I recently had the opportunity to give Apple’s Mighty Mouse a good test-drive. I was really excited when this mouse was announced. What a perfect compromise: a two-button mouse that can masquerade as a single-clicker for the frightened masses! My excitement turned to slight concern as the informal reviews started appearing on the web.

People were discovering a cheezy implementation detail that required the user to completely remove their finger from the left side of the mouse before attempting to click the right side. It was hard to gauge how problematic this issue actually was. The reviewers were either completely appalled by the problem or absurdly nonplussed: “It’s no big deal, you just lift your left finger every time you click.” No big deal!?

Earlier this month I was working in New York for a week on-site with a client. They had bought an awesome new PowerMac G5 for this work, and I was delighted (but a little scared) to see that it came with a Mighty Mouse. To Apple’s credit, the computer ships with the mouse in “one button” mode. This is how they should continue shipping computers. In fact, they should remove the software that allows two-button mode to be enabled. This “feature” of the mouse is a total piece of poop. With the Mighty Mouse, essentially every click becomes a Russian roulette gamble. Did I click on the right side or the left side? Well, I know what side I clicked, but what side has the mouse decided I clicked?

I battled with the mouse for a few hours, trying to master the art of right clicking. Not only did the mouse fail to register my right clicks half of the time, the monstrosity managed to on occasion turn my left clicks into right clicks! I could swear it even swallowed clicks sometimes!

Just how bad is the Mighty Mouse? I have been using a two-button mouse on the Mac for about 5 years. I am completely accustomed to right-clicking everything in sight. I depend on the right mouse button, and I disabled it for my week with the Mighty Mouse. I became a control-clicker for the week!

It depresses me that this is the new “Standard Mouse” for Macs. It could have been so good. In my opinion it would be false advertising to call this a two-button mouse. I guess that’s why they just say it has “multibutton charm.”

For those of you who are concerned that the right clicking with the Mighty Mouse might be a problem, but are considering a purchase anyway: save yourself! I’m back at home with my utterly unstylish Wacom mouse, and loving every damned predictable right click I make.

At the very bottom of a long list of sobering lessons to be learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is one having to do with the security of digital data.

Katrina Lesson #1432: Backups are Useless

I don’t have precise statistics, but I’d venture to say that most people don’t make regular backups. Between the dearth of reliable, easy to use software, and the relative technical naivete of the computer-using public, backups are simply not on the radar in most folks’ lives. So when the unexpected happens, most people are simply left to start over without the benefit of their accumulated data. All those pictures of the kids at Little League, gone. All the ambitious spreadsheet plans that show you might actually afford to own a home, gone. All the email you exchanged with your sweetheart before you had a clue that you’d one day be married, gone.

That’s sad.

But what’s really sad is that the small percentage of people who do make the heroic effort of backing up are kidding themselves if they think they’re much better protected. There are many, many ways a person can lose data. Too many to count, yet the backup strategies typically employed by “plain folks” protect against only two: hard drive failure and careless erasure. In a world where hard drive reliability is at an all time high, and most data sits in the “Trash Can” or “Recycle Bin” for some time before being permanently deleted, these particular dangers may be much less probable than other risks that are obliviously under-addressed.

Are you backing up your important data? Where does your backup live? If your house erupts into flames while you’re out shopping, will the smoke from your backups mingle with the smoke of your originals? The proximity that most backed up data keep with their originals is an extremely risky component of most backup strategies.

Many people have taken to using redundant hard drives as their main backup strategy. One problem with this solution is that your data, which is probably by itself unattractive to a thief, suddenly has implicit street value. If a burglar enters your house and, God forbid, steals your computer with all of your original data on it, will they also be stealing your backup? If you’re using a redundant internal drive, you’ve just lost both in one fell swoop. If you’re using an external drive, you may not be much luckier. A glimmering FireWire enclosure screams “take me” much louder than a stack of anonymous DVD discs in a filing cabinet. Your family photos may be protected from mold and oxidation in their digital format, but the chances of a thief stealing your dusty old photo album are about a billion times lower than their walking away with your shiny new iPod.

Another risk of the “redundant hard drive” strategy is that, at any given time, both your backup and originals are hooked up to an extremely powerful, unpredictable power source that could cause havoc at any moment. Surge protectors assuage some of the fear, but my completely unscientific and paranoid assessment is that “there are still no guarantees.” The problem is, whatever your computer is plugged into, your backup is probably plugged into the same thing. This means that when the freak bolt of lightening crawls up through the wires and obliterates your computer, your backup hard drive has just melted as well.

