Daily Movement

I don’t want to get on jwz’s shitlist, but in response to his message about backups not RAID, I think RAID for storing backups is still a reasonable approach, although the ZFS folks would still balk about silent failures, i.e. media or hardware that has corrupted bits.

Since my parent’s PC died and all our baby photos were on there, I decided to set them up with a mandatory backup system that doesn’t require their involvement. Fortunately, the system death was due to a bad motherboard or power supply and the hard disk itself is intact. However, it’s only a matter of time when the disk dies too.

I also set up VNC for remote access so that I can troubleshoot problems remotely without me having to guess what “that blinking thing” is over the phone.

SyncBackSE runs nightly and does incremental backups of the entire system (except for OS portion which can be reinstalled).

Using a VPN (Hamachi, now LogMeIn) allows me to not worry so much about security, but there are some layers of security, albeit weak, beyond just the VPN for good measure. Samba requires a user and password using NT LANMAN authentication, but it doesn’t encrypt the data connection unfortunately. VNC requires a password, but does not encrypt the data channel.

I am still somewhat skeptical about Hamachi’s security… Every insider has their price at which they’re willing to engage in corruption. I just hope Hamachi’s developers continue to be well paid… Here’s a diagram of the setup. Note that “bfraid2″ stands for Big F*ing RAID 2nd incarnation. More on that later…

Update 10-Nov-2007:
Backing up 160+ GB over DSL the first time is slow. I’m hoping the incrementals will not be significant. I have the SyncBackSE job only run for a few hours at a time so the first full backup will take some number of days to complete.

in searching for SuperCrunchables 2.0, aka supercrunching in the web 2.0 space, …

This is interesting — two search engines that focus just on twitter output. I suppose you could get some kind of collective immediate intelligence just by searching.

e.g. whether you should watch a particular movie opening night, such as “Gone Baby Gone” which apparently did much worse in the box office at $6MM compared to “30 days and 30 nights” at $16MM, but also apparently liked by people who did watch it (below):

• buzztter results for “Gone Baby Gone”
• terraminds results for “Gone Baby Gone”

I also did a check on Rendition and didn’t see much buzz about it other than one person who said it confused them. i suppose that is also reflective of the even lower box office turnout of $4.2MM, seen at MovieWeb 10/19/07 weekend results

As an update of How to get rid of ants, let me share a technique that seems to be working.

I’ve been trying the Ortho Home Defense Max spray, active ingredient of Bifenthrin. You spray the holes or crevices where you see ants coming out of or going into. A little while later, no ants use those holes any more. Eventually, the ants find a new way to get in and you repeat the process of spraying the deterrent into the crevice.

It is supposed to last for 12 months, and it has actually kept the garage area free of ants for a few days now. The ants did manage to find a new entrance in the last day, but after spraying that too, the trail stopped. Maybe the spray doesn’t actually kill, but as long as it keeps them out of the house, that’s good enough for me.

I’ve been meaning to publish this technique for compactly tracking periodic tasks, both their completion and upcoming schedule on paper. There are also a couple of glyph techniques for using the limited area to best ability for tracking planned tasks, completed tasks and multiple tasks per week.

I use a 3×5 sheet organized as a spreadsheet with starting day of week (for me it’s Sunday) as the column heading (vertically written to save space — remember this is only 3 inches wide) and particular periodic tasks grouped into their contexts as row headings. Once every couple of months when I’m about to run out of space on the sheet, I shift the dates over with a little overlap, print out the sheet again, copy over the markings for the last couple of week so that I have a visual history of tasks so I can continue the trend, and put the sheet back in my Circa notebook.

The width of the week columns is such that i can place a small paper clip vertically as a marker of the current week.

An example of my categories and tasks are:

• @financial
  tasks involving paying bills and people, periodically checking financial accounts
• @errand
  getting haircut, picking up prescription medicine
• @health
  working out, various health tests
• @home
  things involving the car such as washing it, oil change, checking tire pressure, etc.

Only the @errand category really corresponds to a context that I actually use. The others are just to group together the entries.

About the image, I place a filled in circle in box when the task was done for that week. This means the task can only be tracked for being done at most once a week. The tasks that are done every few weeks can be measured and scheduled by counting out the boxes and drawing an empty circle for the week the task should be done.

The difference between a circle versus a triangle in corner is the circle tasks are best effort and can be forgotten, but the triangle ones must be done, e.g. they are bills or people that need to be paid.

For tracking a task that is done more than once a week, i fill in the entire area in increasing pattern. If it’s three times a week, as in my exercise goal, the first time, i fill in the triangle, 50% of the area. The second time, i fill in another triangle covering 75% of area, leaving a triangle at bottom. Third time, i fill in the last 25%. It’s hard to cut a square/rectangle in thirds.

Update for 10/30/2007:
An easier to see image:

And here’s a Word doc that you can use to produce your own: periodic-tasks-sample.doc

As I sit in the Starbucks in Mountain View, with 19% signal strength of Google’s Wi-Fi compared to 65% signal strength of T-Mobile, it’s clear you get what you pay for. I doubt they’re serious about actually getting wide coverage - rather just enough coverage to be useful some fraction of time and to get press interest. They are not yet at the level of Verizon (”can you hear me now?”) or any other hotspot service provider.

Soon Starbucks will be offering Wi-Fi for free, so what me worry? Looks like the actual cost of Wi-Fi is actually going to approach the marginal cost of Wi-Fi. Maybe the next phone I get will run VoIP to take advantage of the Starbucks internet.