I have a serious love-hate relationship with Linux.  I love the fact that it’s free and open source.  I love the fact that it can breathe new life into old hardware.  I love the fact that it’s easy to extend.  I love the fact that it has a vibrant and passionate user community.

What I do not love is that many open source programs are incomplete.  They can do most everything that you need, but never get around to adding the one or two features that prevent them from being finished, polished and exceptional.  I’ve ranted about this before, back when I was trying to find the perfect backup program.

Well … I’m at it again; except this time, I’m looking for the perfect email program.

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Tags: Communications Software,Lifehacking,Linux
Categories: Computer, Cool Stuff
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Imagine how awesome it would be if this announcement read: “Time Drive has been completely rewritten from scratch (yet again) to take better advantage of the paradigms of modern computing!  Version 0.3 has hundreds of updates and new features which will make your life easier and more fulfilled!”

There's just one little problem … such a hyper inflated announcement wouldn't necessarily be true.  (Marketing hyperbole, I never knew thee!)  The truth is this: Time Drive is a simple backup program that does a good job of reliably backing up your data.  It offers a nice list of potential backup options: from an attached hard drive, to a computer over the network, or across the internet.  It makes it easy to search for and restore a lost file.  In short, Time Drive seeks to change the world by making an act of computer maintenance more convenient.

But the real test of a program isn’t how well it works, but how easy it is to fix when broken.  A good program does what you want, but a better program helps you get back on track when things go wrong.  Back when I was looking at other backup programs available for Linux, this was my number one frustration.  Most of the applications would work (for the most part), but I could never troubleshoot or repair problems when they happened.  There just wasn’t enough information available.

For an example, let’s take SBackup.  It’s a lovely little program,  except you have no way of knowing if it is working.  It doesn’t keep log files, it doesn’t notify you if a backup job failed.  It doesn’t let you know if it is running.  Its simplicity is actually symptomatic of a flaw: it’s incomplete.

These were problems that I desperately wanted to avoid with Time Drive.  And version 0.3 includes a number of refinements that solve these issues while at the same time making make it better, easier and more refined.  In the rest of this post, I’ll explain why.

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Tags: Backup,Linux,Mac OS X,Time Drive
Categories: Computer, Featured, Programming
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It’s been an interesting couple of days.  I was rather honored to see that Lifehacker did a short highlight of Time Drive, which I thought was pretty cool.  It’s always been one of my goals to have something featured in Lifehacker or Gizmodo, and now I’m going to have to scratch that off the list of goals.  But that’s okay, I’ve got other things to fill the void.  Like … how exactly does one get invited to present at TED?

On another note … while I knew that I would see some kind of traffic bump due to the article in Lifehacker, I wasn’t necessarily prepared for the magnitude.  In mathematics, there is this thing called a step function.  It’s where you move from one value to another more or less instantaneously.  It looks like a step, hence the name.  Sure, It may not actually exist, since even very dramatic shifts still have a non vertical slope; but even so, the change in my traffic might as well be a step-function.  Between yesterday and today, I’ve had more visits to this site than I’ve had in much of the rest of the year combined.  I think that’s kind of cool, though it probably won’t last.

(This might be a good time to say that I am actually rather proud of my “lackluster” web traffic.  Though it might not necessarily be that impressive, it is, nevertheless, mine. I’ve worked hard for it, and I revel in the fact that some 40 to 50 people each day find the unorganized garbage of my mind intoxicating.  Some of them even come back!)

But as interesting as that might be, traffic stats is probably not why you're here.  Good thing, since I’ve got announcements.

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Tags: Backup,Cygwin,Linux,Mac OS X,Time Drive
Categories: Computer, Cool Stuff, Programming, Raves
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