Depressing. Isn’t it? Backups are useless!

Well, they’re not useless. They’re just highly under-useful. Of all the possible scenarios involving data loss, only these two, hard drive failure and accidental erasure, spring to mind as scenarios that are actually addressed by most strategies. All the infinitely diverse other scenarios fall into the “gosh, I sure hope that doesn’t happen!” category. This means that despite your well-intentioned backup plans, you are either oblivious to the real dangers or else live in constant paranoid anxiety about how you will cope in the absence of your data. All that anxious fear is unhealthy! You need to address this!

Making Backups Useful

So how do we improve our backup strategies? How can we Katrina-proof our data? Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire strategy for preventing data loss. No matter what you do, there is an imaginable scenario that you didn’t account for. Perhaps you lost the data 5 minutes before your regularly scheduled backup would have saved it. Perhaps the Earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic superhighway. You can’t prevent all data loss, but you can take major steps to ensure survival of all but the most catastrophic of scenarios.

The components of a successful backup strategy include regularity and remoteness. Most people make a gallant effort of satisfying the first, but do nothing to satisfy the second. Your data backup is useless if not remote from the original. What does it mean to be remote from the original? This is highly contextual and can mean a number of things. On a very philosophical level it means that the backed-up data should exist in as different a form as possible from the original. If the original is on a hard disk, the backup should not be on a hard disk. If the original is vulnerable to fire and flood, the backup should be safe from fire and flood. If the original is in Atlanta, the backup should not be in Atlanta! We want to get the backed up data as far away from the original as possible, and we want it to be ideally as different from the original as possible (while still containing the same information). If a hard-drive eating fungus descends upon the earth, you’ll be happy to know that your backups are all on tape. And if a tape-eating fungus should arrive instead, you’ll be glad to know that your hard drive is in fact such a good backup of your backup, that it’s already backed up your future backup! Or something!

Practically speaking, many levels of remoteness can be built-in to your backup strategy. How easy or difficult these levels are to introduce is highly dependent on your personal situation, and how much data you have to back up. If you happen to have a fire-proof safe in your house, you can make your data remote in terms of fire vulnerability by popping the backup into the safe. If you are only backing up a small amount of data, it might make sense to upload it to a server at your ISP or on a friend’s computer. If you’re shopping for a web hosting provider, you might be wise to go out of your way to choose one that is not local. When the ball of flame engulfs your town, your data will be safely stored on your web account halfway around the world.

Remoteness is easier to achieve when the data is stored on inexpensive and lightweight media. If you make regular backups to DVD, why not add a weekly backup that gets mailed off every Monday to your parents house, or somebody else you know on the other side of the country? You can encrypt the data if its sensitive, so you don’t have to worry about your parents’ house-guests getting cozy with your data. Just getting the data into their unread pile of mail gets it “safe.” You want your backup data to live a dramatically different lifestyle than you. While you’re freezing your butt off in Ontario, and the screen of your computer flickers on and off to the rhythm of the power surging, you can think of your backup data living it up on the beach in San Diego.

In the aftermath of a mind-bogglingly catastrophic event like Katrina, many people have been reminded to revise their personal disaster plans. Most plans focus on the preservation of personal safety, and rightly so. Your backed up data will be worthless to you if you and your family don’t survive to enjoy it. But the last thing you’ll want to learn after being successfully pulled to safety from the wreckage of your home and town, is that you’ll be starting your life over sans data. We invest so much into these little ones and zeroes, we owe it to ourselves to protect them as much as we would any other incredibly valuable possession. The overwhelming unlikeliness of such disasters make it easy to “hope for the best,” but doing so is offensively irresponsible.

I am not typing this from a high-horse. Until this blog entry makes its way from my Massachusetts fingers to its California database, it’s as vulnerable as the rest of my data. I take a moment now to look down at my redundant firewire hard-drive. Lazily backed up now more than a week ago. I think of my source code, copied a few days ago to my California server – at least I think I got all of it! I consider the music files I laboriously imported from my CD collection. Not backed up, because I can “always reimport them.”Shudder! I agree: it’s hard to do this right. My strategy as it exists today is unacceptable. It’s time-consuming. It’s difficult. It’s not Katrina-proof.

My strategy is useless. I’m betting yours is, too. It’s time we made them useful.

