Here at Corpmac we’re fans of virtualisation - both Parallels in particular is in pretty much daily use. However, there are times where nothing other than Boot Camp will do the trick - so we also have a slice of hard disk dedicated to a Boot Camp partition.

Trouble is, its size was a bit of a guess. And, it turns out, quite a bit too large. Getting that wasted disk space back to the main Mac partition isn’t something that can be done with Boot Camp Assistant - well, not unless you want to do a complete backup / resize / restore. Not a pleasant task.

So, we’re glad to find out about CampTune from Paragon Software. This is a bootable CD that enables you to safely resize partitions, automatically dealing with any data that needs moved to cope with the resizing.

We’ve given this a work-out here - eventually settling on reclaiming the 7Gb we had over-allocated to out Boot Camp partition. CampTune performed perfectly each time, taking around an hour to move data and resize the partitions. The only small niggle we’d have is that once it’s finished, and you press OK, it just leaves you sitting at a final screen. All you need to do (and indeed can do) at this point is reboot, but it’d be good to have at least a message on screen telling you to do this.

So definitely recommended if you want to resize your Boot Camp partition. CampTune does exactly that with no fuss or drama.

CampTune is in pre-release at the moment, and is currently available for free.

Technorati Tags:
CampTune, partition, Boot Camp

Posted: August 10th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

I’ve been using the iPhone properly now for 72 hours, and the my first impressions have set in. And while there is a lot of good about the phone, there are definite imperfections. Here are the top three:

It’s slow. Actions that took an imperceptible time before, such as selecting somewhere else in the Contacts list, or going to the SMS screen, now have a perceptible delay. This is going to irritate me more and more.

It’s buggy. I’ve had the location services freeze, requiring me to reboot the phone to get it working. I never needed to reboot my last one.

Battery life is terrible When out and about in the city centre last night, with moderate iPhone use over both Wifi and 3G, the battery got down to 20% from a full charge over five hours. That’s really not good.

For the moment, applications and flexibility are winning out - I do still like it. However my opinions may have changed after a few months’ use.

Posted: July 14th, 2008 under Review.
Comments: 1

I’ve had one spam today. That’s a 99.5% reduction. I’m impressed. The system is a pretty serious pain in the neck to set up for small users: once you understand their model then it’s fine, but it’s not one for unsophisticated admins to set up.

A full review will appear later, but if the per-user costs of Google Apps Message Security Services gives you cause for concern, Mail-scanning.com, a uk-based service propose to charge by the domain. Their prices are not yet fixed (as they’re in free beta) but they are looking to charge around £10 or less per domain per year. That’s good value.

Technorati Tags:
antispam, antivirus, google, postini, mail-scanning

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under News, Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

The thing I like most about SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket Software is that it just works. That’s the reason for the 3.5 month delay between Leopard’s release and the release of the new version yesterday - the guys wanted to be absolutely certain that it continued to do so. And it definitely does.

The way it’s most used here is to make full images of machines’ system drives, updated nightly. This way, if an internal hard drive fails (our Macbook Pros have been pretty heavily thrown about when travelling in the past, and we have had drive failures) all we need to do is get a new drive, install it, then restore directly from the SuperDuper drive. Best of all, we can continue to use the machine - albeit slowly - booted off the external drive.

We’ve been trying that today, and are pleased to report that it all works perfectly for us. There was only one small problem - SuperDuper uses a series of scripts to exclude certain files from the backup. We extended that with our own script, to exclude other thing we didn’t care whether they were backed up or not. One script has vanished - the “Exclude Spotlight Search Index” script - and this caused our backups to fail to start until we modified them to remove this script. After that it’s been fine.

We’re breathing a sigh of relief here. We have our bootable backups back. While we don’t mistreat our machines, accidents can and do happen. Now the process of recovering from such an accident is simple again.

SuperDuper 3.5 is a free upgrade for existing users, and $27.95 to unlock full functionality for new users. Feature-limited demos are free.

Technorati Tags:
SuperDuper, review

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none