to turn it back off, run the command “diskutil disableJournal ‘/Volumes/My Drobo’”.
There was a time several months ago when Apple Time Capsule devices required connected Drobos to have journaling disabled, but that problem has long since been fixed. Journaling should be enabled on all Mac OS Extended volumes unless you know what you are doing.
For more information, Apple provides an excellent KB article on the topic.
Summary
I hope this explainer proves useful to you if you find yourself in this situation. Please feel free to share your experience in the comments below.
My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.
Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.
If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.
Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.
Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!
Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!
This is the first growing season in our new house. We have quite a bit of gardening space, so my wife and I will be attempting to fill that space with beautiful and edible plants.
In an attempt to keep this information handy for my own reference, I have decided to start a journal. I’ve made it public in the hopes that it someone might care to share some advice or learn from my inevitable mistakes.
The blog is called The Nu Leaf.
I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.
Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/
Add it to your calendar:
I worked at a company that made accessories for telecommunications equipment. Most of the telco equipment still uses deprecated RS-232 serial ports, and so all of their products do too.
At one point, I was tasked with making a device that could send an identical serial port data stream to several devices at once. Shortly thereafter, the Megapus was born.
This crazy device took 1 serial port data stream and a 12VAC power supply and split it out into twenty devices at once.
We considered calling it the Icosapus considering the 20 outputs, but I actually crated the device to be infinitely scalable simply by adding more I/O cards with a power supply every fifth one.
The PCBs (printed circuit boards) I used happened to be unpopulated parts for other products that repurposed nicely after shuffing a few components around. Hence the two circuit boards for each layer of four outputs.
In my previous post, I mentioned getting a new motherboard. I’ve just uploaded new photos with more details on the current status of the project.
The new motherboard is Mini-ITX with a 1GHz processor. For a power solution, I got a picoPSU-120 and a 6.6A brick converter to go with it. It’s a clean and elegant solution that keeps the wires in the case at a bare minimum and makes for much more free space. I’ll now have room to put two full size speakers in it.
Not mentioned in the previous post: Damn Small Linux is set up to connect to a network and start playing music on boot. Using Monkey web server and PHP, I created an interface that allows someone to pick any shoutcast station and control the media player, XMMS. The audio plays to some PC speakers I’ve connected until I get a small speaker amp and some decent speakers to install.
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a web radio boom box. I’ve hollowed out a perfectly good radio and made room for a tiny motherboard and power supply that are set up to run Damn Small Linux off of a USB flash drive. There is a wireless card inside, and the box is configured to sniff out wireless networks and automatically start streaming web radio on any friendly Wi-fi network.
I’ve come across several obstacles along the way, ranging from the actual hollowing out of the stereo to linux wireless headaches to my most recent discovery: the new, smaller motherboard I found for this project has very anemic audio output.
I fully expect to install a small audio amplifier to drive the speakers that go with the stereo, but sound quality is still very tinny even with the EQ fully tweaked out in XMMS (a Linux Winamp clone). I’ll have to do some more experimenting to see if this motherboard can be made viable. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work on my other projects. More about those later.
