How to unbork a Time Machine Restore

I’ve restored my Mac Mini from Time Machine twice now, and both times, I had permissions issues. Since I forgot how I solved it last time and had to thrash around again, I thought it good to blog it here for the next time. (Provided I remember to check here)

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=557041

Based on this post, I finally remembered that I needed to run the following command:

chown -R username:username /Users/username

For some reason, the user account got restored with username:staff, which was breaking things.

everytimezone.com

This is the coolest, most usable time zone conversion site I’ve ever seen!

Asus Eee PC 900 + Windows 7 = not half bad

Inspired by a blog post from MSDN (via @lancespeelmon) and emboldened by a post from@matro about an dirt simple USB memory stick-based install of the Windows 7 public Release Candidate, I decided to change the OS on my recently acquired (thanks Woot!) and upgraded (HT to @koralesky for advice and NewEgg for the cheap upgrades) Asus Eee PC 900.

It was relatively painless:

• Downloaded Windows 7 Release Candidate
• Turned a memory stick into a bootable Windows 7 installer using these great instructions (courtesy of @matro via @nampahc). Used Virtual Clone Drive to mount the RC ISO file to complete step #5.
• Installed Asus Eee PC 900 VGA Driver linked from this blog, because Windows 7 was happy with the built-in driver that provided only an awkward, stretched 800×600 and I was not.

And now I have the most responsive and most comfortable OS on my LapEee since I bought it. I really tried to like Eeebuntu, but the open bug with hidden wireless connections and intermittent pausing left me wanting more.

Not sure if I’d pay for Windows 7 once the trial license runs out, but the likelihood of me trying out another OS for the foreseeable future just went way down.

UPDATE #1

Added MSDN blog post linked by Lance Speelmon that first got me thinking this would not be a patently insane and futile undertaking.

About to try AntiVir Personal Edition for my antivirus and will report back if it fails miserably. Has worked well for about a year on Vista box. If that doesn’t work, will try AVG Free which seems to be Windows 7 certified.

When Is Good: the Holy Grail of casual meeting scheduling

Thanks to the folks at Calendar Swamp, I came across something I’ve been searching for (and resigning myself to write someday) for a great long while:

http://whenisgood.net/

Background

Before I extoll its virtues, a little back story. We have a crusty old Perl/CGI app at work that a student worker wrote for us many moons ago. While it still serves its purpose, it has several flaws:

• It requires the organizer to install a full copy of the source code in public web space, which must have Perl/CGI capabilities.
• There is no update mechanism, which stinks given the number of copies floating around.
• The UI was current circa 1998.
• If it breaks, we can *probably* fix it.
• There is no way to clean up old scheduling requests short of connecting via SSH and breaking out good, old-fashioned “rm”. [Note: I LOVE the command line myself, but it's a black box to most users]

I’ve always kept my eyes out for a replacement, but all the flaws aside, it solves one problem area extremely well: It lets a disparate group of people with no central shared calendaring system throw their available times for a given week at it and lets the organizer find the time that is most suitable for most (if not all) attendees. Beyond that, it’s dirt simple to use–just click the square once for “OK” and it turns green, click again for “Not OK” and it turns red. The organizer gets a summary page with a smiley icon on all good times and red or green blocks scaled by their relative “goodness” or “badness”.

I’ve looked at several others (Diarised, Doodle, and newest on the block, TimeBridge), but they are all overly-constrained, usually in the sense that you must propose specific dates/times, rather than collect a broad sample of who’s available when and look at your options.

Enter When Is Good

This is the first app I’ve seen that really matches what we have in house, but in a modern way. (Not to mention that we don’t have to maintain it.) It honors the spirit of simplicity and doesn’t put the onus on the organizer to pick some target times out of thin air.

Here are the things I like most about it:

• Can click & drag over several cells
• No sign up is required by anyone
• It has a lot of extra options, but they are hidden by default (button at bottom left)
• The company has a paid service option, which should help keep the basic service free. Can’t live off VC angels forever, can we?
• Simple and uncluttered
• Time zone support (used ours with multiple time zones–quite painful)
• You can make your availability query as big (several weeks) or as small (a single day) as you like
• 15, 30, and 60 minute time block options (day option too)
• Supports “generic” days like our in-house system (no dates shown–set under options)

So far, I haven’t found any way in which this doesn’t match what we have feature for feature and make it better. Best of all, I don’t every have to get around to writing it!

UPDDATE

So WIG has fared less-favorably in the wild. Here are some points of improvement:

• Since coming up with the Free/Pro scales, they seem to have removed the ability to modify the blocks/intervals of time. That is less than ideal.
• People are reporting that they can’t edit times after the fact, nor can reporters see the results–only the organizer.