Software, Hardware, and my wallet

It's a good feeling to work with a developer to resolve a bug. About two weeks ago, I bought a camcorder, a Canon ZR60. It had multiple purposes - videos (obviously), video capture from analog sources (this is something that Canon cameras can do), and data backup. Data backup? Oh yes.

There's a piece of software for OS X called DV Backup. I downloaded it, tried it out, and after verifying it worked on a 35MB backup, I bought it. That's when the trouble began. I wanted to back up my iTunes music library (20GB+ worth) and needed somewhat reliable, somewhat cheap storage, that could be spanned across multiple media. DV Backup offered this functionality, and at a good price. It was able to successfully back up my data, but always crashed/failed/died during the verification phase. Always.

I contacted the developer and explained the problem, and after much testing, I've got a much more reliable application, that seems to work on the verification moreso than it did. There are still problems with it, but instead of failing on the first tape (of 3), it fails on the 3rd. This means about 19GB of music is able to be restored, at this point. Much better. The developer had it good - he had me and another person to test and, as he explained it to me, it only affected dual-processor Macs. If the app failed for me, it was always reproduceable by the other tester. That's got to be nice, from a development perspective.

On a hardware and wallet-related note, last night Nicole and I went to the Mac Store here in Seattle and traded in her dual 867MHz G4 PowerMac for a 1.25GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4. Gorgeous machine, and with Panther supporting fast user switching, we have no need for two PowerMacs in the house. We'll really only need one computer each. Now, if we could just get Panther soon, we'll be set :-)

I guess I'm getting in all my purchases now before someone decides to lay me off. Yup, hooray for credit. No more major purchases for the rest of the year, now.