Archive for February 6, 2017

Monday, February 6, 2017

How to Verify Time Machine Backups

Paul Horowitz:

Time Machine will verify the backup by comparing checksums, and it will alert the user if a problem or issue has been found. If the backup verifies fine, no issues will be reported. It’s possible the checksums will not match, indicating some sort of issue, corruption, or modification with the Time Machine backup, and Mac OS will offer instructions to attempt to correct the problem. It’s also possible the backup won’t have a valid checksum at all.

[…]

While the Verify Time Machine backups feature has existed for a long time in Mac OS X and Mac OS, it’s important to note that only modern versions of Mac OS maintain a record of checksums associated with each backup snapshot, so if the backup was made prior to 10.12 or 10.11 it can not be verified by comparing the checksum this way.

I think this only detects damaged files, not missing files. The menu command is often disabled for me, for no apparent reason.

GVFS (Git Virtual File System)

Saeed Noursalehi (via Peter Steinberger):

Here at Microsoft we have teams of all shapes and sizes, and many of them are already using Git or are moving that way. For the most part, the Git client and Team Services Git repos work great for them. However, we also have a handful of teams with repos of unusual size! For example, the Windows codebase has over 3.5 million files and is over 270 GB in size. The Git client was never designed to work with repos with that many files or that much content. You can see that in action when you run “git checkout” and it takes up to 3 hours, or even a simple “git status” takes almost 10 minutes to run. That’s assuming you can get past the “git clone”, which takes 12+ hours.

Even so, we are fans of Git, and we were not deterred. That’s why we’ve been working hard on a solution that allows the Git client to scale to repos of any size. Today, we’re introducing GVFS (Git Virtual File System), which virtualizes the file system beneath your repo and makes it appear as though all the files in your repo are present, but in reality only downloads a file the first time it is opened. GVFS also actively manages how much of the repo Git has to consider in operations like checkout and status, since any file that has not been hydrated can be safely ignored. And because we do this all at the file system level, your IDEs and build tools don’t need to change at all!

Note that the initial comments refer to “NFS+” when they mean “HFS+.” I doubt the choice of file system is the problem here. Some of the comments are interesting, though.

Previously: Facebook Makes Mercurial Faster Than Git.

Update (2017-02-09): Brian Harry (via Hacker News):

GVFS (and the related Git optimizations) really solves 4 distinct problems[…]

[…]

Looking at the server from the client, it’s just Git. All TFS and Team Services hosted repos are just Git repos. Same protocols. Every Git client that I know of in the world works against them. You can choose to use the GVFS client or not. It’s your choice. It’s just Git. If you are happy with your repo performance, don’t use GVFS. If your repo is big and feeling slow, GVFS can save you.

Looking at the GVFS client, it’s also “just Git” with a few exceptions. It preserves all of the semantics of Git – The version graph is a Git version graph. The branching model is the Git branching model. All the normal Git commands work. For all intents and purposes you can’t tell it’s not Git. There are three exceptions.

Control-T to Show “cp” Status

Dave Dribin:

Mind blown: Hit Ctrl-T while performing a long running cp command. Shows current input and output file and the percentage complete.

The Control-T sends a SIGINFO signal. It also works with dd and ping.

Building a LISP From Scratch With Swift

Umberto Raimondi (via Natasha Murashev):

In this article, we’ll implement a minimal LISP based on the 1978 paper by John McCarthy titled A Micro-Manual For Lisp - Not The Whole Truth, that defines a small and self-contained LISP, as a Swift framework that will be able to evaluate strings containing LISP symbolic expressions.

We’ll eventually use that compact interpreter to build a simple REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) that will interactively execute statements and print out the result of the evaluation. A playground to play around with the interpreter is also available.

The Secret Trackpad on the iPhone

David Pogue:

Still keep your finger down. At this point, hard presses also let you select (highlight) text:

  • Hard-press twice to select an entire sentence.
  • Hard-press three times to select an entire paragraph.

Or use this trick: Move the insertion point to a word; if you now press hard, you highlight that word.

Every day I use 3D Touch to select text on my iPhone and double-click to select words on my Mac, but I never realized these could be combined.