The softaholic blog

My Mantis bug-tracking site is finally on-line at http://cyberguijarro.com/mantis. It hosts my three major (minor) projects: infoscape for Windows, infoscape for OS X and disaster.

Note: Anyone can log-in as guest and report bugs using a guest account. Please navigate to the site for more details.

Everyone is going to love this release, I bet. Here is a list of what you get downloading the new version:

• Application comes now in universal binary format (for all PPC folks out there)
• Exclusion list can be now initialized via command line parameters
• Backup process now runs in its own thread, so the GUI is not blocked anymore
• Backup process can be stopped anytime now

Tip: invoke Disaster in the following way from the command line or a script to make it backup your data and close automatically:

/Applications/Disaster.app/Contents/MacOS/Disaster source_path target_path [excluded_path_1 excluded_path_2 ...]

Disaster is back and this time it really shakes the ground:

• Improved backup status visualization
• Improved file change detection logic
• Command line support (great for automated backup scripts!)

To use the command-line interface, just call the executable providing source path and target path as first and second parameters, respectively. The program will then start, do the backup and close itself automatically.

Here it is! It is an awful piece of software but hey, it is my first Mac OS X application and you’re getting it for free, so watch your tongue (or your fingertips) when commenting. Known issues are:

• Problems reporting backup sizes over 4GB (damn 32-bit integers).
• No persistent configuration implemented.
• No documentation.
• No OpenGL acceleration.

My very latest software goodie will be delayed for a while until I find the time to test it properly, pack it, an upload it to the site.

Thanks for your patience.