This is a somewhat long post, but the point is this: I have a new 1TB Fantom GreenDrive (attached via USB) which I cannot partition the way that I want to. I want to allocate 300G for a Time Machine backup partition and the remainder as a partition for everything else. For some reason, I’m only able to partition the drive so that it has two equal-size partitions. While this isn’t terrible (the 300G figure was somewhat arbitrary), I’m curious to see if anyone knows what’s going on here. As part of my tale, I list three “mysteries” that have really stumped me.

For at least a year now, I’ve had two external USB drives attached to my machine through a hub. One (a Fantom Titanium-II 500G drive) was for Time Machine, and the other (a LaCie 150G drive) was for other files. These drives were almost always connected to my machine, and they were almost always powered on. About three weeks ago, the Time Machine drive started unmounting, seemingly randomly, from the computer. When I tried to verify it in Disk Utility, it gave me an error, and the drive would again unmount. At the same time, I started having problems with the LaCie drive - when I plugged it in, the Mac gave me a message saying that the drive wasn’t working properly and that I had to back up everything on it.

This all seemed too coincidental to me, and so is the first mystery of my saga. However, I saw the GreenDrive on sale and decided to pick one up, rather than trying to fix the two drives. When I connected the GreenDrive to the computer, it was formatted at NTSF. When I tried to format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Disk Utility gave me an error.

If I booted the Mac into Windows, I could format the drive again as NTSF, and it would work fine. When I went back into the Mac side, it worked there, too (that is, I could read from it and write to it). Also, I could use Disk Utility to format the drive as MS-DOS (FAT). Of course, I needed to format the drive for the Mac so that it would work for Time Machine.

When I went into the Time Machine preference pane and selected the GreenDrive for Backup (which was still formatted as MS-DOS (FAT) at the time), and did the erasing from within Time Machine, I was able to get the drive formatted as one large Mac OS formatted partition. Why I was able to successfully format it from Time Machine, but not from Disk Utility (which I believe is what Time Machine uses for the erasing, anyway) is the second mystery.

So, now I had a 1TB hard drive set up a single partition. I still wanted to divide it in two. However, when I tried using Disk Utility to partition it the way I wanted, I got an error saying the partition failed. Just as a test, I tried partitioning as two equal-size partitions, and this worked. Why it would let me partition in this configuration, and not the way I wanted, is the third and final mystery.

In the end, I’m almost where I want to be. I had to spend a little bit of money, but I have more total storage space available, and it seems to be working fine. Also, I was able to format the LaCie drive, and it seems to be working well, so it wasn’t a total loss. Still, any answers you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps my favorite “feature” of the iPhone is having a decent (though some would call it sub-par) camera with me at all times.  What’s really cool is that the iPhone includes GPS tags for every photo that you take.  This allows you to create albums like this one of my recent trip to Golden Gate Park.  This is arguably useful, but it’s definitely really, really cool.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, iPhoto lacks the ability to create these maps, either natively or through an iPhoto plug-in.  It seems silly that I need to upload my photos to the Web to accomplish this, and thus I hereby declare my First iPhoto Wish.

My Second iPhoto Wish also relates to the iPhone and a Web service which takes advantage of the phone’s capabilities even better than its applications do.  It seems to me that Photos is Facebook’s really killer app so far, or at least the one that draws the most eyes to the site.  I’m a fairly active Facebook user, and when I log in, what I’m most interested in seeing is the list of updated photos; it’s more interesting than, say, your recently-updated list of favorite music, or the non sequiturs on your Wall.  What makes Photos especially cool is its ability to tag friends in your photos.  At this point, I would go so far as to call it uncouth to not tag the people in your photos.  Unfortunately, while Facebook provides an iPhone application which allows you to directly upload photos from your iPhone, it doesn’t allow you to tag the photos with friends.  So, you need to upload the photo to Facebook (via your phone or computer), then log in with a browser to actually tag people.  This is silly (as is the ability to fulfill my First iPhoto Wish in an analogous way by viewing a map on Facebook) and should be corrected.

An alternative would to rely upon the iPhone’s Photos application to do the tagging.  What would be nice about that is that it would let you sync the tag information to your iPhoto library, which is helpful if you’re slightly uneasy, as I am, about entrusting your photos to Facebook.  The problem there is the iPhone and iPhoto don’t know your Facebook friends - they only know the contacts on your phone and computer.  Perhaps Apple could use the Facebook API to get around this limitation.

My Third iPhoto Wish is for the ability to assign photos taken on the iPhone to an album before syncing to the computer.  As I understand it, the current sync procedure is this: when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, iTunes handles backing the phone up and also syncing audio and video files, calendars, contacts, and applications, and also uploading photos to the phone.  iPhoto is used to download photos from the phone.  While this makes a certain degree of sense, it’s not terribly convenient when you’re like me and only take a handful of pictures per day.  I have to plug in the phone, wait for iPhoto to open, import the picture, assign it to an album (and tag the people in it, via the Title field), and then confirm the deletion of the original from the phone.  It would be much better if I could take a picture using the phone, immediately assign it to the “San Francisco” album, and just let everything be synced automatically.

