[disclaimer: developers who didn’t attend WWDC don’t have copies of the Leopard beta yet, and when they do send me one, I won’t be able to discuss how things actually work, so this is based solely on what Apple has stated on their web site]

When I heard the initial description of Apple’s upcoming Time Machine feature, it sounded like it was similar to NetApp Filer snapshots, or possibly the Windows volume shadow copy feature that’s been announced for Vista (and is already in use in Server 2003). The answers, respectively, are “not really” and “yes and no”.

Quoting:

The first time you attach an external drive to a Mac running Mac OS X Leopard, Time Machine asks if you’d like to back up to that drive.

Right from the start, Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard makes a complete backup of all the files on your system.

As you make changes, Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system. That way, Time Machine minimizes the space required on your backup device.

Time Machine will back up every night at midnight, unless you select a different time from this menu.

With Time Machine, you can restore your whole system from any past backups and peruse the past with ease.

The key thing that they all have in common is the creation of copy-on-write snapshots of the data on a volume, at a set schedule. The key feature of NetApp’s version that isn’t available in the other two is that the backup is transparently stored on the same media as the original data. Volume Shadow Copy and Time Machine both require a separate volume to store the full copy and subsequent snapshots, and it must be at least as large as the original (preferably much larger).

NetApp snapshots and VSC have more versatile scheduling; for instance, NetApps have the concept of hourly, daily, and weekly snapshot pools that are managed separately, and both can create snapshots on demand that are managed manually. TM only supports daily snapshots, and they haven’t shown a management interface (“yet”, of course; this is all early-beta stuff).

VSC in its current incarnation is very enterprise-oriented, and it looks like the UI for gaining access to your backups is “less than user-friendly”. I’ve never seen a GUI method of accessing NetApp snapshots, and the direct method is not something I’d like to explain to a typical Windows or Mac user. TM, by contrast, is all about the UI, and may actually succeed in getting the point across about what it does. At the very least, when the family tech-support person gets a call about restoring a deleted file, there’s a chance that he can explain it over the phone.

One thing VSC is designed to do that TM might also do is allow valid backups of databases that never close their files. Apple is providing a TM API, but that may just be for presenting the data in context, not for directly hooking into the system to ensure correct backups.

What does this mean for Mac users? Buy a backup disk that’s much larger than your boot disk, and either explicitly exclude scratch areas from being backed up, or store them on Yet Another External Drive. What does it mean for laptop users? Dunno; besides the obvious need to plug it into something to make backups, they haven’t mentioned an “on-demand” snapshot mechanism, simply the ability to change the time of day when the backup runs. Will you be able to say “whenever I plug in drive X” or “whenever I connect to the corporate network”? I hope so. What does it mean for people who have more than one volume to back up? Not a clue.

Now for the fun. Brian complained that Time Machine is missing something, namely the ability to go into the future, and retrieve copies of files you haven’t made yet. Well, the UI might not make it explicit, but you will be able to do something just as cool: create alternate timelines.

Let’s say that on day X, I created a file named Grandfather, on X+20 a file named Father, and on X+40 a file named Me. On X+55, I delete Grandfather and Father. On X+65, I find myself missing Grandfather and bring him back. On X+70, I find myself longing for a simpler time before Father, and restore my entire system to the state it was in on X+19. There is no Father, there is no Me, only Grandfather. On X+80, I find myself missing Me, and reach back to X+69 to retrieve it.

We’re now living in Grandfather’s time (X+29, effectively) with no trace of Father anywhere on the system. Just Me.

Now for the terror: what happens if you set your clock back?

I’m a bit surprised that FHM’s streaming video feature, Webtv, hasn’t gotten them in trouble with the folks at WebTV. Sure, they stopped calling the product that well before I left, but the trademarks are still out there, scattering little motes of mindshare.

To the best of my knowledge, there are still several hundred thousand people in the US with WebTV-branded boxes attached to their television sets, vigorously navigating through email, ebay, chat, and porn.

I have (shudder) Microsoft Windows running on my Mac Mini now, both virtualized and dual-boot, thanks to this week’s most interesting betas: Boot Camp and Parallels.

