FIx a Time Machine verification error for Dummies

This is a follow up post to this one, as I realized I am dumber than I thought when it comes to using the command line interface; so for all of you fellow stoopid users (starting with myself the next time it happens), here is a step-by-step guide derived from the excellent one by Garth Gillespie.

You know you are in trouble when you see this error message:

This means the -sparsebundle file that contains your backup is marked as “bad”. Why is that I haven’t been able to find out, and apparently nobody knows yet; it does not depend on the NAS you use (I have Synology, but I saw the exact same situation reported on a number of other brands).

On your Mac, mount the external drive that contains the .sparsebundle files, launch Terminal, and get root:

sudo su -

enter your password and then

chflags -R nouchg /Volumes/Backups/2013\ MBA\ of\ Gianni.sparsebundle

this takes a while to complete, in my case about 35 minutes; you know it has finished when it returns to the prompt. If at any point in time you want to know what’s going on, you can launch another Terminal window and use the commands: top or ps -e  to list the running processes, q to finish; Garth suggests tail -f /var/log/fsck_hfs.log to watch lines as they are added to the fsck_hfs.log file, ctrl-C when you’re done.

the .sparsebundle file path must be written using the rather arcane Terminal syntax: to find the precise path I use the excellent Pathfinder replacement for Finder, which has a very useful Copy path as > Terminal command

when it’s done, type

hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify -noautofsck /Volumes/Backups/2013\ MBA\ of\ Gianni.sparsebundle

which will result in:

at this point, if needed, FSCK is running already, and the file tail will show something like this over some time (couple of hours, but maybe more):

Now we can go back to Garth’s guide; type

hdiutil detach /dev/disk3s2

When complete, you need to edit an plist file within the sparsebundle that records the state of the backup. On the top level of the sparsebundle find a file called com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist. Edit it and remove these two nodes:

- <key>RecoveryBackupDeclinedDate</key>
- <date>{whatever-the-date}</date>

Finally you want to change <key>VerificationState</key><integer>2</integer>

to <key>VerificationState</key><integer>0</integer>

Now you can eject the network share and have Time Machine give it another go. After the (long) verification step, backups should proceed once again.

Creativity unbound

I ‘m not sure about the year, must have been the late Eighties. Lotus, a company built around easy to understand desktop software introduced a new product, called Lotus Notes, and we had to launch it on the italian market.

Problem is, nobody understood what Notes really did. We didn’t, journalists didn’t, potential clients didn’t. A classic case of a solution in search of a problem.

What we understood, however, are a few use cases, and around these we built a play on collaboration, the power of asynchronous communication, replication, and a few other things. We didn’t have client testimonials, so we invented two fictitious companies, one backward company called Salumificio Porcelli (loosely translatable as “McPigs salami factory”) and the forward looking Frizzi & Lazzi (“Jokes & Puns”) which were dealing with exactly the same problem, hiring a junior sales executive: request forms must be filled and transmitted between the requisitioning office in Roma and the headquarters in Milano, reviewed and approved. An incident causes the whole thing to be bounced from one employee to another without much notice.

In the end, however, the modern Frizzi & Lazzi overcomes all the hurdles and completes its task without breaking a sweat, while the antiquated Salumificio Porcelli gives up, showing what a difference it makes to adopt a modern collaboration software!

This the plot; in the space of three weeks we wrote the play and “hired” the players, all of them volunteer employees of Lotus Italy, including the CFO Ernesto (the moustached gentlemen reading the intros) the CEO (yours truly), sales, tech support, marketing, receptionist – almost everybody ended up doing something and although we had to pull a few allnighters for rehearsals while we carried our our day jobs, we had an insane amount of fun doing it.

Our marketing agency built a double theatrical stage with a screen showing the product at work in the middle to allow for the conversation between the offices. The application shown during the demo was also locally custom written and tested; everybody got engrossed in making this thing a success: I do not remember exactly who sourced the huge mortadella sausage whose dusting by Enrico provokes the laugh at 7:38 but I remember we ate it afterwards.

The result was luckily captured for posterity and if you speak italian, you may enjoy it below:

Obviously it was meant to be a funny play, so parts were allocated to stir even more laughs, primarily among ourselves: so the snappy, impatient manager was played by placid Enrico, I played the lowest-ranking employee, Angelo (our oldest colleague) played the “junior sales exec” and so forth.

I doubt our US or European HQ ever knew what we were doing, I don’t seem to remember we asked permission, but again, Lotus was never a company where people asked much permission to do anything.

The PC industry is looking for a future

This story had been rumoured a lot in the last few weeks, and it finally happened: Micheal Dell is taking the company he founded private with the help of Microsoft.

So now Microsoft has its own world-class smartphone maker (Nokia), its own world-class computer maker (Dell) to complement its other existing hardware businesses (Xbox, accessories, Surface) – Ramin says this is a far cry from a unified hardware business and he’s right, but I retorted that in all this hodgepodge of disparate businesses the only entity making money (and lots of it) is good ol’ Microsoft software, which therefore should call the shots.

When I was discussing this deal, a number of questions arose:

Q: Is the industry abandoning its tested-and-true (sort of) open paradigm, in favor of a closed stack more similar to Apple’s?

A: Hard to say. I think Microsoft is still weighing the pros and cons of the two approaches: the risk of killing the hen who lays the golden eggs is very big, which may be the reason Redmond is sneaking into the driver seat of Nokia and Dell without however an overt buyout which could scare off other manufacturers.

Q: Will Michael Dell end up running Microsoft?

