I'm going to war!

Unfortunately I can't blog about why, when and how yet, as I'm taking legal actions, but as soon as that is resolved I'll post it here.

Meanwhile, I'm looking for good info on consumer terrorism, like this book, and other ways to get back at the <beeeeeeeep> company that caused me considerable monetary damage and have wasted months of my time.

I've already registered a domain name where I'm going to push all information and documentation about this case, and I am thinking about typosquatting the company's site :)

Like my old boss said when I told him about it: Never pick on a pedantic security puke!

I've managed to solve the problem I was blogging about earlier.

I started out by forcing TimeMachine to do a backup and since I wasn't sure I'd succeed in restoring my data using it, I did a gtar backup of all user directories too.

Once the backups were done I booted the Leopard install DVD, started DiskUtility, and reformatted the disk as HFS, Journalling and Case Insensitive. After that I started TimeMachine and choose the restore option. It immediately reformatted my disk to match the backup, and that wasn't what I wanted.

So I reformatted the disk again and then choose to do an install from scratch. When the installation completed and the system rebooted, the migration assistant asked if I would like to mograte old data, and I picked the option to restore from the last TimeMachine backup.

This time is didn't do anything with my file system and all files & settings were restored - and I could start the Photoshop CS3 installation and get it installed!

I don't know how it would have handled a conflict, i.e. restoring foo and Foo, since I wrote a Perl script to make sure that I didn't have any conflicts.

cASe inSEnsITIvE file system - what an utterly stupid idea!

When I installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro it was a natural choice to make the file system case sensitive. Besides being a UNIX geek I had a legitimate reason for doing so:
you can't do

hg clone ssh://martin@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/audit/patches

as the OpenSolaris source code contains case insensitivity conflicts.

So what am I bitching about then? Yesterday I tried to install Adobe Photoshop CS3 on my wife's MacBook pro (which I also installed with case sensitivity) and got this very unintuitive dialog:

This software cannot be installed because the file system of the OS volume is not supported

After scratching my head for a while, I figured out that it is due to the case sensitivity! Adobe hasn't bothered to fix their code, and it is not like it is a new feature in Mac OS X either... they have had several years to fix it.

Unfortunately there is no solution to this, but to reformat the file system and make it case insensitive! To go from bad to worse I can't use TimeMachine to do it, as it too doesn't support backing up a case sensitive file system and restoring it to a case insensitive. It just has to alert me if there is a conflict - which there isn't in my case, I've checked!

Luckily Mac OS X comes with all the UNIX tools we love and cherish, so I'll just use cpio or gtar to back up all my data and then nuke the / partition (while keeping my zpool)

Update: as suggested by zdz and Dick Davies I tried creating a disk image with a case insensitive HFS, but that didn't work either for the Photoshop installer. The hint is in the error message "OS volume is not supported". Back to the original plan of backup/reinstall/restore...