Something that has been for months on my list of things to “check out” are Cascading Style Sheets. Ever since I woke up one day and noticed that they were no longer that funky innovative technology that no browsers supported, I realized maybe I better get a better grasp of what-all they entailed.

When one of the definitive books on the subject, “Cascading Style Sheets” by H֯åkon Wium Lie & Bert Boson, appeared on my library request available list, I rushed over to check it out. I’ve read it bit my bit over the past couple weeks, and occasionally I learn something about CSS that really surprises me. The dang thing’s got wheels!

I know, I know, that was particularly cruel of me. But the point is, all that disgusting crap you see above was done with inline styles. This means you can select it with your mouse, copy and paste it. You can search on “rainbow” in this post and find the rainbow. In the old days, this kind of junk would have always been done with a custom graphic, meaning no searchability, no selectability, and no readability (without an alt tag) for the blind folks.

Yes indeed, CSS is bringing a bright, colorful, perhaps tasteless future our way.

I was a little slow to pick up on the blogging thing. I have been writing in this particular forum for less than six months. Prior to that, I had a taste of blogging, through my connections with various friends on the LiveJournal site. Creating an ID at first just to post non-anonymous comments to friends’ blogs, I eventually started using the site as a podium for my occasionally funny and/or provocative observations on the world. It was nice to have a place to put humorous or sarcastic writing, where I knew I didn’t really have to own up to it. It’s just a LiveJournal ID, after all.

When I decided to start a technical blog, it was mainly because I wanted an outlet to share the results of my curiosity about the Mac. I’ve also learned a few things over the years, and a lot of the tricks and techniques might be put to even better use inside the minds of other people. It was clear to me, however, that my small but loyal group of LiveJournal readers was going to be utterly disappointed by a post like “Nerd Out with GDB” (my first entry on this site). Likewise, a Mac developer might think twice about subscribing to this blog if their first encounter with the site was reading about my foul-mouthed tuxedo tailor, or the fact that a highly esteemed restaurant in San Francisco has a name that is phonetically profane when read backwards.

I know some blogs try to get away with the “rounded personality” thing, but I’m just not into it. If I like your blog because you post really insightful things about programming or using the Mac, I am probably not that interested in hearing about your breakup with your girlfriend, or that you think you’re getting fat, or how the test at the proctologist turned out. I’m not even interested in reading that kind of crap from my close friends’ blogs! A lack of focus on a blog is a real killer for me. Some smart Mac users out there have blogs where half the postings are about the Mac, and half of the postings are about what CD they just bought, or something I don’t care about. I don’t subscribe to many blogs like that.

So I went the “split personality” route. I assume anybody who reads Red Sweater Blog does so because they’re interested in the aspect of my life that directly relates to using and programming computers. The downside to this decision is it presents a completely one-sided view of who I am. Sure, I’m a complicated person! Believe it! From time to time I try to inject a little more personality into my technical postings, occasionally going so far as to include something barely qualified for the blog like “Kool and the Nano Gang” (happily republished in the November 2005 About This Particular Macintosh). But mostly I just accept the fact that I’m going to be the “boring programmer” to this part of the universe. Heck, it’s my software business, so a certain lack of flair is probably appropriate!

Which is why it came as a surprise when Tim Gaden, whose prolific writings about Mail.app appear in his blog Hawk Wings, and who knows me purely through this “technical side” of my personality, sent me an email with the following question:

I nearly fell out of my chair with a mix of surprise and laughter. They’ve broken the code! Not that it’s too difficult to make this connection, but it doesn’t fall in your lap. My latest ego-googling on my own name reveals this funny truth about me in the first page of results. Still, I was wearing my “programmer hat” when this email came in, so I felt a little culturally displaced responding to this question. Umm, yes. Well, I suppose I am, aren’t I? Of course I am! Apparently one of Tim’s readers is an avid Trekkie and had recognized my name on Tim’s blog and made the connection.

The incident was amusing and reminded me that I’m a little jealous of the people who have their complete personality blogs on display for all to see. Thoughts on the world. Favorite music. Cool programming tricks. Last bowel movement. Etc. All wrapped up in a tidy, customized home page. When you come to Red Sweater Blog, all you get is “nerd this” and “nerd that.” And while the momentary jealousy did prompt me to write this entry, and to make an effort in the future to bring at least a bit more of “Daniel Jalkut: Cultural Superhero” to the blogging table, you’ll be happy to know that I will not be posting any updates from or relating to the restroom or devices contained therein. For that, you’ll have to find your way to my other blog.