onfocus

The O'Reilly Radar picked up on an internal conversation I was involved with about Google's decision to stop supporting their Search API. There's more at the Radar: Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API.

I can't help but think of the lawyerly phrase arbitrary and capricious to describe the decision because no one from Google has explained the move in a public forum. I'm sure there were some black hat SEO types using the Search API for nefarious purposes—and I'm guessing the decision to shut it down stems in part from that. (Not to mention that SOAP has fallen out of favor.) But that's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why such a limited alternative? (The API has been "replaced" by the Ajax API, a very limited cousin of the Search API.) And why not move to a REST API if that's where the developer preference winds have blown? In one of my emails I mentioned that this decision reminds me of Microsoft's decision to scrap their MVP program (which was later reinstated). Why alienate future potential power users?

Also, the new Hackzine blog picked up a tip I stumbled on for grabbing an API Key while the grabbing is good: Get a Google SOAP API Key.

Update: Slashdot weighs in. For them it's all about the failure of SOAP, not a misstep by Google.

I'm on hour 16 without power thanks to a wind storm that blew through Oregon last night. I'm speaking to you live from my laptop, connected to my cell phone via bluetooth, using a Cingular data connection. I love living on the edge of a small town—the positives outweigh the negatives. But one of the drawbacks is that power seems to take a little longer to come back for us once it goes out, and the power even occasionally blinks on and off for no apparent reason. So I've had to do some contingency planning for situations just like these.

A couple weeks ago I talked about planning for hard drive failure, so I thought I'd talk about planning for power failure now that I'm in the middle of dealing with it.

One of the best investments I've made is an APC battery back-up (aka Uninterruptible Power Supply) for the main computers and monitors in the house. (I picked up two APC ES 650s, available at Amazon.) Basically a UPS will give you about 15 minutes to save everything you're working on and shut down the computer once the power goes out. But I've really found it useful for those power blips where it just goes out for a minute or so. The UPS keeps your computer humming along, and you won't lose any work.

I also picked up a smaller UPS for my less-power-hungy cable modem and router. Typically if the power goes out, the cable connection will still work as long as my modem and router have power. So in those 15 minutes of power I have for my computer, I can still access the Internet and power blips won't force a modem/router reboot.

And finally that bluetooth modem connection has been a lifesaver. Not only can I still check email and surf the web during a blackout, but I can use the connection whenever I travel. I pay Cingular $20/month for unlimited data transfer, but it also means I don't pay access fees at airports, hotels, or greedy coffee shops (I'm looking at you Starbucks). Granted, the connection is painfully slow, but at least I can check websites, send emails, and post long-winded messages to my blog.

Unfortunately I can't turn on my main computer now, so I can't get much done. But at least I didn't have to worry about losing data. I guess the next level of redundancy is some sort of portable generator. Luckily these long power outages are few and far between, so I'm not sure it's worth it.

My laptop is at 46% power so I better sign off. No telling when the lights will come back on.

O'Reilly just published a digital media gift guide via press release, and it includes a bunch of great books for the MP3 and digital photo crowd. But they left out one item, imho. (Warning, what is about to follow is blatant self-promotion—but I still think it's a good idea.) If someone you know is getting a new digital camera (or receiving a digital camera or cameraphone for the first time), give them the ultimate accessories: a Flickr Pro account and a copy of Flickr Hacks. Digital cameras should ship with some sort of pipeline to Flickr. And until they do, you can encourage sharing with the account and get them up to speed with almost everything Flickr can do with the book. (This is my own digital media press release.)

And speaking of Flickr Hacks, co-author Jim Bumgardner recently joined Yahoo. He'll be doing his brand of audio and visual Flash hackery for Yahoo Music. Congrats, Jim! (And Yahoo!)

Update (12/18): Flickr added a Flickr Gifts page, and Paul Stamitiou put together a Flickr Gift Guide for the Flickrist in your life. (Alas, no mention of Flickr Hacks—but you know better!)

