Don’t trust your hard drive – it will fail

Posted on July 9, 2010

If there’s one constant in life, it’s that shit happens – usually at the most in inopportune moment possible. And the greatest disaster that can happen to a computer user is a complete hard drive failure. I spent a couple of hours of preventative medicine  yesterday replacing the hard drive in my MacBook Pro, after seeing a Powerbook 12″ and iMac 20″ both with failed drives.

You bought an Apple Mac and paid a premium for it  – but this doesn’t mean the quality of the components used to build it are superior to those used to make a Dell, HP or IBM computer. This is particularly true of hard drives. They are commodity items, built to a price, because the consumer (you) thinks bigger and cheaper is better.

Apple tries to make sure that the parts are not stressed unduly by attaching temperature sensors to everything, then carefully tweak the fan speeds to keep the computer sufficiently cool without sounding like a hair-drier.

But regardless of this, shit happens. If you’re in Bath, Bristol, Wiltshire or Somerset and have a hard drive failure on your Mac, please give us a call – we can quickly and cheaply replace it, and restore your data…

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Don’t trust your hard drive – it will fail

Troubleshoot OS X like it’s OS 9…

Posted on July 7, 2010

Yesterday a client in Bradford on Avon had an emergency, a deadline and no replacement install disks for raft of applications that suddenly failed to open. A bit of detective work later I realised that the affected applications were all Carbon based and it was the OS that was causing the problem, not the applications themselves. I could reinstall the OS, but that might mean the applications would need installing and they had no disks. What to do?

The standard advice you’ll hear when trying to fix problems in OS X usually comes down to Repair Permissions or reinstall the Mac OS. Repair Permissions has become the modern equivalent of rebuilding the desktop database – it’s a zero effort fix to try, but personally I’ve never seen it solve any problem. Reinstalling the OS is a significant effort in time and hence cost to the customer.

Back in the days of the classic Mac OS, you frequently found that critical system files would get corrupted after a system crash, leading to boot failure or related weirdness. The joy of the old Mac OS was that you could simply drag and drop files from a backup system to solve the problem.

OS X has made life much more complicated. You not only have to worry about file permissions and ownership, but also PPC vs Intel Macs and the plethora of different incremental OSes.

But if it’s a specific file or folder that has got damaged, you can copy the required files over, as long as you reapply the correct permissions. So we identified the damaged files, dragged over the damaged Framework from a matching System install we happened to have, reset the permissions and tested. Worked like a charm!

Sometimes it pays to be an old-skool Mac genius, not someone with a black tee-shirt who works in a shop…

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , | Comments Off on Troubleshoot OS X like it’s OS 9…

Maintaining search engine position after a web site redesign

Posted on July 7, 2010

You’ve worked hard to get high up in the search engine results for your targeted keywords, you’ve got inbound links to your website coming out of your ears and your customers have bookmarked pages on your site. And now you want to redevelop your web site.

You speak a few web design companies around Bath, Bristol and Wiltshire and they  have great ideas and lovely designs. But do they say anything at all about how they’re going to avoid completely losing that precious, hard fought search engine ranking? If they don’t, they really should.

It’s not rocket science, – it just requires a little bit of research, some time clarifying the  valuable pages you currently have, and some after care once the site is live. When looking in analytics we noticed one of the pages on the old site, we’d completely forgotten about, actually had a fair number of inbound links. Unfortunately it wasn’t linking through to it’s replacement page, potentially costing us lost search engine position. 5 mins later we’d got that sorted and transferring it’s link equity to the new page. Phew!!!

Interested in knowing more? Give us a call…

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Maintaining search engine position after a web site redesign

Professional photography? It’s not about the camera…

Posted on July 6, 2010

Taken with an iPhone 3G, some talent and decent lights...A number of  my Mac support customers in and around Bath are professional photographers – and boy have pro photographers been having a hard time recently! The advent of cheap Digital SLRs has lead to an explosion in the number of images being taken by amateurs and ‘pro-sumers’. Just as Apple and Adobe radically disrupted the printing industry in the late 90s, the digital camera has ripped great swathes through the professional photographic scene in the early 21st Century.

I remember having many conversions over the years with photographers who were spending all their time learning the digital tools of the trade ( in effect becoming computer experts) rather than working out how to market and differentiate themselves. I always said, partly from selfish reasons admittedly, spend your time making better images and getting better clients, not fixing computer glitches.

What makes the difference between a pro and an amateur is not the camera. It’s the brain that composes the shot, builds the set, and get the lighting right.

Don’t believe me? See what you can do with an iPhone, a model and some decent lights. Amazing! And kudos to fstoppers for great marketing…

Posted in iPhone | Tagged , | Comments Off on Professional photography? It’s not about the camera…

Modernizr – get fine grained control over your CSS

Posted on July 3, 2010

Modern web browsers like Safari, Chrome and Firefox support some extremely useful parts of the CSS3 specification, that can remove a great deal of the pain of creating simple things like rounded corners, drop shadows, and gradients. However, the elephant in the room is still Internet Explorer, and particularly that god-awful aberration called IE6. So how can you easily take advantage of these new CSS attributes in browsers that support it, but without interfering with legacy browsers like IE?

Modernizr is a lightweight JavaScrpt library that identifies those CSS attributes that the client’s browser supports, then makes those easy to access by adding their names as CSS classes to the <html> tag, or as object properties in JavaScript. This means you can easily create CSS rules that are only used by supported browsers or make decisions within JavaScript to conditionally do things.

.borderradius ul li a { //do stuff}
if(Modernizr.fontface == false) {do stuff};

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Modernizr – get fine grained control over your CSS