A: I think there is more than an hint in that direction: Dell is the kind of visionary industry figure Ballmer has ceased to be long ago. However I still maintain that a lot of Apple’ success is due to its superior software, and with all due respect for big Mike, I don’t think he gets software

Q: Is this good for the industry?

A: Absolutely yes, especially becase it will trigger a domino effect with the other big guys. What will Lenovo do? What will Samsung do? This industry does not perform well without the periodic mass extinctions and this looks has just like a meteor hurtling towards the planet.

Q: What will happen next?

A: for one thing, expect more vigorous competition. Full stacks will mean more integrated products, focused much more on the user experience and much less of the technicalitis of protocols, standards and the like. Apple does not have the answer to all questions and – besides – it’s an Apple without the genius of Steve, so a much more approachable one.

 

 

iPad charting: some love from @lovely_djay

Had you been a faithful reader of this blog (haven’t you regretted this already several times?) you would remember this post about Lovely Charts, a brave attempt to make charting slightly less obvious, monotone and Powerpoint-dull.

Jérôme Cordiez brings us an exquisitely superfluous – but exactly for this reason totally necessary – application which brings charting to the iPad in the way it was meant to be. Pretty basic functionality so far, needs hues, more shapes, more text options, some 3D, but you should really fork over the four bucks to encourage JC to continue the development. Me, I just suspect I will take every opportunity to illustrate my thoughts in flow charts…

Best. Train. App.

Ever.

I use trains in Italy and France; some of the trains I use go from Italy to France and viceversa. I have never used a train in Germany. Yet the best ever iPad application to check train schedules, especially when you cross borders is done by Deutsche Bahn, which obviously must access a database of international train schedule that must hardly be proprietary to them; unlike their “competitors” in other countries, however, they realize that people, especially around Europe, may need to cross borders and therefore provide this unique service that had me remove all other train apps from my iPad, as I don’t really need them.

Just about the only thing you cannot do on it (yet) is buy a ticket when you’re not traveling with DB, which is an entirely forgivable sin, methinks. You may say “But if you can’t buy tickets, how do the monetize this app?” Well, sooner or later train markets will be liberalized (ha!) and consumers such as myself are being exposed to the DB brand in a context of relevance and quality; how can this hurt brand perception and, given the opportunity, fail to orient my choices?

I wish SNCF and Ferrovie dello Stato would simply copy it, but I know there’s no chance: too smart!

Managing complex projects

This is a post for all the project-management junkies out there (and given the size of my audience, it is a fairly large group. Not !)

I am about to kick-start another very large client project which will require iron-fisted project management skills to stay on time. So I am dusting PM skills which I honed when I was at IBM, nearly 30 years ago. I was put in charge of a cumbersome but really powerful application program (when IBM still made application software, sigh!) called CIPREC.

It had very advanced time leveling and resource allocation and optimization modules, but you had to program the beast in near-Assembler, it ran on a /370 CPU with MVS (or VM, if you were lucky); there were no more than maybe 50 people in all IBM worldwide who knew anything about CIPREC and when it got our of beta it was so buggy I had to do tests on the night shift to avoid pissing off the sysadmins (believe or not, IBM had a night shift then).

As usual with PM software, reporting was the stumbling block (that, and PERT unbundling, but this got solved later on with more capable graphical interfaces) and I was the undisputed worldwide God of CIPREC reporting – peer recognition ranked very high back then!

Fast forward to today, I am playing with Merlin, a rather capable product which – believe it or not – is Mac-only ! Why would you cut yourself out of 90% of the corporate market who is the largest user of PM software is a total mystery to me, but there you go!

Merlin is great at managing data entry and resource allocation, but I’d definitely welcome a much stronger ability to write my own reports – a surprise they did not imagine you would need that.

Maybe they monitor blogs…

For some reason…

…since yesterday when I open an Office document (PPT, DOC or XLS) it now launches iWork instead of OpenOffice.

I am sure I ticked some box somewhere, but for the life of me….

Someone please explain…

…why some apps can read the operating systems network settings and therefore automatically activate the proxy script when I’m behind the corporate firewall, and deactivate it when I’m outside? I would have never expected (perhaps unfairly) that level of user-friendliness on my Windows PC, but I did on Linux and even more now on Mac OS.

I tell you this is mighty practical – it is the reason I have effectively switched from Firefox to Chrome – no other.

Another example: why can’t Twitterdeck do that ? Is it the Twitter API or is there a secret handshake I need to perform?

Old apps, new apps

I’ve had it! After months of wrangling with a stubborn printing problem that only affects my MacBook Pro (not any of the kids’ nor Mirella’s iMac) I am dropping OpenOffice in favor a Apple’ Pages who reads and writes .doc  but prints and saves in PDF as well.

Don’t say I haven’t tried ! I must have left posts in at least half a dozen OO support boards, but nobody else seems to have the same problem.

And I’ve started using Dropbox, a nice little app that allows you to share a folder with as many computers as you want; the client links to your account and mirrors the shared folder on each computer – an old-fashioned replica, no less – reminding me of when Ray, then at Groove, used to say it is on the edges (now he says it’s in the cloud).

Cruise

Seems that the bubble-inspired love for alternate spelling of product names did not end up in the same tar pit as Lehman futures.

Weeks after the Chrome hoopla, there’s a new browser in town, check it out.

I have a hard time imagining anything new in the browser space, after tabs and decent Java, but I’m happy to be proven wrong and surprised, so I downloaded Cruz and will be using as an alternative to Firefox over the next few weeks; one thing I can tell you. I fired it up on this same machine alongside Firefox and loaded exactly the same pages, then checked out my System Monitor for memory consumption. Result:

• Firefox = 211 MB of real memory
• Cruz = 95 MB

So it is possible to cruise leaner, after all…