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.

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.

My wife gave me a project of making a workout music mix for her new iPod Nano for her birthday.

First off, I’m using Mac OSX and iTunes, so keep in mind that a solution using Windows will involve different software, but maybe with same overall limitations.

I tried beaTunes 1.2.1 but found the BPM analysis wasn’t accurate for some songs.

Then I came across Potion Factory’s Tangerine listed on this page. I double checked the results with a free javascript manual-tapping-based BPM analyzer and they were accurate. Sometimes Tangerine picked a twice as fast BPM but I think unfortunately, the numbers will always need to be tweaked before they are used to put together a smooth playlist.

I’m still deciding what to do. I still haven’t shelled out any money for either of these programs yet.

I tried using Ecto v2 on osx — actually purchased it — but the RTF editor has issues such as:

• not being able to get numbered lists to be generated correctly,
• when I switch to HTML mode, the new text i’ve added to the list doesn’t show up,
• when I edit the HTML in an external editor, e.g. textmate, and go back to ecto, the HTML has been rewritten incorrectly.

So, i’m going to have to discontinue my use of this and just use wordpress’s native editor. Hopefully things are improved with Ecto v3.

for the longest time, the 250GB drive was the cheapest per gigabyte at 25 or 26 cents per gigabyte, but in the last week, the 500GB SATA drives dropped to the lowest cost place at 23 cents per gigabyte. I’m still going with the 750GB drives (not shown) at 43 cents per gigabyte for my needs though.

from our work site discussion list, CH Gowri Kumar’s Programming Interview Questions

Technorati Tags: putnam, programming, interview

Part 2 of 4 – expanding the existing array without rewriting all the data by hand.

More detail here…

Part 3 will be recovering from a failed disk, only losing a little bit of data.

Part 4 will be getting a new RAID now that broadcom has discontinued their BC4852/BC4452 line of controllers.

“I endorse this product” –psb

I like products that eliminate one or more other products you have to carry around (cellphone+PDA being the exception since the combination is bulkier and less stylish than each taken separately). The ability for most electronic consumer devices built in the last 10 years to accept AC ranging from 100V to 240V, 50 or 60 cycle allows me to not worry about carrying around a power inverter when travelling overseas, and now this multiple input (AC or DC) and multiple output (various reasonably priced convertor tips) Targus APM14US power supply means I don’t need to carry around a bunch of transformers to charge each gadget in my bag.

The manual shows a interchangable tip and a second power connector for hooking up a cellphone charging cable (which I will soon be getting):

It also deals with car’s cigarette lighter, wall outlet, and the 12V outlet found in airplanes:

The tips included are tailored towards the apple powerbooks and the white coloring matches the Apple aesthetic, but I got a tip for my black windows laptop for about $9.

My only complaint right now is the AC power cable could be longer (only about 2.5 feet).

regarding Windows-based Treo coming, this kind of pisses me off cause i just spent $ on a now obsolete platform, but then again, wince made economic sense back in 1998/1999 since who wants to learn another API once you’ve invested in windows. WinCE just wasn’t ready back then which is why I was a palm loyalist even though I asserted that WinCE would win. It’s funny that PalmOne and PalmSource went through so much spin-off, buy-back, spin-off, until now. 3com must have made out well avoiding all that hassle and just getting the money from the spin off.

I did wind up trying to write some cellphone aware code for the Treo 650, but the cobalt environment they were pushing didn’t exist on the Treo 650 and the Treo 600 cell support in garnet wasn’t on the Treo 650 either, so I wound up having to get the Treo specific SDK for garnet which had a lot of handspring headers. And then when I did finally build against these headers and run on the actual hardware (not an emulator – which doesn’t exist for the Treo 650 anyway, only cobalt), it wouldn’t even open up the phone library correctly.

Such a waste.

and looking at the e-mail traffic on the palm dev forumsbluetooth [RSS], emulator [RSS], palm-dev [RSS]these folks are just hating life on bluetooth, on the emulator, and i’d guess pretty much everything else Treo.

I’m glad they’ve made this first step. I’ll probably make my first step too soon which will be to get a WinCE based Treo once they figure out which cellular provider they’re going to cut the sweet deal with.

But once I’ve been forced to think about a WinCE phone device, I may as well shop the whole market to see if there’s anything better than the Palm… watch out.

This is hilarious.

I search for “fuji premium plus” glossy longevity on google because i want to find some info on the cheap consumer paper that i’ve been using.

On a small set of 11 results, I look at #4 and find this page which in summary has the right keywords – if you count the ads. There isn’t a cached version of the page either – which is kind of suspicious. The crawled site could have tricked google by feeding it different content, or the site could respond to referrers from google with different content than folks who come in straight, which in fact it does along with a couple of google ads.

It might make sense that google didn’t keep a cached copy of the page because it looks like search results – but why wouldn’t it cache a copy? Maybe because of the meta http-equiv 60 second refresh? Still, it seems like the game of serving back search content with irrelevant marketing messages to referrer searches has been around a while and it’s easy to check if straight-through-page != referrer-through-page.

I wonder if the reason why these sites aren’t filtered out is that they also tend to be high users of the google’s adwords revenue generating service? And so, relevance in this way, would be an unprofitable move for google.