so that's where my disk space is going: insidious backups

Yesterday, I downloaded Xcode 2.2. This is a 933 mb download, and installs to even bigger than that. I let it install overnight, and I woke up to a message that my startup disk is almost full. Drat!. This is still my three-year-old titanium ibook, with a 30 gb hard drive. I went looking for stuff to cleanup, but I'd cleaned my desktop a few days ago, pruned unused source trees, deleted unused applications... so where is all my disk space going? I found a directory named Backups on the root dir of my drive. Looking inside, it contains "Home Folder Full Backup" from September 22, 2005, and 11.6 gigs of incremental backups for every day since then. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! I'm using a third of my disk space backing up files to the same disk that contains them... so when my hard drive fails, these 11 gigs of backups are going to be useless.
I'm not stupid, and I've been burnt before, so hell yes I have backups. I backup to cd once a month; my source code and mail are backed up by my employer and gmail, and I periodically drop a snapshot on a remote server. My powerbook has had so many hardware problems in the last year that I don't rely on anything being there tomorrow that was there today. These incremental backups are quite possibly the least useful data I've ever stored on any media anywhere.
I'm a paying member of .mac and I use Backup 3, which comes with .mac, and comes configured with a sensible backup plan. When I was setting up with Backup 3, I think I made some decision like "I'm going to be very cautious and do lots of backups, more than the standard apple recommendations!" Apparently I didn't think that one through completely.
I implore each of my readers: backup to alternate, write-once media, with error checking, stored offsite. If not regularly, just do it now. Today.
I'm starting my work today backing up to cd, starting with purchased music and then going through the really crucial stuff, Quicken and email and pictures and notes. Want to take bets on how much longer my powerbook will last?

a free day for coding!

It's the friday after thanksgiving and have three days to do whatever I want! I want to code. The question is, what should I code? I could dive into a fairly bad set of Laszlo Mail bugs; I've got seven P1's blocking the next milestone. I could learn Ruby on Rails, although I don't have a project I want to implement with it, so let's rule that out. I could return to my Delicious Library laszlo application. I could look at some OpenLaszlo platform issues. I could work on a book chapter I've committed to writing for an early january deadline. I could go back to my skunkworks project that will dramatically improve Laszlo Mail usability.
How to choose? I want to do something that will be fun to do and that will give me that happy coding feeling. (Code is my favorite mood-altering experience, in case that wasn't clear already.) The P1 bugs and platform performance issues sort of fill me with dread. The skunkworks usability project, though, that's exciting. When I demonstrated a prototype a few weeks ago, people were really excited about it. Probably traditional software engineering values would say, quality before features, contractually-required features before strategic features before just cool features... but I say, bah! It's my three days, and I know I'll be spending the rest of November and December on quality and contractually-required features. So, I'm going to dive into the fun usability project, and get back to the bugs saturday or sunday.

email faux-pas

Seen in a long conversation on a list which will go unnamed:

I deleted all your comments to save some bandwidth.

everybody's working for the weekend

"I can work all weekend, whether I want to or not."

mouse wheel isn't supported in flash player 7 on the mac

The Flash 7 release notes explain that mousewheel support was added for windows only. Parse that and rearrange a bit, and you get, "the mousewheel is not supported on the mac in flash player 7." Flash doesn't support it, so OpenLaszlo doesn't support it, so (sadly) Laszlo Mail can't support it.
We've been getting user comments about this, so I know it doesn't work in some cases (including on my favorite dev machine) but I'm not sure if it does work in any cases. Luckily, I don't have a windows box with a mouse with a scroll wheel to try it out on.