It’s often difficult to find out just exactly how much space is taken up in the home directory on your hard drive. IF you are comfortable with the command line, startup terminal and run:
du -h -d1
This will list the top level of directories from wherever you are (hopefully your home folder). The ‘-dx’ controls how many directories to descend. Do a ‘man du’ to learn more.
If you prefer a GUI interface, then WhatSize is what you are looking for. It’s free and a good tool to use. It’s easier and faster than ‘du’ in that it lets you rapidly compare different areas on the disk visually.
Now if you want something really cool, Disk Inventory X is an experimental application that creates a “treemap”, like this:
While not entirely useful, treemaps are cool in that they let you see disk usage in ways that are impossible to visualize otherwise.
I have been trying out the .Mac Web Galleries and am disappointed. While it does offer 10GB of storage, the features of the gallery itself are strictly for consumers showing snapshots.
1. The data transfer and website is very heavy. Its slow. Much slower than it needs to be. Someone clocked the initial download hit for scripts, etc. at 2MB.
2. All images are resized on the fly. There is very little thumbnailing and no possible way to see the image in its native resolution. When trying to view images full-size, the resizing messes up the image quality, at times quite severely. There is no fixed resolution view mode to show the image at high quality.
3. Reflections. I am showing photos, not eye-candy reflections at the bottom of the photos.
4. Upload options. There are none.
5. When clicking through full-size images and there are multiple pages of thumbnails, a user is told they are at the end of the gallery when they reach the end of the thumbnail “page”. In a test this caused every single user to miss the second half of the two-page gallery.
While this Gallery is as easy as possible to use for your average iPhoto user, I think that it could do a much better job with less of the bloat.
PicasaWeb, with all of its features and Google maps integration and an iPhoto plugin, is still lightweight and plagued by none of these problems. It just works. Of course, with the release of the new iLife 08, the Picasa iPhoto export plugin is broken, but the separate uploader app works and an update to the plugin will be released soon.
Here is an example for you to compare:
.Mac Web Gallery
Picasaweb
I spent quite a bit of time looking around for a good OS X password manager and form manager. I found that 1Passwd blows everything else away. Click there to see a demo movie which is pretty cool.
Consisting of a stand-alone application to manage your password database and plugins for every browser under the sun. I was able to import all of my Firefox saved passwords instantly and the toolbar automatically captures new logins and stores them in the database.
Passwords can synch via .Mac and can be backed up automatically via .Mac. It also is compatible with the pop-up HTTPAuth dialogs some websites show.
The multiple personality idea is embedded in both the logins as well as the form auto-fill feature.
If I am creating a new account, I can easily generate a stupendously difficult one-account password which will be stored in the database and used for future logins at that website.
The GUI is well-behaved and it just works. It’s well worth the registration fee!
While at the VeriSign Technical Symposium last week, I got to hang out with the guys building the VeriSign Personal Identity Provider, an OpenID implementation. I am already a fan of ClaimID, which is another OpenID provider and have been using VeriSign authentication tokens for work. It’s interesting to see the convergence of the Paypal and EBay markets, the VeriSign security tokens and OpenID.
Paypal and Ebay have achieved a critical mass of users and seem to be able to define an entire market segment by simply rolling out new technology. Security tokens have been in use for awhile in the enterprise but Java rings, smart cards, tokens and other things were just a bit early for the consumer. There was no market demand.
Given the fraud issues on Paypal and eBay, consumers are acutely aware of the need for something better than just a password for authentication. Paypal is now offering a VeriSign security token for $5 each on their website. You have to dig around to find it, but its there. Once you order one, a whole new world opens up.
The classic concern raised about security tokens are that they are bulky and they only work with one vendor. Enter the idea of a “networked” token. One token, issued by a large certificate authority, can now work for any vendor that chooses to implement their solution. The Paypal token, being issued by VeriSign, already automatically works for eBay. The secret here is that this is not a “Paypal” token, this is a VeriSign Identity Protection device. You will use it with a lot more stuff than just Paypal and eBay.
As more vendors adopt the VeriSign token, the network will grow and each user getting a token will be able to use it with more and more vendors. eBay and Paypal have simply jump-started the consumer adoption.
One such compatible implementation is the OpenID based VeriSign Labs Personal Identity Provider. Create a profile and activate your VeriSign token in it, now you have just upgraded your OpenID authentication to use the token for OpenID logins!
