I bought a WD MyBook Pro II for my storage and backup needs. The 2x500GB RAID 1 setup provides enough space and safety for me. It is also faster than the internal 2.5" hard drive of my Intel Mac Mini and since Macs can be booted from Firewire drives I thought it'd be a good idea to do just that.

I went to install a fresh copy of MacOS X onto the new drive. The installer happily proceeded and upon reboot, well, the Mini didn't reboot into the new system. The old installation came up. Easy, I thought, just set the correct Startup Volume in the Preferences. No Go.

Luckily, when holding the alt-key while starting up, a Mac shows all available volumes to start OS X from. Relieved, I chose the MyBook volume. A couple of seconds into the startup sequence, the …

[Update 2007/08/17: I just found out, that this entry got overwritten by another one. A corrupted MySQL key file might have caused this.]

As a developer, reading things on the web, you come by Joel Spolsky pretty quickly. Joel is a top-notch essayist with many a story to share from his days on the Microsoft Excel Team and his current company Fog Creek. Now, Joel cares for a good read. Being sick of bad writing he tried to make an example of good software writing. He compiled a list of essays from The Net he deemed worth publishing in a book. Joel introduces each essay with a few comments. The preface to the piece by Michael “Rands” Lopp says, in my words, when you're done with this, you'll be going …