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.

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.

One good shortcut is a Spotlight enhancement:

• Google Importer spotlight plugin

Well, it’s not as sophisticated as an emacs or vim based program, but it has simplicity going for it.

http://todotxt.com/ 1,000 people on del.icio.us think it’s worth bookmarking…

Here it is. It is used to convert this typo web site between one database and the other. Usage:

  % ./mysql-to-sqlite.rb

However, since sqlite3 implementation in Ruby Rails doesn’t support schema migration, I will be writing a sqlite to mysql convertor shortly…

Keeping the lawn green in an arid west/southwest climate can be expensive unless you’re smart with water use.

Here’s a tool to track watering requirements based on evapotranspiration.

Enjoy.

Here are other applications that I think are worth knowing about:

Someone once asked me what good Mac applications was I using. Here’s a list for all to see with rationale.