I just noticed that my Crucial SSD were starting to be really slow so I look around to find a way to reconditioning the drive under OS X. I found that you can do this in two way one free and one that cost a few coins.

A. Using OS X’s Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!

B. Using diglloyd’s DiskTester and Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!

Restoring write performance can be done in about an hour for drives around 128GB.

1. Start by making a backup of the SSD to another hard drive. The best thing is to create a clone using on of the free programs Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, and is more or less mandatory if the drive is your boot drive.
2. Use OS X’s Disk Utility to Erase the SSD. Remember that you will need to boot using the clone if the SSD is your boot drive.
3. Now you can either (A) write over the entire capacity of the SSD with OS X’s Disk Utility using “Erase free space”, or (B) use the faster approach DiskTester’s recondition command.
4. If you use DiskTester you can test the speed when done with the Sequential Test option, if the speed is still not what you expect you repeat step 3.
5. Last you want to erase the SSD with OS X’s Disk Utility again. Finally you clone the backup from step 1 back onto you SSD.

You should do this when you SSD starts to get slow again or regularly run DiskTester’s recondition command to avoid too much defragmentation.

After the process my Crucial SSD drive were:
Write 193MB/sec Read 268MB/sec

Enjoy,

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

Having just paid $125 to get a MySQL database recovered I thought it would be timely to figure out a way to make a backup system for my MySQL database(s) on the MediaTemple Grid Service.

Here is how I do it!

Step 1:

The first step is to backup the database(s) to the file system.

Using automysqlbackup I do a daily MySQL backup to the folder /home/dbbackups. This is done for all MySQL databases using the easy to install backup shell script (automysqlbackup.sh).

Just go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/, download the script, modify it and upload it to your server.

I use “Cron Jobs” in the Media Temple Control Panel to run the automysqlbackup script daily. The script conveniently handles daily, weekly, monthly folders plus rotation.

Step 2:

Next, I make sure my entire home folder (including the dbbackups) get copied to another server using rsync.

I really like this way of doing it because I think it’s important to have different snapshots of the data from different time periods (daily, weekly, monthly). This way I will be able to restore things deleted weeks ago.

Please let me know if you have questions!

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

Chris Pearson just released version 1.7 of The Thesis Theme for WordPress with a lot of new exciting features. If you’re not familiar with The Thesis Theme I can tell you it has been designed to be flexible and easy to customize.

In this post, I will show you how to change the header of The Thesis Theme. By default, Thesis Theme is displaying blog title and a tagline in the header but you can easily change this in order personalize to your own taste.

Here are the 3 steps you can easily follow.

1. Open custom_functions.php

Open custom_functions.php file using any text editor of your choice. The file is located at in the Thesis custom folder. Remember the files in the custom folder can be customized without changing the core thesis files.

2. Adding Header Action Hook

Add the following line of code just below <?php in the file. This will add the hook function add_image_header to the thesis_hook_header section.

add_action('thesis_hook_before_title', 'add_image_header');

3. Creating Header Function

The following code should be added to the custom_functions.php file just below add_action code shown in step 2.

function add_image_header() {
?>
<p id="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo(template_url)?>/custom/images/header.png" width="650" height="50" alt="Header image" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"/></a></p>
<?php
}

Description:

<p id="logo">

Give Thesis instructions that this paragraph is logo.

<a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">

This links to the to your blogs homepage and make it a click–able link.

<img src="<?php bloginfo(template_url)?>/custom/images/header.png" width="650" height="50" alt="Header image" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"/>

This code will make sure the header image is displayed. You can add width and height as well as title and alt text if you like.

You should change header.png to the correct header filename that is uploaded to your /custom/images/ folder.

This is how I added my header image to The Thesis Theme.

Enjoy!

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

In this post I will cover three Mac programs i use nearly every day. The synergy between the programs are huge. Coda is the newest program on my Mac and it is basically an advanced combination of TextWrangler and Transmit.

Transmit | Panic
The feature list of Transmit is long. Very long needed. I have been using Transmit for years now and still remember when I first saw the little truck icon five years ago.

Browsing the home page of Panic really say something about what quality you should expect from this little truck.

The full feature list can be seen on the home page.

Here are some of the features I really like and why I have used it for the past years. I started to use Amazon S3 a while ago and it is great to see Transmit support Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). I can now manage my storage service in a nice Mac-style fashion. You just select a remote item and your will see a preview and will be able to instantly copy the URL! This is really what I really like about this application. Secure FTP in a really nice package has made this, one of my most used programs on my Mac. Read more on Transmit.

Coda | Panic
The story of Coda is also my story of Coda! I used to use Taco HTML Edit, which is another great program for building programs using hand-coding. I simple edited the html file uploaded it using transmit and checked in the browser how the page looked.

On day I just realized that Panic were doing a similar thing and I went to the website, downloaded a trial – and I were hooked!

I mostly code web sites by hand. And Coda really makes this a much easier task. First when you start using Coda you will need to setup your sites. Then, when you’re ready to work you just double click on a site and you are ready.

Coda will restore itself to where you left it, connecting to your server, restoring any splits and tabs, and you are ready to code, pronto. A great feature is that it allows you to easily preview local or remote content and you can edit on which you want. Read more on Coda.

TextWrangler | Bare Bones Software
TextWrangler is simply a powerful general-purpose text editor, Unix and server administrator’s tool. At its most basic it is an advanced text editor.

I used to use it a lot for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac, to writing HTML or other codings.

