Day: 21 August 2012

Amazon Glacier ⇥ shawnblanc.net

Just as I bitch and moan (footnote 2) about how unrealistic it is to host my music collection online, Amazon introduces a long-term backup solution. Shawn Blanc explains:

Storage costs are just $0.01/GB. That’s 9.3x cheaper than Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage and 12.5x cheaper than their Standard Storage. And Glacier gives you get the same data durability and reliability of the Standard Storage (99.999999999% durability).

Even better, one can transfer up to a gigabyte of data per month for free, and data retrievals are almost free (be sure to read the fine print). It would cost me less than $4 per month to host all my music on Glacier1, and just a few cents to access all the music I can handle. Looks interesting.

But Klint Finley isn’t convinced. He examined the terms of service and the fine print for Wired:

Because the service is designed for long-term archival needs, not active use, it’s understandable that the fees for retrieval will be high in comparison to the fees for storage to discourage the use of Glacier for general purpose storage. It will also take three to five hours to prepare an archive for downloading, which will also deter misuse of the service. Presumably, Amazon powers off the hardware until it’s needed.

This looks like a great service for long-term storage and backup, but not for active use. There goes my great idea.

  1. Cool2 name. ↥︎

  2. Stop that, Nick. ↥︎

New Hotness

I’m sure you’re familiar with the elementary school math problem where you need precisely four litres of water, but you only have unmarked containers of three and five litres. You’re supposed to juggle the water between the pails in order to get a nice, even four litres of total water.

Now picture that problem, but instead of water, you have terabytes of very precious personal data, music, photos, and videos. Instead of buckets, you have a few hard drives. And you’re not moving water as a trivial exercise, but making the move to a brand new computer to last the next five years.

I purchased a mid-2007 MacBook Pro soon after it launched. It came with Tiger (version 10.4.7, I believe), and has since been upgraded with every major (and minor) OS update, a new hard drive, and a few surprising tweaks. It has served me well in editing video and photos, and designing and building websites. It’s not just a computer any more—it’s the tool I’ve used for everything I’ve done to forge a career, and to become a better student. But it’s Old ‘N’ Busted.

On August 13, 2012, 1,865 days after placing my order for that MacBook Pro, I clicked the “Complete Order” button for a computer again, this time for a mid-2012 MacBook Air. New Hotness. It’s the 13″ model, because I tried the 11″ in an Apple Store and found Photoshop to be too cramped. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB, for future proofing, and maxed-out the processor.

It’s a huge upgrade. Not only is it a Pro to an Air, but more importantly, it’s a 2007 machine to a 2012 machine. It has a faster processor, despite being 0.4 GHz slower on paper1, faster memory (and twice as much of it), a solid-state drive, and longer battery life. It’s thinner and lighter than my Pro, it’s ridiculously powerful, and super quiet. It’s also my first unibody machine.

I will admit that it was a tough call to not choose a retina MacBook Pro. I’m mobile enough that I need a notebook, but when I’m at my desk, I connect to an external display. When I was 14, I saw a 30″ Cinema Display in person, and I’ve coveted it ever since. I purchased a Thunderbolt Display to accompany my Air, to and to replace a terrible Dell monitor. Finally, I get to own a display of nearly equivalent size, and with the same horizontal pixel count. It has a better panel, a bunch of connectors, and is about half the price, to boot.

But, as I said, I needed a flawless way to move my terabytes of stuff from one computer to another. Some things are easy: I have a bunch of movies I’ve ripped from DVDs or bought on iTunes kicking around on a MyBook, so I don’t have to move a single byte—I can just connect it to my Thunderbolt Display. Some things are a little more complicated, however. My music library is 300 GB, and is perhaps the most precious folder of data I have. Most everything else can be stored in the cloud, but my music cannot2.

Luckily, while I was looking for solutions to this mess, Paul Haddad pointed out an inexpensive Thunderbolt drive from Buffalo. I went ahead and picked up a terabyte model. I’ve split it right down the middle. Half is partitioned as a Time Machine drive for the Air, and the other half is for my iTunes library.

Everything else has to be moved over by hand, though, for two very good reasons:

  1. The Air’s drive isn’t big enough for the remainder of my data, so I can’t use Migration Assistant.

  2. I want to rid myself of the cruft I’ve built up over the years. I’m sure I have a bunch of preference files for applications I don’t have any more, documents I will never again touch, and things I simply don’t need to move over.

Most applications can be moved over with a drag and drop, or downloaded again from the Mac App Store. I had to deal with a bit of DRM nonsense on the Photoshop side, but a quick deactivation of my Pro and activation of the Air made it easier than I had anticipated. Indie applications like Yojimbo and all my Panic apps were a piece of cake to move (and Panic’s automatic serial number finder made that process totally painless).

Everything has been working swimmingly so far. I have been consistently blown away by how fast, quiet, sturdy, and elegant the MacBook Air is. The Thunderbolt Display is a wonderful piece of hardware, though it wouldn’t have killed Apple to add a 3.5mm headphone jack. Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome upgrade. I have managed to push my MacBook Pro (and its original MagSafe cable) to five years of great use in the classroom, across France in a TGV, across the Atlantic in a Boeing, and right here on my desk. I feel exceedingly lucky.

  1. Yes, I’m aware of the megahertz myth, and the gigahertz gambit (or whatever it’s called). ↥︎

  2. Neither realistically nor cheaply, anyway. It would cost at least $600 per year to host it with Amazon S3. I can’t use iTunes Match, because it has a 25,000 song limit. ↥︎

Passwords Have Never Been Weaker, and Crackers Are Stronger ⇥ arstechnica.com

Dan Goodin wrote a great article for ArsTechnica about the dangerous new combination of incredibly fast hardware, and lazy password re-use:

Most importantly, a series of leaks over the past few years containing more than 100 million real-world passwords have provided crackers with important new insights about how people in different walks of life choose passwords on different sites or in different settings. The ever-growing list of leaked passwords allows programmers to write rules that make cracking algorithms faster and more accurate; password attacks have become cut-and-paste exercises that even script kiddies can perform with ease.

The numbers alone in this article are astounding, but it gives a little more insight into the recent surge in compromised password databases.

This article reminded me to check in on Mat Honan’s nightmare. It turns out that he recovered around 75% of his data:

When Drivesavers began looking at my machine, the first 6GB of data held a clean install of Mac OS X. And after that, all they saw was row after row after row of zeroes. That data had been zeroed out. Overwritten. No recovery.

And then numbers. That beautiful hex data started rolling across the screen. Yes, 25 percent of my drive was gone and beyond repair. But the remaining 75 percent? Hope for life. DriveSavers called me to come look at what they had found, and my wife and I drove up there on Wednesday morning.

I’m happy for Honan that he got the vast majority of his data back. As he notes, it’s disturbing how easy it was to gain access to his accounts, and how widespread these practices are.

PC Obsolescence is Obsolete ⇥ extremetech.com

Joel Hruska for ExtremeTech:

Are there people who need more than the 8GB of RAM that the lower-tier MacBook Pro w/RD offers? Yes. But if you’re one of those people, chances are you know it already. There’s no operating system or general software suite coming down the pipe that’s going to push the 8GB limit, nothing in the works that will unexpectedly turn your hard drive (assuming you still own a hard drive) into a chittering swarm of crickets.

This is something I’ve been saying for ages, at least since the last time a friend asked what laptop they should buy. I answered that it pretty much doesn’t matter any more for the average consumer, because everything out there is ridiculously powerful today, and will continue to be for several years.