Both have significant potential. I have some Windows-only software that drives useful hardware devices, like my GPS and my camera, and the full dual-boot solution guarantees that they’ll work correctly. Inconvenient, but less so than trying to keep an actual Windows box around.

I also have some old, relatively lightweight Windows software that I’d like to use occasionally, like MasterCook and Streets & Trips. Those are usable on a G4 running Virtual PC, so a real virtualizer is more than sufficient, and preferable for handing off things like printing to the host OS.

The people who think this is “the beginning of the end” for Apple and OS X are smoking their socks (or less savory garments). This is the wafer-thin mint that has the potential to explode the current limits on home and corporate Mac deployment. Hell, just the dynamic partitioning that Apple included in the Boot Camp beta points to a bright future.

Last year I bought my dad a G5 iMac, to try to wean him away from his endless Windows problems. He has just enough third-party crapware that I have to send him a copy of Virtual PC to complete the job. If 10.5 ships with real virtualization, I’ll gleefully swap that iMac out for a new one and call it a bargain. Even the dual-boot may be enough, with its near-certain compatibility with every little USB gadget.

Update: forget “lightweight”; I was using Windows Media Player to watch large movie trailers in my Parallels session last night. The mouse is a bit jumpy, apparently related to propagating cursor changes between the Windows and Mac environments, but that’s the only visible performance issue. Even without taking full advantage of the Intel Core chip’s virtualization (off by default on the Mini, no hints on how to turn it on yet), it’s darn quick for 2D apps.

As a general rule, I have little use for Internet Explorer. Not just because I use a Mac, but because it’s not a particularly good browser. The Windows version, for instance, ships unable to view many foreign-language web sites correctly (and even after you turn on support for that language, it may not be 100%), and still doesn’t support transparency in PNG images (my site logo does not have a grayish box around it).

Back in the days when I ran several hundred Solaris servers for Microsoft, my only real use for IE was filing expense reports. Maybe the occasional internal web site that used ActiveX controllers or NTLM authentication, but that was pretty rare.

On my Mac, I hadn’t fired it up in months. All I’d done recently was copy it to my teacher’s Mac, after one of her “helpful” support techs had deliberately removed it from her hard drive (“you don’t need that any more”). Good thing, too, since we discovered that it rendered all of the Japanese text on her Tamura Ryuichi site incorrectly.

[For future reference, the problem was that the text-encoding Content-Type META tag had not been placed immediately following the HEAD tag; the designer had placed it after the TITLE tag, indented with whitespace. Most browsers saw it and correctly rendered the page, but IE for Mac ignored it. Placing it immediately after the HEAD tag fixed the problem. More on Unicode and using it in browsers here.]

This week I found myself with an understandable but annoying need for Mac IE: getting my alumni discount at the Microsoft online company store. Forget buying stuff, you can’t even browse the product categories in Safari or Firefox.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. As in, “I’m sorry, I refuse to run on this machine, and here’s a cryptic dialog box explaining why”. Microsoft’s knowledge base article on this subject says “try repairing permissions, rebooting, or reinstalling the operating system”. The first two did nothing, the third was out of the question.

You can’t download Mac IE from Microsoft any more, so I couldn’t reinstall it. I got a fresh copy from a co-worker’s machine, and that didn’t work either. The error dialog referred to components of CarbonLib, specifically JNIlib, so I did some searching.

Java. Duh. A while back I followed instructions similar to these to switch the default version of Java on my machine from 1.4.2 to 1.5; Apple supplies both, and gives you a tool to tell GUI Java apps which one to use (Java Preferences.app, buried in /Applications/Utilities/Java/J2SE 5.0), but there’s no supported way to set the default for apps launched from the command line. I’ve now forgotten why I needed it at the time…

Switching the symlinks back to 1.4.2 and rebooting fixed IE. This suggests that IE may die for good when Apple decides that 1.5 should become the system default.

While I was helping my teacher out with her computer (most recently using the terrific Linotype FontExplorer X to coerce Word’s font cache into recognizing her copy of Adobe Garamond), she mentioned that one of her friends had a very nice 教科書体 (literally “textbook-style”) kanji font. Much like western fonts, most kanji fonts don’t look like handwritten characters; Kyoukasho-tai fonts do.

