Yet Another Backup Solution

In these days of US$150 1 terabyte hard drives, there is simply no reason not to have multiple hard drives and implementing a regular backup plan. Of course, I don't have one and feel like I'm walking the high wire without a net. I've installed a couple of GUI rsync frontends, but haven't done anything with them. I even did some work to try and update dar to work, given its orphaned status (although they finally updated it in the openSUSE repositories), but still haven't done anything. Here's another tool that looks easy to use, although I really think I should set up a real bacula setup for all the home computers.

BackupGem Manual

Backup is the easiest and most flexible backup, archive and rotate tool. It’s a beginning-to-end solution for scheduled backups in a clean ruby package that is simple use and powerful when customized.

Back in the Saddle

As you may have noticed (for both of my readers), I am back to updating Daemon Dancing instead of helping out at Linux Brain Dump, as LBD seems to have slipped into a funk lately. So I figured I would just go back to working on Daemon and trying to update the look and feel of it. But I had forgotten just what an incredible time sink it can be once you begin playing with your blog look! Just a few minor tweaks (like trying to get the search box to work) took a couple of hours, as I played with all kinds of settings. And, as you can probably see, this is a pretty plain vanilla Movable Type blog!

Anyway, look for more Linux, FreeBSD and other FOSS software ramblings to show up here again.

Just a quick note on FreeBSD - while I don't run it on my home desktop, my server (the one that hosts this blog, for instance), runs FreeBSD 6.1 (a little out of date). I finally bit the bullet and did a full package upgrade and lo and behold, it went like a champ, despite the long delay between updates. At least I had the portsnap cron job running, so that part was kept up to date. The first portsnap update command took a very long time, but after a few carefully chosen upgrades, I just jumped in with both feet and the portmanager -u command did it all. Of course, I haven't tried rebooting yet, which is the real test. But still, very nice.

AIRing it out

Very nice intro to AIR on Linux found at Linux Journal. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobes push for a crossplatform rich Internet app "operating system". I've been using it for Twhirl, a very nice Twitter client. For some reason, there are many Twitter clients using AIR. Adobe claims AIR to be only in an "alpha" state for Linux, but it has been working for me pretty well.

The only obvious shortcoming is that, according to the Twhirl author, the Linux version doesn't support the password encryption that is found on the Windows client, so it doesn't store passwords. And there are some rough edges for the UI, like the super-annoying Mac-like restriction of only resizing the window via dragging the lower right corner. And the auto-update feature doesn't work. You have to download the update file for the app and install it yourself. But it has been very stable for me and I'd like to look more into programming with it.

An Introduction to AIR

Vee Dee Eyes page

Cool page providing a bunch of VDIs, which are images you can use in VirtualBox, my current favorite OS emulator. These VDIs are pre-installed OS images that run in VirtualBox and let you quickly try out any OS (mostly Linux, of course).

Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index | veeDee-Eyes

The VirtualBox "Virtual Disk Image" Index
VDI images of pre-installed "Open Source" Operating System distros.
It's a computer inside your computer.