But as all neat little editors in its infancy go, it is a little premature. For example there is no out of the box CoffeeScript support. Since I have been hacking some CoffeeScript, I needed to correct this. So with some googling and the fact that Sublime Text supports TextMate bundles, I discovered how to start CoffeeScript development with Sublime Text. The following are my findings.
We will make use of Jeremy Ashkenas CoffeeScript TextMate Bundle to add syntax highlighting support.
To setup the Sublime Text Build System to work with CoffeeScript you just need to create a file (CoffeeScript.sublime-build) with the following contents and place in ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages/User/
{
"cmd": ["coffee", "$file"],
"selector" : "source.coffee",
"path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}Note that I have CoffeeScript installed in /usr/local/bin on my Mac. Edit the above path appropriately to match your system.
Obviously the above is aching to be automated so I hacked up a quick bash script and associated sublime build file. They can be found here in my git sandbox repo.
Credit where credit is due. Much of the info from this post was garnered from the following sources:
http://soenkerohde.com/2011/11/coffeescript-with-sublime-text/
http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2022
There is a saying that a piece of data does not exist unless there are three copies of that data. I have always agreed with that principle, but always came short of actually adhering to it. I used local backup solutions to make two copies of my data, but making that third copy was always deferred for later. Well in part because its been sitting in my OmniFocus todo list, my vacation starting this week, and also being inspired by Lab49 colleague Martin Harris’s post Diary of a cloud backup I have finally decided to make that third copy with a offline backup solution. Lets first see what the current setup looks like.
So I have three macs in the household that has important enough data to be backed up:
Mac Pro – The Mac Pro is my main desktop machine. It has ~300GB of files consisting of documents, music, RAW photos, and AVCHD video (this is the big one) that needs backing up. It is currently setup with Time Machine backing up to an attached Drobo with 1.8TB of space. The Drobo gives it it a bit more safety since the data will survive one HD going bad.
iMac – The iMac is my wife’s desktop machine. It has ~400GB of files mostly consisting of AVCHD video (taking video of your daughter is quite expensive indeed!). It also has Time Machine backing up to external HD enclosure with 2 1TB drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration.
MacBook Pro – The MacBook Pro acts as an extension to the Mac Pro. Active documents and files are synchronized using Dropbox. Non active documents and files are synchronized on a demand basis using unison. It has no backup strategy since its basically a mirror of the Mac Pro and the backups get done on that box.
As Martin Harris stated a third offsite copy is crucial to be truly safe in case of environmental disaster or theft. Given my current setup I had the following requirements:
Some other considerations in a backup service:
I checked out the plans for for Crashplan, memopal, Carbonite, and Mozy. It seems if you are in the sweetspot of having 1 computer with about 200GB of data to backup you can find solutions ranging from free to ~$50/yr.
Both Carbonite and Mozy have unlimited storage plans per computer for ~$50. Memopal costs around $380 for backing up 700GB of data.
Crashplan has an unlimited computer and storage plan for $100 a year. Given my storage and computer requirements and since it since it met most of my other considerations above Crashplan seemed to be a good choice for a trial.
I decided to trial Crashplan with a ~50GB backup (54.1GB to be exact). Crashplan allows you to tailor the backup to put it on a schedule, and control CPU and network utilization. I have a 30/5 Mbps cable connection and for the first test ran the backup with these settings:
So as of the first checkpoint Crashplan is going at a rate of 7.75GB a day which is roughly 720 kbps. Which does fall in between the present limit and away limit of 200kbps and 2Mbps respectively. It seems on the slow side, and extrapolating it would take about 3 months to backup the entire 700GB.
At 2 Mbps Crashplan should backup at a theoretical rate of 21.6 GB/day or 700GB in about 33days. Obviously that would require some ideal conditions such as ensuring that no other computers are using the connection and a guaranteed upload bandwidth from your ISP. But I should be able to come close with a 5 Mbps upload connection. As an experiment I am changing the backup settings to the following for the next checkpoint:
Hopefully that shouldn’t saturate my connection too much.
]]>The first time I used a Bloomberg terminal, I was taken aback by the interface and its steep learning curve. I am not a UX designer (IANAUXD), but wouldn’t a redesign of a complex system carry a risk of imposing a loss of productivity on its users? The Bloomberg terminal given its warts is extremely powerful and experienced users of the system would have ingrained usage patterns into there brain and muscle memory. Inertia from users does come to play here but a good redesign of a system with an established user base needs to take this into account.
Anyway with some competition from Single Dealer Platforms (SDP) with slick UX, as exemplified by Morgan Stanley’s Matrix, who is to say that Bloomberg is not redesigning there terminal right now?
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