Well, this week’s trip is to Dallas. A funny thing about Dallas trips is that I usually end up flying first class. Because the contract I work on requires that we book fully refundable flights, that apparently defaults to first class within the timeframe I am traveling. I haven’t really questioned it that much.

The past week has been a hectic blur. I was back from the week in Tysons Corner just long enough to unpack, process laundry, and do a little work at home. I feel like I just got off a plane. Yet, here I am, some thirty thousand feet up and typing this entry into TextEdit, the native OS X text editor. Why TextEdit, you ask? Good question.

I have been backing up my laptop with Dantz Software’s Retrospect 6.0 for Mac OS X for the last several days. The backups seemed to be working well. The motive for getting around to the long-overdue task of implementing a disaster recovery plan for my laptop was that I was out of disk space on my OS X startup disk. I needed to recover the space being used to multiboot into Linux. Despite the fact that I have a shiny, sleek KDE setup on a 2.6.7 kernel, Linux has to go on this laptop. For more on that rationale, see my earlier entry about reconsidering my move to Linux as my primary desktop OS.

So, back to TextEdit and myself. In a bold gesture of confidence in Retrospect’s restore facilities, I removed all partitions from the drive and installed a fresh copy of OS X. Once I installed Retrospect onto that, I began the restore process. Things looked good; all of the file and folder checks looked to be operating correctly. Once it got to the point where the restore seemed to be underway, my wife and I went to have a late lunch before I had to leave later this afternoon.

I got home at the point where the restore should have been close to completion, ready to pack up all of my stuff and head to wonderful downtown Dallas. There waiting for me was a message that my backup disk had an incorrect timestamp of 05:23 AM July 5, 2004 instead of 01:23 AM July 5, 2004; because of that, it refused to restore the data. However, it had done a thorough job of deleting the data it intended to replace. I tried a couple of alternatives to no avail, and upon reboot, discovered that there was nothing to reboot; it had wiped out enough critical parts of the OS to prevent that. I had to leave in one hour.

An hour and a half later, I rushed out the door with a frenetically-packed suitcase and a laptop that had a virgin and rather spartan OS X install on it. In my suitcase, the clunky 75GB Firewire drive that has all my data was snugly packed, ready for me to give it another go once I get to the hotel tonight.

On Saturday installed OS X and Debian Linux onto my Titanium PowerBook G4 alongside OS 9. To my delight, yaboot worked flawlessly, enabling a triple-boot setup with minimal effort. The success of a Linux install is so dependent upon the target hardware; the old TiBooks suspend and do wireless with relative ease compared to the gymnastics required to get minimal results with the aluminum PowerBook series. I kept putting it to sleep needlessly just to watch it work; it must be some sort of subconscious vindication for the hours I sank into getting Linux working on my newer PowerBook, sans sleep, of course.

In hindsight, I should have just put Debian onto the TiBook and never tried the newer unit. I had known from the outset that Airport Extreme was a lost cause, and I also knew sleep was out of the question for the foreseeable future. I have so many other pressing projects, some with income-producing potential, yet I chose to try and make Linux on my newest PowerBook a reality.

The philosophy of open source software greatly appeals to me; that was one of my main reasons for wanting to move to Linux. Unfortunately, there are situations where the attempt to apply that philosophy in a practical way is simply a bad idea. I am not saying that I am turning my back on the idea of an open-source desktop OS; heck, I burned a few hours this weekend putting it onto another of laptop. For now, it is not the thing to do with the hardware and the time constraints I have.