Then I find TS1760: “In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine ‘time travel’ window, past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters.”

The solution is to update to 10.5.5 or later. I’m pretty sure I had done that long before I set up Time Machine.

What the hell?

My computer name was “BR’s MacBook”. I renamed it to “BR MacBook” and, later, “BRMacBook”. So far I have learned:

• Time Machine does not freak out and renames the root backup folder appropriately.
• I am still unable to “time travel”.
• Many people on the Internet have reported the existence of this problem but nobody has claimed to have found a solution to it.

What did I do to deserve this?

UPDATE: Apparently the way to time travel in this configuration is to option-click the Time Machine menu item (or ctrl-click the Dock icon) and select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. I found this out by browsing Apple’s discussion forums directly instead of simply assuming that Google knew it all.

Instead, today was FUBAR because of code signing problems.

In my down time today, as I waited for certificates to be generated and phone calls to be returned, I searched the web for a good overview of digital signatures and public key encryption that I could use to explain the process to people who did not implement RSA in Scheme.

I found “What is a Digital Signature?” by David Youd, which manages to be simple without being misleading. He is writing about email, but the concept applies to code signing if you make the following substitutions:

• Bob → developer
• email message → iPhone application
• Pat → iPhone user
• Doug → malicious developer
• Susan → Apple Worldwide Developer Relations
• Pat’s user friendly software → iTunes