Dev-Picayune

So here it is the first day of OSCON and today I’m chillin’ with the Ruby tutorials. And while I will reserve judgement (for now) on Ruby and Rails, I’d like to point out one pretty cool thing that happened today.

So the background info here is that I had loaded my work laptop with Ubuntu (dapper) because afterall, I do use Ubuntu a lot and since it seems like the OSCON thing to do. So there I am sitting in class and after finally battling through the initial wireless problems, I manage to download and install Ruby during the Ruby class and I was able to type along with some of the examples. That was pretty cool. Then now here in the Rails class, I was able to download and install Rails and MySQL (and Apache2 but I didn’t need it). And it downloaded so quickly that I had time to at least keep up with the first part of the coding section (eventually I couldn’t keep up) but the point is it was a very hi-tech moment for me and it was also major kudos to Ubuntu because even under Windows, I would not have been able to get all those things installed that quickly. Here it’s a real tribute to the Synaptic Package manager and the maintainers. The wirelessly connected transition from a generic Ubuntu laptop to creating and running a simple Rails app was really pretty darn cool.

As a side note, then, I am amazed at how “cool” it’s considered to run a Mac. And it’s even considered cool to actually buy software (e.g. TextMate). It’s just amazing since since running Linux would have to be the true Open Source thing to do. I really fail to see how Mac OSX is any more cool than Windows. Afterall, OSX is really more closed than Windows in the sense that it’s essentially restricted to a single set of hardware. Yes, it has a way cool interface but why wouldn’t running Vista be cool? Unlike Apple’s OSX, I could run Vista on both my Dell laptop as well as on an Intel-based Mac. Ultimately, though, I am convinced that the Mac popularity thing is based purely based on eye-candy (the UI) and popular culture and here by contrast (like the recent commercials) it’s not a Windows PC.

I am sure more observations will come.

Technorati Tags: OSCON, OSCON2006, Ruby, Rails, Ubuntu

Brandon has been talking since January about backups and backup philosophy (see Thoughts on backups and RAID and More proof that you should backup your online files). So, I’ve finally started on a path towards a more reasonable setup with regard to storage and backups. This ties well into my move to Ubuntu because I’ve had to think a little about OS stuff as well.

Among the comments I made on Brandon’s post, was that I felt backups should be done to an external drive. My reason for this is simple, if there is an emergency, the backup drive is easy to grab and go. All this said, though, and I am only willing to commit to a 200GB external drive. Realistically, this is not enough space to backup everything I want to backup but it’s a good start. So looking at what really needs to be backed up, I’ve got a few categories of information that has to be dealt with:

• Pictures - my most valuable data. They are both the negatives and the editing work that I do. If these are gone, they are gone. That’s really bad.
• Music - I am in the process of reripping all music. My plan is to rerip to flac files (if I find I am getting the additional results I need with regard to tags) and then transcode to mp3 or ogg as needed. But essentially, when I buy a CD, my plan is to rip it and then file the CD away. If I need a CD for the car, it’ll either be an mp3 CD or a backup copy of the audio CD.
• Scans - these are closely related to pictures, as they are scanned versions of paperwork we have filed and might need later.
• Documents - also like the scanned documents, these are our word documents and such.
• Emails - I’m an email packrat. I want all my emails. Forever!
• Projects - code stuff and web site templates…
• Misc Other - data like quicken or Grayson’s bloodsugar data or gps info
• Online Data - data (like blog entries) that exists only on a web service

So I’ve had to come up with places to store all these things where all computers can get to all the data and so also can be backed up. I decided that the external backup drive would be attached to my computer. This meant dealing with Linux. Since NTFS support is technically only read-only, I couldn’t really format the 200GB drive with NTFS. There are forums posts suggesting FAT32 is very inconsistent with Linux (and some would argue under Windows as well). So my compromise was to do ext3 on it and if I ever have to connect the external drive to a Windows machine, I’ll have to download the ext3 driver for it. It’s not ideal but it’s better than anything else I can come up with.

Another issue I’ve got to deal with is that since flac still results in some huge files, I am not going to back those up the same way. My plan is to burn those DVD (they don’t change) along with any mp3 or ogg files I have or transcode from flac. The trick will be cutting those to DVD frequently as they get added. The rest of the stuff will hopefully fit on the 200GB backup drive.

Stay tuned… in additional posts I’ll discuss how I’ve dealt with where the data is actually going to reside (i.e. how I’m going to deal with storing stuff remotely among the machines and still be able to access it) and how I end up implementing the backup processes. I’m still working on all that. I’ll also have to report back on my flac findings.

Technorati Tags: flac, backup, linux, ntfs, ext3, fat32

After returning from the doctor today, I decided to try to ignore my exceptionally sore throat by playing around some with my Ubuntu Linux machine.  Actually, my Ubuntu machine is really now my only machine. I have robbed parts from my moderately tricked out XP machine with the addition of my new dual core processor and motherboard to create this machine. Between all my positive experience running Ubuntu on my Dell laptop and now with the release of the Dapper Drake version I felt it was time to shed the MS shackles and go free or at least a little more free (I have both dual boot to XP and a virtual machine under VMware available for situations where I can’t survive without it).

So here I am running Linux again. I say again, because I ran it “back in the day”. Specifically, I ran it some while I was in college on my 386 (or was it a 486?) with so little memory that I couldn’t even start x-windows. It was all text consoles. I can recall (although I don’t know how I ever figured out how to do it except from help from my friends) editing text (via the Joe editor) and recompiling the kernal while downloading some files via zmodem and listening to mod music files all at the same time. And now, 13 years later, I’m back to doing some of the same things. Only now it’s x with dual-core, virtual machines and high speed networking. The technological irony, though, of listening to a mod file (now in XMMS) is not lost on me. In many ways, it feels like I’ve come full circle. The nice thing is now I am not recompiling the kernel trying to get a Gravis Ultrasound card working. The mod playing library is installed by default… just had to make a few clicks to get XMMS installed. Done!

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, xmms, mod