Cloud Computing on the Google CR-48

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I received a package that I wasn’t expecting at the office last week.

A Merry Christmas Indeed

My wife and I ordered a good bit of our Christmas gifts from Amazon this year since it is usually cheaper and I have a Prime account. Since most of the stuff shipped separately from various fulfillment centers around the country, I was expecting (and tracking) multiple shipments to my office. I knew how many packages were arriving today and was puzzled by an extra box that I received.

As I opened it to reveal the inner box, with that now famous hamster-turbo-schematic artwork, I knew exactly what this surprise package was. The Google CR-48 – more affectionately dubbed the Chromebook.

Getting Started

The Chromebook was easy enough to setup. I unwrapped it from the bubblewrap sleeve, put the battery in, and as soon as I opened it, it turned on. Instant on. Pretty spiffy. After entering by Gmail account info and taking a picture of myself, it connected to WiFi, ran a few setup procedures, and it was done.

Because the CR-48 uses your Gmail/Google account as the system login, all of your Google services are instantly available.

The Hardware

The hardware itself is pretty nice. It resembles the black MacBook, with the same style keyboard and button-less-but-clickable trackpad. The trackpad supports basic 2 finger scrolling and clicking, but nothing beyond that. The keyboard is fairly responsive and has a few non-standard keys. For instance, instead of a CAPS-lock key, there is a home key that opens a blank homepage tab, where you can access any apps you have “installed”.

The Google CR-48

Inside the rubberized black case is an Intel Atom N455 processor running at 1.66 GHz. It has 2GB of RAM and stores what it needs on a 16GB SSD. For external devices, it has a USB port and SD memory card slot.

Connectivity On The Go

For connectivity, you have 2 options: WiFi and 3G. When you first startup the Chromebook, you will need to join a WiFi network so that it can access the internet, register your gmail account and the laptop, and do a few other setup items. The WiFi card in the CR-48 supports 802.11 a, b, g, and n with encryption support for WEP, WPA, and WPA2.

For the times when you are not near an accessible hot spot, you can use the built-in CDMA 3G. If you already have a Verizon data plan account, you can use it on the Chromebook. If you do not, each participant in the pilot program is given 100 MB of bandwidth per month for 2 years absolutely free. All you have to do is sign up for a Verizon account and select the free option. If you go over that limit, Verizon will automatically bill you for the overage using the credit card you submitted when you signed up for the account.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I am pleased with the performance of the Chromebook. For the relatively minimal tasks I do when I am at home at night or over the weekends – check email, read news/rss, check twitter and facebook – it seems perfectly suited to handle. I will be put it though a few more paces over the next week or two and give frequent updates on my site.

Get Your Own

If you want to try out the Google CR-48, you can apply for the pilot program and see if you get accepted. Oddly enough, there seems to be no system to notify those who have been selected. Your laptop just shows up.

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The Setup

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I have been designing and developing websites for over well over 10 years. I always get asked what type of hardware and software I use to get the job done, so I thought I would write up a blog post about it.

Hardware

When I first started working on the web, I used a PC. About 4 years ago, I switched to Mac as my primary development environment and never looked back. Sure, I still have to use windows on occasion, and help manage our Windows-based network at the office, but I am a Mac user through and through.

My current setup includes a new 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a hi-res anti-glare display. When I am at the office, I pair this up to a 30″ Cinema Display, which gives me plenty of room to push the pixels around. I use an M-Stand from Rain Design to prop my laptop up, keep it running cool and get the display in line with the Cinema Display.

For backups, I run two 1TB Iomega Prestige Drives. One drive is my Time Machine drive and it stays connected to my Mac when I am at the office. The other is for regular backups using Super Duper. Time Machine is great for when you accidentally delete a file or folder, but nothing beats having a fairly recent, bootable backup to get back up and running quickly. Learn more about my setup for running and managing backups.

I also use Dropbox for sharing files with my wife’s Macbook Pro as well as backing up documents.

Software

I have a fairly standard set of software tools and rarely deviate from them. We run all of our projects out of Subversion, so I use Versions to check in and out of our SVN server. Once I have what I need checked out, I use TextMate as my main authoring environment.
When I first switched from PC to Mac, I tried just about everything on the market to find something that was close to Homesite, which was my main editor on PC. I eventually settled on TextMate and really enjoy using it.

