NSConference 2009

oops! Missed a couple of blog posts but I've been away for a couple of days.

Well the MacBook Air is now sold via eBay but I won't be able to wipe and rebuild it until the weekend. So it's made the journey with me down to Hatfield in Hertfordshire for the very first (but probably not the last) NSConference 2009 - a tech conference for Mac developers run by MacDevNet

One minor point before talking about the conference, is the fact that I'd left my USB ethernet adapter at home resulting in my not being able to access the internet from my room at the conference. Instead, I've had to rely on WiFi in the main conference room for internet access. No big deal but another barrier thrown up by the lack of standard ports on the MBA, much as it irks me to point that out!

But anyway, back to the conference.....

Whilst not a Mac developer, I decided to invest two days of my time by supporting the efforts of the MacDevNet (or actually Scotty and Tim) by attending the very first NSConference. This two day conference has been put together as an alternative to the rather expensive proposition (well at least for us Europeans) of travelling to WWDC over in San Francisco. Whilst obviously not being able to offer the scope and breadth of sessions available in WWDC, Scotty and Tim have done a fantastic job of arranging a number of highly information sessions covering a wide range of topics and subject matter.

For this first year, the sessions have been arranged as a single stream releasing all the delegates from any problematic decision making on what sessions to see. As a non-developer, I was a bit concerned that the sessions would be pitched way over my head, resulting in frustration and possibly leaving me with an inferiority complex! However, although the majority of sessions have been techy, they've all been extremely informative and stimulating both in the range of subjects covered, but also in the way the subjects have been approached.

Of course, one of the major benefits of these sorts of events has always been the networking side and this NSConference has been no exception. It's been great to meet up with UK, European and International Mac developers, many of whom I've collaborated with in the past when producing ScreenCastsOnline shows. Obviously, I can't mention everybody but it's been great to meet up with Danny Gregg and some of the RealMac software guys, Scott Morrison from Indev Software (the creator of the invaluable MailTags and Mail Act-on, all the way from Canada), Uli from Elgato, Dave Verwer from Shiny, Mike Lee from Delicious Monster and Tapulous, Fraser Speirs from Connected Flow, the list goes on and on.

I really think that this is the start of an extremely significant annual event here in the UK, one that has the potential to expand beyond its current remit.

I will definitely be making it a permanent feature on my calendar.

Congrats to both Tim and Scotty for organising such a fantastic event.

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Backup Strategy revised...

So my external storage comprises 2 x RAID arrays both configured as RAID 0 or scary RAID as some people like to call it.

The reason I originally went with RAID 0 was two fold, one it was fast and secondly, my eSata card didn't support RAID 5. The reason for two RAIDs was to use one as a master and one as a backup.

Sweet!

Until the backup RAID failed for no apparent reason a couple of days ago. Ok, so I still had the main RAID but as this was also in RAID 0 format, it gave me a couple of hours of palpitations whilst I made some space available on the Mac Pros to make an immediate copy. Unless you've got two copies of something, you ain't got a copy at all!

Actually, it wasn't that bad as I'd taken a full backup of the RAID up to the end of February and moved that offsite. So I really did have two copies of the bulk of my project files plus most if not all of my really important documents are backed up between Amazon S3 and Dropbox. Plus, my video project files since February were also stored on one of the Mac Pros, so it wasn't too perilous.

But I had to fix the backup RAID and decided that I needed to come up with an alternative to RAID 0 moving forward, that included the provision for moving backups off site. BTW, I can't really rely on a cloud based backup solution for my video projects, the shear amount of data generated each week makes it impossible with my limited upload speed. I have to backup to physical media.

So this is what I'm planning....

The SCO Archive (all my screencast video project files) I've pruned down to 1.1TB. I had a lot of intermediate files that I could delete and recreate if needed so there was no point keeping those. As it's over 1TB, I'll need to split it over separate drives (didn't really want to buy any more drives and the biggest I have are 1TB) so I'll probably go for a Firewire 800 based Drobo as permanent storage. I have 4x750GB in one of the existing RAIDS that will give me 2TB space so will give me another years expansion even without upgrading the drives. I know the new Drobo Pro is out soon, but I'll wait until they are tried and tested and also a lot cheaper!

