Torsten Curdt’s weblog

While I am heading off to Bali there still will be the CocoaHeads Frankfurt on Monday. For more information check on upcoming or join us on mixxt. It’s unfortunate I can’t be there. But you guys will have fun. I am sure I will too :-D

So for those in Frankfurt: Monday 8pm. CocoaHeads.

Back in 2 weeks.

Whenever you release a product it is important to measure how you are doing in terms of adoption. Unfortunately the number of downloads is a very bad metric. Just because someone downloaded the application does not mean that he is actually using it. And someone could download the application multiple times and so on. All my Cocoa applications are using Sparkle for software updates. It’s the one time where all of your users check back on your server. So the idea was simple: just let’s include a unique identifier with the software update check and we are golden.
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Instruments and DTrace are extremely valuable tools for inspecting your software and to track down problems. Be it memory leaks or performance bottlenecks. Let me walk you through a real profiling session here.
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I’ve just pushed out the new FeedbackReporter release. It comes with quite a few changes that deserve the jump from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0. The dialog is no longer modal and the UI a little refined. Access to the framework is now provided through a Singleton. Using a delegate you can now send along arbitrary data on the data submission. It’s now also localized. Current languages are English and German. The source code plus a sample application is now included in the distribution.

Check out the release notes for more details.

Recently I got myself a Time Capsule to give me and the people around me a more effortless backup experience. Unfortunately I found backups sometimes to take quite long. Especially on the hourly backup cycle it feels like constant backups. Occasionally I have seen “Finishing backup” for more than an hour.

It might actually be related to my terrible signal of the Time Capsule. Seems like I need to give Apple Support a call. (*sigh*) On 5Ghz n-only I am not getting a full signal standing 4 meters away from it. I can barely leave the room. Or it shows full reception and as soon as I try to access the web it just drops the connection. On 2Ghz n-only it seems both the Airport Express and the LinkedSys WRT54g still give better reception than the Time Capsule. It seems the g/n mode works best for me while I really hoped for the 5Ghz multi-channel speed. Buy anyway!

I was curious what acutally gets backed up to see why it really takes so long. I found this command line tool extremely useful.

tms snaphots
tms delta 12 11

You first can list the available backup snapshots and then get a delta of what files have been saved. If you are also annoyed by the limited Time Machine preferences you might want to give the Time Machine Editor a try. It lets you adjust the backup schedule to something a little more sensible.