Tag: tips

The Laravel Podcast Episode 42 and the Meaning of …

I really enjoyed last week’s Laravel Podcast episode 42. Now since it is episode number 42 – I expected it to contain the answer to the ultimate question of development.

Now when you listen to the episode, you might think that the ultimate question that’s being answered is “which is the best object relational mapping approach/pattern – ActiveRecord pattern or the Data Mapper pattern?”

Or perhaps the ultimate question that’s being answered is “Should the ‘Single Responsibility Principle’ be violated when it comes to ORMs?”

Of course you need to listen to episode 42 to make your own decision. Perhaps it’s all ORM drama and dogma that is just a mystery wrapped in a Twinkie.

Personally, I think that the ultimate question is “how should you approach feature creation when it comes to software development?” And the answer is stated at the 46th minute of episode 42 (if only it was the 42nd minute…it would have been perfect…it’s time to repeat ‘serenity now’^100 and come to terms with this lack of symmetry). So what is the answer is:

“Don’t do it until you need it.”

Sounds simple – doesn’t it?

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Time Machine Slowdown Issue and Resolution

Problem:

Right after coming back from the holidays I noticed that my machine was completely unusable when Time Machine (TM) would run (on Yosemite). It was so bad that I would need to pull the external USB hard disk without ejecting any partitions (while cringing inside) to be able to get control of my machine.

My system’s specs: mid 2014 MacBook Pro 15″ with a 2.5 GHz i7 CPU running Yosemite.

Solution:

This solution worked for me but the usual disclaimers apply.

Initially, I ran TM overnight thinking it had to catch up on some holiday weeks that it missed in terms of backups. This assumption was wrong. When I looked at the 1 TB partition that I had made available for TM it had only 25 GB left. It seemed like TM was thrashing my whole machine in attempting to clean up old backups.

The next thing I did was to shut TM off so that I could use my system while figuring how to delete old backups off the TM partition. I first tried to delete individual backups and I found this Stack Exchange article to be extremely useful: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/39287/how-can-i-manually-delete-old-backups-to-free-space-for-time-machine.

I tried both the command line approach of deleting specific TM backups and I also used the TM interface. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t tell which backups were extremely large (running ‘du’ on the directories was useless due to permission issues and a long response time). Additionally, when I used the TM interface, it would block me from using my system for anything besides Time Machine (command line was much better). I then decided to delete all the backups using command line and I got tons of error -36 messages. So this didn’t work well.

My solution was the nuclear option – i.e. nuke the TM partition and start over:

  1. Shut off TM via system preference
  2. Disconnect TM partition via Finder
  3. Use Disk Utility to erase partition:
    • name it with current year so it’s different name than original
    • it will complain giving an error while it removes the encrypted partition that TM created
    • re-erase partition after the initial error so actual erasure occurs
  4. In TM system preference:
    • remove the old disk (you can’t do this until the partition is gone)
    • create new TM disk by selecting the new TM partition

This is probably old hat to experienced users of the Mac but it was new to me.

If you found this useful – let me know via @eli4d on Twitter