I'll also be creating a mirrored pair of 1TB drives for new additions to the SCO video archive. So when I create new content, this will be backed up to the mirrored pair and then also to the Drobo. The beauty of a mirrored pair (or RAID 1) is that each disk is an exact copy of each other. If one disk fails, your data is still on the other disk and when you introduce a new drive, the mirror is created.

There is one other benefit too! At monthly intervals, I can deliberately break the mirror and convert one of the drives into a standard drive which then becomes my offsite backup. Whack in a new drive and re-create the mirror and repeat the cycle for as many times as I want.

As well as the SCO Archive mirror, I'll create a 1TB mirror for all my media, again, will probably last for a while before I fill it up. Not too concerned about off site backups for this but would be a nice to have!

And finally, another mirrored pair for any other data that I need to keep, not connected with video projects. I may also mirror this to the cloud using Jungledisk, Mozy or BackBlaze. I may wait to see if Amazon introduce a service that allows you to send in a drive for them to copy locally in to S3 which you can then incrementally update - they are thinking about it and it would be excellent if they did introduce it.

In the medium term, I can well see me investing in a Drobo Pro, once the FW Drobo starts to reach capacity with the SCO Archive, but I'll still need the mirrored pairs for offsite backup.

I'd probably re-use the FW Drobo as a separate media only storage device, perhaps hooked up to the Mac mini once in place as the Media Center (or Apple TV Take 3 whenever that appears!)

Anything I've left out?

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So just what does QuickPress do?

Ah, it looks like a simple way to quickly post a blog post from the WordPress dashboard. You might want to ignore this post!

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New iPhone blog presentation...

If you're reading this blog via an iPhone, you will have noticed a few changes!

All down to a rather smart Wordpress plugin called WPTouch (available from Brave New Code)

Thanks to Legion for the suggestion.

It took all of ten minutes to install and configure and I think adds a lot to the readability of the blog on the iPhone or iPod touch.

If you don't like it and would rather have the original theme, you can switch it off at the bottom of the page.

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Time for a re-think...

Well, if you follow my blog (or watch the show), you'll know that I picked up a second Intel based Mac Pro when the new Mac Pros came out a few weeks ago. I just had to take advantage of the great savings available by getting one of the "End of life" Mac Pros, basically picking up a non "Nehalem" 8 core plus 16GB memory for the same price as a new iMac.

The master plan was to use the second Mac Pro as a dedicated video editing machine, keeping the existing Mac Pro as my general purpose desktop machine but combing both machines as a virtual cluster when encoding. In order to make the best use of my 30" monitor, I setup a KVM to share the monitor between both machines.

After a couple of weeks, a couple of observations...

The KVM works well but has proved to be extremely disruptive to my workflow. Although the idea of a dedicated editing machine is fine, I've found that I don't work that way in reality. When editing, I still need to do other tasks and found myself switching to the desktop machine much more than I anticipated.

I ended up with just using the KVM to switch the monitor but still ended up with 2 mice and 2 keyboards (yes I know about Teleport and Synergy) and really, it's become more of a pain than I anticipated.

I really missed the three monitor setup I had with the original Mac Pro and found reverting back to a two monitor setup (albeit, two monitors on each machine due to the KVM) to be a retrograde step.

So I've had a re-think about the current setup.

What I think I'll do is to revert to a single desktop for both my normal day to day computing and video editing, and go back to the three monitor setup. However, I still want the second Mac Pro for encoding duties so that's going to replace the current G5 tower used by my wife, and I'll probably sell the G5 tower.

Just a slight change to the mix is the introduction of the new MacBook Pro, ordered to replace the MacBook Air. I'll configure the new laptop to do all podcast publishing duties including publishing my RSS feeds (via Feeder) and publishing my ScreenCastsOnline website (using Rapidweaver). This will enable me to make sure I can still publish when travelling without having to transfer all the settings from my desktop machine to the laptop each time if I know I'm going to be away. I'm also hoping to do a lot of work over the next few months updating the ScreenCastsOnline website so if it's on the laptop, I can do it from anywhere (even the living room!). Updates to the blog are covered as that's based on Wordpress so I can update that from any machine.

I'll probably also change the configuration of my iPhone so it synchronises with the MacBook Pro rather than the desktop machine, again, that's always been a pain when preparing to do any travelling.

Another big area of change is in my backup strategy but I'll save that for another blog post!

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