Vinko’s Thoughts On…

Now I am running Mozy for Mac OS X version 0.6.0.0. It no longer requires me to be in an account in Mac OS X with administrator rights. As I had pointed out previously that is definitely not a good idea.

Now when I ran Mozy on my Mac, it keeps triggering Little Snitchwanting to contact various servers through port 443. Although, I am uncertain what these servers are; as it only displays the IP addresses of the servers rather than their domains, I still allowed Mozy and MobBackup access.

Shortly after Mozy ran for about 20 minutes it encountered an error “ConnectionError0?. So I reported this to Mozy Support.

Dear Sir/Madam,I had encountered a problem while Mozy was attempting to backup my
Mac.

Mac OS 10.4.10
Mozy v0.6.0.0
Mac OS X’s built in Firewall is turned on
Internet is accessed from a Router (Apple’s Airport Extreme Base
Station) via the ISP, Netviator (a service offered by PCCW in Hong
Kong).
No anti-virus application running other than LittleSnitch, which
had already set to allow Mozy (the entities Mozy and MobBackup)
access to servers/ports that it asked for. Currently ports 443
(https) for the following servers:
66.133.112.13
66.133.112.23
66.133.108.30
66.133.117.214
The error message displayed is “ConnectionError0?

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.

On Monday Apple Inc. released the Beta version of the next major version of Safari at the opening keynote of WWDC ‘07 (2007 Worldwide Developers Conference). Apple released versions for Mac OS 10.4.x, Mac OS 10.5, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Since my primary system is Mac OS 10.4.9, I only downloaded this version for review and my impressions below are only based on this version.

Before I start I want to give everyone a little background. Last week when a vulnerability was found in both Internet Explorer and Firefox I switch back to Safari 2. It had been almost 4 years since I use Safari as my primary browser, and I was surprised to find that Safari felt faster than FireFox 2 (my previous primary browser). Now with Safari 3, it is even faster. Of course this is non-scientific and it is based on real life usage of it for a week.

I operate an online retail business, Vinko’s Treasures, and the backend system for my operation is completely web based. So I noticed the speed improvements right away only after a few days.

In Safari 3 I did not find too many new features or features that are better than FireFox. Most of the new features in Safari 3 are just catch up features to the default (without any 3rd party Extensions) FireFox 2. These being:

• Inline search: rather than having a dialog that pops up for the user to enter the search term. Safari 3 now displays a thin bar (”Search Bar”) at top of the browser just below the Tab Bar or Bookmark Bar; depending on what you have visible. After the results are found, Safari will dim the entire page and highlights the found terms on the page. 

  





• Movable Tabs: you can now drag the Tabs back and forth. Rearranging them in any order you like.

  

The new feature I found so far, is what the user can do with Tabs. They can take a tab like the one above on the right and open it in a new window. This can be accomplished by performing a Control + Click (or right click) on the Tab Label, which brings up a contextual menu. From here you then choose the menu item “Move Tab to New Window”.

The “Mac” way of doing the same thing is just to drag the Tab out of the Tab Bar and let go, like you would with icons on the Dock or Finder Sidebar. Unlike these other User Interface elements, doing so here will cause a miniature version of the Tab window content to show for a second, then a new browser window with the Tab window content will open.

As with Expose activation, holding down the Shift key will cause the animation of this behaviour to be in slow motion.

All in all I am fairy happy with Safari 3. It did install a new WebKit so some of the Widget I use in Dashboard no longer works, but that is expected for a “Beta” classification application.

Due to my work, I do use Mail, Dashboard and Safari 18 hours a day. So far I have encountered no crashes; knock on wood.

Another Mozy technical support reply:

Make sure you’re running it as administrator, and make sure your clients stay up to date. This is most likely a bug, and if so, it should be fixed in the next revision.

You can probably guess what I say to them. How can any software developer / company tells the customers to be running in Administrator mode? Especially when Mozy is suppose to be running at all times in the background. I am starting to be very discourage by this company’s ability to create a good reliable product. The latter is extremely important since we are talking about a Backup Utility.

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.

Mozy released a new version [v0.4.1.4 (19867M)] of the Mac OS X client, so I was eager to try it immediately hoping that it will resolve my problem. Unfortunately, the problem with the “Scanning Backup Sets…” is still there. Of course I immediately reported the problem to Mozy, and they replied that Mozy is a Beta software and they are making improvements constantly, and then asked me to send them my Mozy.log file.

[Update: May 5, 2007]
Mozy technical support replied with the following:

What happens if you let the configuration dialog just run for a while? It should be doing something and it may just take a few minutes.

They appear to be just shooting in the dark. Very typical of my Windows platform software developers. I replied to them saying that the “Scanning Backup Sets…” had ran for at least 5 minutes.

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.

Mozy released a new version [v0.4.1.4 (19867M)] of the Mac OS X client, so I was eager to try it immediately hoping that it will resolve my problem. Unfortunately, the problem with the “Scanning Backup Sets…” is still there. Of course I immediately reported the problem to Mozy, and they replied that Mozy is a Beta software and they are making improvements constantly, and then asked me to send them my Mozy.log file.

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.

Mozy released a new version [v0.4.1.2 (19793)] of the Mac OS X client. It did resolve my problem of the Configuration Assistant not recognizing my account. As the reader, Marcus pointed out it was a permission problem that Mozy did not adhered to. Unfortunately, one problem solved and I am able to proceed a bit further in the Configuration Assistant, but now there is another problem where the Mozy client claims to be “Scanning Backup Sets…” and never finishes. I reported this to Mozy support.

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.

Mozy support has just replied to my 4th inquiry of my problem and said the following:

We should be releasing a new version later this week that my help with your problem.

Please see my original article “Problem with Mozy” for background.