When I am designing sites, I use Photoshop CS4. I could probably get by on Photoshop 6 when you consider that I probably only use about 10% of the features of Photoshop and rarely use much of the imagery past the concepting phase.

Since we do a good bit of .NET programming, I also run VMWare Fusion with Windows 7. This is also handy for browser testing and running Beyond Compare for uploading files to client servers. I wish there was a Mac version of Beyond Compare or another app that mirrored its capabilities.

So that is my main software setup. I use a variety of other apps from time to time to get things done. Here is a list of other apps I regularly run:

  • Google Chrome for regular web browsing
  • Firefox with Firebug when I need to debug something
  • Fetch for quick file uploads
  • Skitch for capturing screen shots
  • Adium for chatting
  • Entourage for email at work (Exchange. what can ya do, huh?)
  • Gmail for personal email
  • Tweetie for tweeting (patiently waiting for Tweetie 2)
  • Evernote for note taking
  • Integrity for link checking
  • Alfred for app launching
  • XCode when I want to pretend I know what I am doing in an iPhone app project

Are there any apps you are using to get your work done? Any that I am missing that I just have to try out?

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Managing Time Machine Backups

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After a few of my friends had their hard drives die with no backups of their files available, I decided it was time to get serious about keeping my data safe. It would suck to loose 10 years worth of photos and almost 20GB worth of music, not to mention home movies shot on my Flip Mino HD. So I devised a plan and schedule to keep some sort of backup of my Mac in case of hard drive failure.

Since I use a laptop 100% of the time, it was going to be tricky to keep it hooked up to something long enough for backups to run. It wasn’t like I could leave an external drive hooked up all the time to a desktop. Also, running Time Machine backups over WiFi to a disk connected to my AirportExtreme didn’t seem terribly efficient. The bandwidth it took up also affected the performance of other networked devices in the house. So I came up with the following solution.

My MacBook pro is a work machine, but I take it home on the weekends as well. While I am at work during the week (and during the day) it stays connected to a 1TB Iomega Prestige USB drive. This is my Time Machine drive. It keeps running backups of my files so I can revert if I accidentally delete something.

But Time Machine likes to run. A lot. I think it defaults to backups every hour. To do this, Apple uses a launchd daemon to control the timing. Changing the value of the interval in the launchd.plist file has no effect.

To overcome this, I found an app called TimeMachineScheduler. This app disables the automatic backup function of Time Machine and installs its own launchd daemon to allow you to control the frequency of Time Machine backups. You can also skip the backup entirely with a specified time range – like at night, when my MacBook Pro is at home and not connected to the backup drive. If you encounter problems with the app, there is even an uninstaller that will put things back to the way they were.

So I was off and running with Time Machine, but I noticed that every time it ran, it was grabbing 20-30 GB of data…even though I had not really changed that much on my Mac. What in the world could it have been backing up each time? Fortunately, there is a way to find out.

TimeTracker from CharlesSoft will read your Time Machine backups and show you want is being backed up each time. Once you can see that, you can go in and make adjustments to the exclude list to ignore items that don’t really need to be backed up – like Entourage profiles that are also stored in Exchange, or virtual machine images that can’t be incrementally backed up (that was the 20GB I was seeing every time).

In addition to Time Machine, I also regularly run a bootable backup to a second Iomega drive using the fabulous SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket software. Once you run a full bootable backup, you can run a Smart Update (registered version only) which will basically run a differential based on your original full backup.

I keep my SuperDuper drive at home so that I never have both copies in the same place. With the Smart Update feature, I can also keep my SuperDuper drive up to date and bootable without having to run a full backup each time. I probably run a Smart Update once a week, usually on the weekends when I am at home and not using the computer much.

So that is my backup strategy. What is yours?

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Quitting launched apps in iOS 4

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Have you been using the new Multitasking feature in iOS 4? I have been using it like crazy and love it. If you have been using it for any length of time, you have probably noticed about 6 or 7 screens worth of apps in the app drawer that shows up at the bottom.

You can actually quit those apps running in the background. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Double-click the home button to open the multitasking panel.
  2. Select and hold down on one of the app icons like you do on the homescreen to rearrange them.
  3. When they start jiggling, you will see a red minus sign in the top left corner instead of the standard X for deleting apps.
  4. Just scroll through and tap the minus sign for the apps you want to close.


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