Mac applications in general have been maintaining a pretty good consistency in terms of user interface/experience. In case of Windows or Linux applications, it is not a big of deal to be inconsistent because either there is no concrete guideline that states how applications should look and how they behave, or no one really cares what the guideline suggests. However, in case of Mac applications, it really makes your application distinguishable, usually in a bad way, if you don't follow the guide line. Our popular example would be the OpenOffice application suite.

OpenOffice Writer

I have no doubt that OpenOffice is a great application and I use it on my Linux workstation, but let's face it. It's ugly.

Apple iWork Pages

Yup. I actually paid for this ;-)

What I Want To Do

So, what I want to do is to make a decent user interface for OpenOffice, using the Cocoa framework, to give it a consistent look and feel and common behaviors provided by the Cocoa framework so that it looks like a typical Mac application.

It's going to be a lot of work even though significant amount of code base of the OpenOffice remains unchanged. If you have skills and time, please jump in to this. I won't mind for you to steal my idea. I would love to see what comes out.

I can't wait until I see the new expose!

sudo port install vorbis-tools lame

I'm going to decode an ogg file into a wav file and then convert the wav file to an mp3 file. For example,

oggdec test.ogg
lame -h --vbr-new test.ogg

If you want to make an mp3 file with a constant bit rate, use -b option. Refer lame --help for details. However, it is not a good idea to manually invoke this command for every single file you want to convert. So, I'm gonna make a very simple shell script to do all the works.

#/bin/bash

for file in *.ogg; do
    oggdec $file
    file=$(basename $file .ogg)
    lame -h --vbr-new -V 2 "${file}.wav" "${file}.mp3"
    rm "${file}.wav"
done

I'm giving an option -V 2 to specify VBR quality of the result. 0 for highest and 9 for lowest quality.

Here's a screenshot:

First thing you need to is to make a backup volume. You can use hdiutil on the command line if you want, but I'm gonna go with OSX's Disk Utility in this article. It's located under /Applications/Utilities. You can also find it on Spotlight. I always do that.

What you are going to create is a disk image. This disk image will act like a physical disk volume so that Time Machine can backup your data on this disk image.

Once you launch Disk Utility, click New Image to make a new disk volume.

Then the something like this pops up.

You need to set a few things here.

Save As

The important thing here is that your disk image name must include your Mac's MAC address.

For example, if your MAC address is 00:11:22:33:44:55 then your disk image name is going to be:

TimeMachine_001122334455.sparsebundle

And then you need to locate your disk image directly under the network drive that you're gonna use for backup. For example, if your network drive is mounted at /Volumes/backup then your disk image is going to be at /Volumes/backup/TimeMachine_001122334455.sparsebundle.

Don't know what your MAC address is? Go to Network Preferences. Select whatever network interface you're using. Usually Ethernet or AirPort. Click Advanced... button. And then go to Ethernet tab.

Yeah. That's your MAC address.

Or you could use ifconfig command. It's a lot easier for me.

ifconfig en0

Volume Name

It can be whatever you want. Doesn't really matter.

Volume Size

Must be larger than the hard drive on your Mac. You can exclude directories that you don't want to backup from Time Machine. Then the volume size must be larger than the size of the rest of files and directories. Disk Utility will make a disk image regardless of available space on the volume. When Time Machine attempts to backup your data, it will fail if there is not enough space on the disk image.

Encryption

(Haven't tested yet)

Image Format

Set it to be sparse bundle disk image

Changing Settings

Run the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I've been using a shared directory on a personal server through smb protocol, and that's where I'm going to locate the backup volume that I created previously. I'm pretty sure it would work with shared directories on Windows machines as well. I didn't test it though.

Click Change Disk... on Time Machine Preferences.

Then you will be able to see something like this:

Select your network drive and start backing up!