This week’s Tool of the Week is Dynamic Dummy Image Generator.
What it does:
Allows you to display custom sized dynamic images on any webpage using nothing but a normal image tag and a special URL.
When you need it:
How to use it:
The Example:
I’ve been trying to get Mozy backup to work for two months now. First of all, my harddrive is 300GB, and apparently this will take two weeks to backup over my connection. On top of that, there is no “start where you left off” feature, so anytime windows downloads an update and auto-restarts, I’m screwed. So, I can either turn that off, or never have a backup. Crap.
Let’s try plan B.
Went to Frye’s Electronics and picked up a Sabrent SATA 2.5″/3.5″ Hard Drive to USB 2.0 Docking Station, which comes with a one click backup button. Then I grabed a Hitachi Deskstar 500GB Sata HDD. Total cost: $99.00.
End goal is to have two or three HDD, once a week I’ll click the button and then grab the drive and toss it in my bag and take it to work and put it in my desk and swap it out with the drive in my desk and bring that one home. Rinse, wash, repeat. The other great thing about the dock is that it is scalable and useful. I can back up as many different computers and as much data as I want. I’m only limited by how many drives I want to buy.
So, a little trouble when trying to get the Hitachi drive to be recognized. I had to right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. Then I clicked on “Storage” and clicked “Disk Management”; Immediately some dialog thingy popped up asking if I wanted to do such-and-such and I said yes (without snapping a screenshot, oops). This was the end result:
It sees this drive as “drive 5″. Cool. Whatever.
So, now I right click on the drive and select something about “format” or “partition” (idk, couldn’t get a screen-shot, there’s only three options, you’ll figure it out) and a dialog pops up. I captured some screen caps of what I did along the way. My choices were based on almost nothing other than gut instinct. We’ll see how it works out:
(Selected “no” here because I’m planning on this being assigned dynamically because I’ll theoretically be swapping multiple drives out here and I want them all to be seen as the same drive by the computer. So maybe I should have chosen “Z” or something, idk…)
At this point I closed out of the dialog assuming I was done. No Dice. When I went back in I saw it was formatting. After about 15 minutes it was only at 8%:
So, it’s going to take a while. About an hour later it’s done. Apparently bad call on the not assigning a drive letter. It’s ok though, I just right click on the drive partition and select “Change drive letter and path…”
And hey, check it out! There it is!
Now I can easily use the software and one button backup that comes with the sabrent docking station.
This step is going to take a while…
About an hour in…
Went to bed, woke up, and my computer had crashed (it does this at least once a week, another reason Mozy wasn’t working). So I checked the backup drive. Nope. Didn’t get everything. Got about half of everything. Trying again…
I did a little research a few months back about Subversion Clients for Mac. I ended up switching to GIT, but since I already had this post mostly finished, here’s what I found. This is going to break a little from the traditional TOTW format since it’s more of a sampling of a lot of different tools. I’ve already posted about two of these before…
What it is:
Subversion is a semi-modern version control system. As I said, Git is quickly replacing it as the “next big thing”. But if you are going to do version control, and you’re not doing Git, you should at least consider Subversion (and I’d stay away from CVS, it’s old and borked). It allows you to “save states” of your program. So, instead of “save as” > “myProject1″, then “save as” > “myProject1working” and then “myProject1tryNewThing” etc, you would just have one copy of your project/file that you “commit” to your version control. Each commit lives as it’s own snapshot so that if you need to go back to another version, you just browse your history and restore that version. You can even “diff” your current version with any other older version to see what you changed if you’re trying to figure out how you broke something.
When you need it:
Anytime you do any software project at all, big or small, I’d say you need version control. But here’s the bullet list:
Working on a software project:
)There’s a few options out there, but no clear winner. On Windows, TortoiseSVN seems to be the clear winner, and is a great tool. Nothing stands out this way on Mac. At least nothing free. So here you’ll find a list of several Subversion clients for Mac. My favorite as of this writing is Versions, but it costs $60 (there’s a free 30 day trial). I recommend setting up a subversion server (either on your local machine, or corsair) and using it. Any job worth having is going to require you to use a version control system, so it’s best you become familiar with one now.
Here’s a question on StackOverflow discussing these plugins if you’re interested in learning a little more.
Using Subversion from command line
Martin Ott’s Binaries
Free Subversion Book
Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you’re a hardcore Subversion user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow. Versions is here now, so say hello to the fresh new look of your repository and start saying less to that command-line interface. Download the free demo to take it for a spin.
ZigVersion is an easy to use interface for Subversion, a popular open source version control system. Instead of simply reproducing the command line concepts as a graphical interface, we looked at the typical workflows of professional programmers and designed an interface around them.
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