Rumours are spreading about the death of Retrospect. As a fan and user of the product for many years, I am not happy it may no longer be around. We use it on 6 pc servers. It is easy to use, smooth and reliable. We haven't seen an upgrade on the PC side for awhile as I mentioned in a previous blog post, Mac users have waited even longer.

EMC took over a great product and haven't known what to do with it. EMC should tell us what is going on now. I have years worth of backups invested in Retrospect.

The Register has more details.

I had to setup our Quicktime Streaming server this week. It had been working a few years ago, but when I tried to use it this week it failed to stream. I was getting 404 errors. I checked everything. I turned off the web service to make sure it wasn't clashing. I unbound and rebound the ip address. I moved the movies to a different folder and change the movie home location. Nothing would make it work. It wouldn't even stream from Safari or the Quicktime player on the server.

After a bit of research I found that I had to hint the film. This is very easy.

Open the movie in Quicktime. Select Export. Make sure that, Movie to Hinted Movie is selected in the export option.



Click options and set as below.



I also then found out that if you have the web service turned on, Quicktime will stream over port 554. Your url should look something like this.

rtsp://x.x.x.x:554/mymovie2.mov - this will open Quicktime and play the movie

http://x.x.x.x:554/mymovie2.mov - this will play in the browser

It was a relief to get it working again

We have been using the wonderful iShowU all week at work, but hit a big problem. All our PAL output looked horrible. I went straight to the forums at shinywhitebox. Neil, the developer, asked me to ichat with him and for 2 hours we worked through it. I have never worked with a company that gives that sort of support. Normally, its try this or that and call me back if it doesn't work. We sent files back and forth and found the answer.

It turned out that the files were fine, but looked poor on screen because of a Quicktime preference that had not been set correctly: Use high-quality video setting when available.



You won't notice if you are just watching PAL video, but as this was a screencast with text, it was not good.

Following on from my last blog entry, that was close. I said gmail, but it turned out to be Yahoo.

The iPhone looks superb. Here in Europe, we even have the advantage of the Americans ironing out all the bugs as the phone won't be here until December. The question is, which network will it be available on? I believe it isn't 3g so it won't be on 3 here in the UK. From what I hear the US market is different to the UK market so it will be interesting to see which network gets it. Apple will hold all the aces and they can pick.

Free push email sounds great, but is that the account or is the data charge free too? I doubt it. Data charges are always high, so how many people will be dragged into the wow factor and then realise they have a big phone bill. Who will get the phone in the UK? I am on 3, but it won't be them, no 3g. Hopefully Orange. I am not a fan of o2 or Vodafone. I have never used T-Mobile, but they have US connections so it maybe them.

Will the phones now drive the market rather than the networks? Are we going to have to get used to paying the proper price for a phone? What other technology do you buy that gets a subsidy like a phone? The TV license doesn't get you a discount off your TV.

It is a shame in January to know what you want for Christmas in December. I want one!!!!

While listening to Your Mac Life last week, Shawn mentioned that Apple might find it a show stopper to offer email on their mobile phone as .Mac won't work on a pc. Here are my thoughts on this. I was wondering how many people actually use a real mail client anymore? Forget the syncing part of .Mac for this argument. Webmail would allow a pc user to use .Mac. Does Apple have the bandwidth if this was to be tried and was a success? Maybe not. Google does and they are on Apple's board. Does Apple make much money from .Mac? Not as much as it would from a phone. Ship .Mac over to Google and let them cope. I know lots of people who want email on their phone, but it is too hard to setup. Data charges are another issue, but if Apple are a virtual provider, I am sure they can make that attractive. I still believe deep down, people only want a simple phone, but with add on services (i.e. a subscription model, email, video calls, iChat etc.)