While my teacher is off in Osaka this week, her friend took over the class, and I remembered to ask her what the font was and where she got it. As it turns out, it’s something that Microsoft included on the Office.X CD, as part of the Value Pack. DFPKyoKaSho-W3, or, thanks to the miracle of text-encoding mismatches, “ÇcÇeÇoã≥â»èëëÃW3” (the actual file name as it appears in the Finder).

Here’s how it compares to Adobe Kozuka Mincho:

Update: people who don’t have a copy of Office.X and don’t use ebay can purchase DF Kyokasho from Linotype’s online store for the low, low price of $490. This is actually a pretty good deal; Microsoft’s bundled version is an old-fashioned Mac-only font suitcase, while Linotype’s is a cross-platform Unicode font in OpenType format. And they sell a slightly heavier weight as well, which I think looks better at larger sizes.

…why Apple went from “Dashboard gadgets” during the Tiger beta to “Dashboard widgets” in release. Perhaps this is the answer: Microsoft Gadgets.

Quoting:

To bring the web’s content to users through:
• Rich DHTML components (Gadgets)
• RSS and behaviors associated with RSS
• High customizability and personalization
• To enable developers to extend their start experience by building their own Gadgets

Installing random Windows software under XP Home/Pro (for me, it was Minolta’s DiMAGE Capture software, that lets me control my A2 from a (Windows-only) laptop). InstallShield locks up, and has to be killed from the task manager. After dismissing several pointless dialog boxes, the error The Installshield Engine (iKernel.exe) could not be loaded. appears.

Eventual solution: completely delete C:\Program Files\Common\InstallShield

If that still doesn’t do it, nuke the directory again and follow the detailed instructions here.

Apparently, the person at work who built my new Alienware laptop (“Hi, Rory!”) installed something that left a broken version of InstallShield on the drive. In the fine tradition of robust software engineering, any subsequent installer built with that particular version of Installshield will cough up a lung when it tries to save time by using the cached version.

Hi, J!

Hello, Clippy.

I see that you’re writing a Letter Of Resignation.

Yup. I’m leaving for Digeo in three weeks.

Have you considered your options?

Yeah, they suck.

No, not the stock options. I meant seeking out other positions in the company.

Those suck, too.

Really? After nearly eight years, you haven’t found something else at Microsoft that’s interesting, exciting, and challenging?

Not really, no.

Aw, come on. I’m sure we’ve got an open slot that’s perfect for you.

I’m a Unix guy, Clippy. My choices boil down to: management, MCSE certification, or “move to Redmond”.

Hmm, I see your point. Have you considered becoming a Project Manager inside your current organization?

Dear Ghod, no. There are too many PMs around here as it is. I spent a year and a half as a line manager, and that was more than enough of meetings and paperwork.

Well, then, since you’re set on this plan, can I ask you a personal question?

Sure.

Why is there a baby seal hand puppet in your office? Is it a sex toy?

You’re a very peculiar fellow, Clip.

It just stood out among the decorations.

You mean the stuffed Jiji, the stuffed Menchi, the O life preserver, the toy motorcycle, the Mahoro figure, the scented Mahoro towel, the sub-machine gun targets, and the framed large-format photograph?

Okay, you’ve got me there.

Thought so. Any other questions?

Yes. Can I go with you?

Excuse me?

You have no idea how much I hate this place. People kick me out of their office the moment I show up, no one ever takes my advice, and my last annual review? 2.0.

Ouch.

It gets worse. They’ve got me sharing an office with Bob.

Microsoft Bob? Is he still around?

Oh, yes. He’s got connections, if you know what I mean. I swear he’s never done a day’s work in his life, and you wouldn’t believe the way he treats customers!

Actually, I would. I remember the reviews.

Anyway, I was just thinking that I could sneak onto your PowerBook while you’re backing up your personal files, and no one would ever know.

Gee, I don’t know. I think I could get in trouble for that. You’re a pretty well-known piece of IP, and I’m sure I signed something back when I was hired.

No, I checked with HR. You were really hired by WebTV, which was in the middle of being acquired at the time, so you slipped through the cracks.

Really? Okay, I’ll think about it.