A couple weeks ago I walked into my office, turned on my monitor, and saw a gray screen. Odd, I thought. Rebooted. Same gray screen. Rebooted. Nothing but gray.

I have one of those new-fangled Intel Mac Pros, so I had to look up how to boot into a different mode. I fired up my PC and found the handy document: My Mac Won't Start!. As I went through all of the options I kept getting the dreaded gray screen. The contents of my hard drive flashed before my eyes. I thought for sure I'd lost my data, and I was starting to make a list of things I would need to reconstruct. After exhausting my options, I called Apple Support and they confirmed that my Mac would need professional help.

To make a long story short, my hard drive was fine. The internal power unit had failed, and two weeks later I got my Mac Pro back in working order with a new power unit. But the event gave me backup religion, and I decided to look into backup options so I wouldn't have to worry about loosing recent work and the thousands of files, emails, and media I've gathered over the years.

The Mac Pros have RAID software built in, so I decided to move from my default 250 gig drive to two mirrored 500 gig drives. RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks and the idea behind mirroring (aka Raid 1) is that you have two or more disks with exactly the same data. If one disk fails, you can use one of the others until you get a replacement. Plus a drive failure won't mean lost data. I think of it as an insurance policy for my virtual stuff.

The process of setting up a RAID set was fairly simple, but I thought I'd step through the process here to share my experience. Here's what you'll need to move from a single drive to RAID mirroring on a Mac Pro:

• Mac OS X (10.4+)
• Two 500 gig drives
• External hard drive case

I looked for quiet drives and eventually settled on Western Digital Caviar SE16 drives. I found them as OEM drives (plastic bag packaging only) at Newegg for $169.99 each. I didn't have a SATA external drive case, so I picked one up at my local Mac Store for about $75. (I picked up a Macally PHR-100SU.) You can probably find external cases cheaper by looking around a bit, though.

Once you have everything you need, you want to initialize your new drives, set up a RAID mirroring set, and copy your current drive to your new RAID set. It goes like this:

1. Remove the current drive.
2. Install the two 500 gig drives.
3. Install the current drive into the external drive case.
4. Plug in the external drive, boot.

The Mac Pro will boot from an external USB device. You just need to be patient. Eventually the Mac will automatically detect that your OS is now on an external drive. (You could probably also boot from the CD that came with your computer and skip the whole external case thing, but I went the case route.) Now that you've booted into your current drive, start up Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder, and continue:

1. Partition the new drives.
2. Click the RAID tab, drag both new drives into the box, click Create.
3. Click the Restore tab.
4. Drag the current drive (external) icon to the Source field.
5. Drag the new mirrored set icon to the Destination field.
6. Click Restore.

Once this process starts you might want to go out for a coffee. And a movie. And maybe some shopping. You're copying your old disk to your new RAID set, and it'll take several hours (depending, of course, on how much data you have on your current disk).

Once the restore is complete, shut down. Unplug your external drive, and fire up your computer. Your Mac might sit on a gray screen while it looks for an OS to boot into, but you should soon find yourself back on your computer as if you'd never left.

So what did I get out of all this work and the $450 I spent? Well, I now have two hard drives storing my data. In my case, I also got double the hard drive space (I went from 250 gigs available to 500 gigs). I didn't get a performance boost by moving to RAID. With mirroring, the OS has to write everything to two drives now, and I haven't noticed any change. Sometimes I think I sense the system as slower, but it's probably my imagination. But any performance trade-off is so slight, it's worth having protected data. And to top it off, I still have my original 250 gig drive that I can leave in the external case. I might also install the drive internally, and use it for more non-mirrored storage.

The bottom line is that Apple has made RAID disk mirroring extremely easy to set up, and I can sleep a little easier at night knowing that if I wake up to a gray screen (or worse) it won't be the end of my data world.