I think of it as a programmer’s text editor because it features syntax coloring and function navigation for HTML/XHTML, PHP, JavaScript and many more. It’s very god to find differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences. A favorite task where I use it a lot is using find and replace. I can go through folders, find expressions to be replaced just on the fly. A basic task but it has saved me hours of hard work.

Please let me know if I missed something.

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

I just encountered this annoying problem with the “Open With” option in Finder. When I right clicked on a file in Finder. The menu listed programs located on an old drive and not my brand new solid state drive (SSD) boot drive.

I had installed the SSD as a boot drive and created a RAID array with three 1GB hard drives for my increasing numbers of digital photographs. I installed a new version of Snow Leopard and the Programs on the new boot drive. Finally I moved my User folder to the RAID setup. You can read how to move your User folder here: How to move the User Folder.

After this little trick the “Open With” menu listed the programs on the old boot drive and not the SSD drive. Also some of the programs were listed as duplicates.

If you have this problem, you should first check to be sure you do not have duplicate applications on your system. This happens sometimes when updates or reinstalled applications may not replace old files but instead leave a new copy on the system. If this is the problem then just remove the old copy if you don’t need it anymore.

The next step after ensuring you only have one copy of a given application is to reset the launch services. This is the service that pairs up file types and URLs with the correct applications. This can be done two ways: manually or with a third-party utility like OnyX from Titanium Software.

To reset the services manually, open the Terminal and run the following command (the utility to do this is buried deep in the Launch Services framework, hence the commands below are long):

For Leopard and Snow Leopard:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister /Volumes/Macintosh\ BOOT/Applications -kill -seed [-all uls]

For Tiger and previous:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

You might also try removing the launch services preference files, which are the “com.apple.LaunchServices.plist” and “com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEvents” in your /username/Library/Preferences/ folder. Do this and then run the commands to clear and rebuild the launch services.

Have fun

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

After buying my first Mac Pro (2009) I soon realized that I needed more than the standard 1TB hard drive installed in the Mac Pro. I went a head and upgraded with two additional 1TB hard drives and one 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD).

I installed Snow Leopard and my Applications on the 128GB SSD so I could use it as a boot drive. The three 1TB Hard drives were configured as a fast striped RAID setup using the disk utility. Then I simply moved my home folder (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) to the RAID setup.

Move your entire home folder:

So basically I wanted to move my home folder (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) to the RAID setup. As most probably don’t know Apple has this feature built right in to Snow Leopard. There is a configuration pane in System Preferences to do right this with a few clicks with the mouse.

First of all you need to copy your home folder to the destination hard drive — in my case the striped RAID setup.

Second, open Accounts within System Preferences. Make sure the lock is unlocked (click on it and type password) so changes can be made. Right-click on the user name of the account for which you copied the home folder and choose ‘Advanced Options…’.

This takes you to a pane where, amongst other things, you can change the location of your home folder.

After choosing the new location, click OK and restart your Mac.

After restarting the changes take effect and the home folder location has changed and all the system icons (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) are transferred to the new location.

Symbolic Links (Advanced):

Another way to do this is to use symbolic link which is another smart way of organizing your Documents, photos or video.

Before using the ‘ln’ command to create symbolic links you should get more information by typing ‘man ln’ or ‘ln’ in the Terminal.

First you will need to move the folder to the location you want to keep your files.

Simply drag and drop your Music folder located in ‘/Volumes/BOOT/Users/user/Music’ from the ‘BOOT’ volume to the ‘RAID’ volume.

Then to add a symbolic link from the Music folder on the ‘BOOT’ drive to the ‘RAID’ drive you will type:

‘ln -s /Volumes/RAID/Users/user/Music /Volumes/BOOT/Users/user/Music’

Finish safely:

To be sure everything went fine and your files are in good conditions open disk utility and repair permissions after wards, just to be safe!.

Good luck,

Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET

Preparing to launch a new photographic e-commerce site I decided to evaluate the quality in terms of reliability and speed of my previous host. It was clear that with the amount of domains I had and the traffic from the sites I should look out for a new host to ease administration and to speed things up.

However it’s not an easy task to choose which host and what service you want. There are so many options and different opinions. Anyway I had been looking at Media Temple for some time now, but was not really sure if that would be the right solution for my up coming sites. Fortunately Media Temple offers a “Money Back Guarantee” so after going through the term of use I went ahead and opened a Grid-Service account for $20 each month.

Media Temple is very different from my previous host – the control panel is huge and confusing but I can use ssh to log on to the service with the Terminal in OS X and play around just like any other remote computer with Linux installed.

I soon got familiarized with the interface and transferred one of my domains — a WordPress installation with about 1GB of data and a 2.5MB database. Not large but not small either. Everything went fine and following the  knowledgebase the web page were up and running in no time. The site were on a .dk domain so I could just change the DNS settings at the registrar and within a few hours everything were running smoothly.

It was clear that the site loaded and opened much faster now on the Media Temple service but just to get some numbers I opened a free account on Site24x7. This site allows you to monitor response time, throughput and host up/down-time etc.

The results were clear: Media Temple were approximately 6 times faster than my previous host (often more). Even though the results are from a European origin and the Grid-Service service is located in the states. The long response is due to the WordPress installation and the php scripts and plugins that need to be processed during load. When doing the same test on a simple html page the response time drops considerately (down to 30ms).

Another issue is downtime-time and unfortunately I have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime during the first two weeks of monitoring. Media Temple answered promptly and explained what was going and the sites were up and running soon again.

Having moved to a new host, installed a new site, tested it for a few weeks without problems, seen the boost of my sites it is clear that I can easily host the coming e-commerce photo site to Media Temple.