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.