Watching Negroponte speak, I realized I was witnessing something really amazing. The OLPC project is exactly the kind of thing that I hope to do one day. They’ve taken a really, really, really hard and gigantic problem and made it work: I saw the laptop with my own eyes. Just considering the types of problems they had to solve is staggering. They’ve: created a new financial instrument to fund the projecct, developed an entirely new user interface paradigm, created hardware at a price nobody thought possible, worked with governments across the world to ensure widespread acceptance, and much more. They solved problems that I didn’t even think existed. Negroponte spoke about how the target schools for the program do not have access to electricity. I had read about this in previous articles about the program, and I was aware of the novel “hand crank” they had built into prototypes that would allow children to generate power. But the first generation shipping product actually uses a pull-cord, something like you see on children’s talking dolls. Apparently their research showed that this design reduces overall muscle strain.

The pull-cord is just one small example of the brilliance I learned about last night. This is world-changing stuff.

In other news, it’s a sad day for Philly sports. Donovan is out for the season (again) and it looks like the Phils won’t be picking up Soriano. The Sixers and Flyers continue to remain bad. Sometimes the consistency is all you need.

• I need to be able to indent/outdent only one section at a time, regardless of whether or not there are other sections below it. The behavior that I’ve seen is that when you do move a section above, all sections below are automatically moved accordingly. Sometimes this is what I want, and sometimes it is not. I really would appreciate a way to pick between the two, perhaps with just another keyboard shortcut.
• Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, how about using the standard system ones that every other app uses? There aren’t too many offenders here, but there are enough to be annoying. For example, I instinctively press Command-T to bring up the font and text size palette. In Notebook Layout (and all of Word), Command-D does this. So when I press Command-T, I ended up changing the tab location. That’s annoying.
• Obviously there are design decisions to be made regarding how much “unique” functionality you want your application to have, as opposed to using “for free” functionality provided by the system frameworks (or, of course, user interface guidelines). I would differ from the MacBU team on the idea of the built-in spell-checker and dictionary, for example. Why not use the system functionality here? As for the former, I wouldn’t have to add my unwieldy surname to both the system dictionary and the Word one. As for the latter, it just seems redundant. Instead of having the Office team spending hour upon hour of development time reinventing the wheel, why not direct that time into something more useful, such as getting an Intel-compatible version of the application suite out within two years of the architecture’s public introduction?
• I’ll combine two complaints into one here, since they both relate to the tabs, or “Sections” on the right side of the Notebook Layout screen. Basically, they’re forgetful. There are two annoying behaviors that I deal with every single day. I have a tab for every week of class, just because it is an easy way for me to do a week-by-week review. So, let’s say I’m typing some notes in the week 6 tab. My professor asks about something related to default vs. immutable rules. I don’t remember what they are, so I do a search for the term, and the application highlghts the relevant text in my week 2 tab. So far, so good. Then I switch back to the section 6 tab, and I’m disappointed to see that I’m now looking at the top of the file, not where I was typing before. It lost my place. And I have to spend precious time trying to figure out where I was typing before, and praying that I don’t get called on, because I haven’t been paying attention for the last two minutes. So, cursor position is not saved between tab switches. Also, neither the cursor position nor the currently-selected tab is saved when the file is closed. When you open your notebook file, you are always taken to the very top of the first tab. I would argue that a more convenient result would be to be taken wherever you were last working. When you open a real notebook, you don’t turn to page one, then turn to wherever it is you were writing - you (try) to open right to where it is you want to continue writing.
• All I can say about the tables function in the notebook view is that something funky is up with it. It doesn’t work right.
• If you want to know whether or not you are in the “bold” text formatting mode, you need to have the Formatting Palette open. There is no formatting toolbar in the Notebook Layout. What a ridiculous waste of space. Because I can’t see my text at the size I would like to while at the same time having the Palette open, I’m forced to guess whether or not the next word I type will be bold or not. There is no visual indicator as there would be with a toolbar.

I don’t think any of these things would be terribly hard to fix, and they would save me a ton of frustration. So git-r-done.

Because everybody keeps asking (not true), here are my thoughts on Studio 60 that I shared with beejpost:

I really want to like it, but I think Sorkin has failed to expand his portfolio here. It’s just a mash-up of WW and SportsNight, but even more touchy-feely; I’m not ready to really care about these characters yet. There’s no built-in gravitas like there is with people working in the White House. And I feel like WW could deal in one episode with the whole range of issues (censorship, religious right, etc.) that S60 will be relying on for its entire existence.

BJ also added that Bradley Whitford’s character should be named Josh. Truer words have never been spoken.

The interesting bit is that I wrote this almost three years ago - in one night. Since then, it’s been downloaded almost 12,000 times, which is really amazing. I guess this is relevant again because of iTunes 7’s ability to automatically download artwork for songs you select. I hope people are finding it useful. I especially hope that there aren’t any bugs in it. I’m not an AppleScript developer, and I was able to write that script using a combination of guessing commands and revising example scripts I found on the Internet. I guess that is a testament to how powerful AppleScript can be and how much you can do with little training.