uplink.to

Monday morning did not begin well at the uplink.to campus:

Fortunately I have a 2TB external drive connected to my iMac, running Time Machine every day. You can pick up an external 1TB USB drive for less than $100. If you don’t have one already do it today, especially if you have a laptop. Setting up Time Machine is trivial. If you are on a PC the drive itself comes with backup software pre-installed on it you can start using right away as well as the Windows backup software.

I also have discrete file backups and GitHub repositories, but they are not as consistently updated as the automated backups are. I was a still a little nervous, if the backup file was corrupted, etc, etc. I booted off the Snow Leopard DVD (make sure you know where your install discs are located also!) by inserting the DVD and restarting with C pressed. The Disk Repair Utility was used to erase and reformat the drive. This was a tense few moments. I then ran the Time Machine restore option, picked the most recent backup image date, and the screen you see above was soon replaced with this:

You don’t even have to have the external drive plugged in all the time, just do a full image back up now at least. Beware though that the backup image file itself would become a single point of failure if a main drive goes down. Time Machine images are compressed deltas and have been known to be corrupted, so keep an alternate backup of the most critical files.

By all accounts, it was a beautiful day. The most I got to experience it though was the through the window next to the laptop! These pictures are from last year courtesy of sfcharterboat.com:

Jack London Square has been an epicenter of sailing this spring. The square was deserted a few years ago, it has definitely rebounded. Strictly Sail Pacific was back in town so the marinas of the square were festooned with sail boats and all the booths along the promenade. Oracle Racing had one of their catamarans on display there – more pics on my Flickr page.

In the space of a few weeks, new restaurants have opened to welcome the crews of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, about 10 boats of a custom class of ocean yachts. The Geraldton West Australia had been hit by a massive wave 250 miles offshore. Two injuries, but fortunately they were within range of the US Coast Guard who brought them back here to Coast Island. The Geraldton arrived a few days later, and left with the rest of the pack on the next leg through the Panama Canal.

I was fortunate to live in the county for a while and I’ve been a regular visitor there to enjoy the wine and racing since 1996! If you are thinking about moving up there check out Santa Rosa homes for sale. Here is one of the pics I took at the 2011 Indy Car race at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, it was our last chance to see Danica Patrick before the move to NASCAR.

What a complex, fascinating island it is. I think I was in the airport once, back when flying from London to Australia involved a couple of refueling hops. Now of course a conversation about F1 must include it too. Messing around with Google Maps it turns out the Bahrain land mass is almost a mirror image of the San Francisco Bay and delta.

Even before the discovery of oil Bahrain was rich and thriving with ocean traders and pearl divers, governed in some form since 700 BC. It has been controlled more or less by Al Khalifa family since 1790, ruling to this day under Islamic law, with a mix of British common law that is an important component in the liberalization of the island. Despite the massive petroleum wealth discovered in 1932, Bahrain today has a public debt at 75.3% of GDP, with half of the almost totally urban 1.2 million population below the poverty line and/or dependent on the government in some way. All this on an island the size of Durham County, North Carolina or Lake Mohave – 290 sq miles, with immense wealth and power at the top of the income distribution pyramid.

The Al Khalifa family carved a Hermann Tilke F1 track out of the desert, and owns half of the McLaren group. Sakhir circuit is built from gravel shipped to Bahrain from England, with adhesive sprayed on the sand to prevent it from blowing onto the track. I quickly found out the track is not included in F1 2011 for XBox 360 due to the uncertainty and eventually elimination of this race last year. The F1 2010 release has Bahrain, but in the “Endurance” configuration, not the “Grand Prix Circuit” used in F1 from 2004–2009, and from 2012 onwards. I saw an eBay listing for F1 2009 (not available for Xbox) and it was $234!

UPDATE: 2012 FORMULA 1 GULF AIR BAHRAIN GRAND PRIX results

Its been a pretty exciting season so far. New team and chassis configurations are randomizing the results through various mishaps as everyone acclimatizes to the new layouts. I decided to get F1 2011 for Xbox 360 to learn the tracks some more. It was great to drive the Chinese Grand Prix before the actual race and familiarize myself a little with the track map and driving experience. I had everything set to full computer assist of course, braking, tires, etc all on auto. And it was still a huge challenge. Coming off a recent run to complete Monster Jam, I was driving the car like a monster truck for the first few rounds with predictable results. Still great to experience the dash to the first turn as part of the pack and then the relentless demand to execute each corner, perfectly, every time or become isolated to the back rapidly. Even as a game developer who has written driving games myself, I’m still amazed how “feel” can be translated through just a screen and controller.

More real time pics on Twitter @PhotoUpLink

Braid Paisley, in a reflective mood.

This is the port I did of the iPhone version I worked on earlier this year. Enjoy!

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside…

Like millions of other people, I was sitting in front of a Mac with Xcode open when the news came that Steve Jobs passed away, deeply focused on the iPhone application I was working on. The day had already started off on a dark footing to say the least. Cupertino was front page, headline news already that morning.

Shareef Allman, an employee of Lehigh Hanson Cement Plant in Cupertino, began his 4am shift emptying a handgun and then an AK-47 killing three co-workers and injuring seven others. As I prepared to drive to work for a 10am start in Palo Alto from Oakland, Allman was running from police, armed and dangerous, in that area.

It was a dark and rainy morning also, a major storm also hit the Bay Area overnight. Power was out in some areas, flooding, and uprooted trees caused havoc with the morning commute and I drove down 880 through intermittent cloud bursts and across the Dunbarton Bridge into Palo Alto. Allman was still at large and had even attempted to carjack an HP employee near the HP campus close to the office park I was headed to. I was wary of the situation as I arrived at work, a mere 7 miles from Steve Job’s house.

By mid afternoon, the gunman was still on the loose in the Mountain View area, and several schools had been locked down as a house to house search continued. This still mattered somewhat as I went outside the building occasionally throughout the day. But life went on at work, and I focused on the task at hand, dealing with some release / retain issues in the iPhone code I was working on, and trying to trace object ownership through several NSArrays and NSDictionaries passing between subroutines. I was kind of stuck at that moment, so I reached out for some historical perspective.

This started with a thorough re-read of NSObject, and then a foray to the OpenStep timeline – Objective-C first emerged in Connecticut in the 80′s based on Smalltalk. In 1988, NeXT licensed Objective-C and used it for NextStep and then OpenStep which led to YellowBox etc and ultimately Mac OS X. Reading that lead me back to the object lifecycle discussion on apple.com, after a little biographical info on the NeXT company founding. So as Steve Jobs passed away a few miles from my desk, I was immersed about as deep as you could get into his life work.

I kept checking my Android phone for the latest on the gunman’s afternoon suicide as I read all this on my MacBook, and this is why I got the news of his death almost immediately. Like so many others, the man was a giant in my life, an almost constant mental companion and inspiration for 15 years, the moment was as if a power cord had been yanked from the wall to me, I just slumped forward onto the keyboard. It was a little early to be leaving the office, but clearly my work day was done. The streets were safe, the rain had stopped, and it was time to go home.