Archive for Technology
February 23, 2008 at 19:54 · Filed under Humour, Technology
Last night I made some changes to my PC at home and in the process I blew up all my photos for the past 7 years or so. That sucks. I have some backups on DVD and I can eventually track them down. The part that’s doubly stupid is that despite the fact that I am a (semi) professional sysadmin and manage terabytes of data and co-ordinate their associated backups for a living, despite the fact that I rigorously backup the data on the servers you are connected to right now, I have been incredibly neglectful in backing up the data on my own PC.
Stupid.
In any event, there’s really no point in screwing something up badly unless it teaches you a lesson. So today I decided I’d finally get Time Machine working. (Yeah that’s right, I use one of the very few operating systems that ships with a sophisticated native backup tool that does snapshots, yadda, yadda, and I still didn’t have a backup of my data!) I decided I’d start with my work notebook and that means I had to get some sort of external disk.
Herein lies the silver lining, I decided I’d get a Firewire/IEEE1394 disk, not so much because of the performance, though that is nice, but more because I have a low level of confidence in USB disks based on past experience. After a bit of research I decided it was easier just to buy a retail disk instead of an OEM hard drive and a 3rd party enclosure, even if it is a bit more expensive. So after some digging around it turned out that the only place in downtown Toronto that sells a wide range of Firewire disks is the Apple Store. I wasn’t looking forward to the markup, but this problem just can’t wait any longer I need to deal with data protection for my workstations. So off I go to the Apple Store and in the end I decided to buy a 250GB G-DRIVE Q for 200 bones. Not a great deal, but it’s a good disk and I can lock it to the pillar by my desk at work with a simple cable lock and that’s pretty much a requirement in an open office. So I got home about an hour ago and started to set up my backups only to discover that the disk in the box was a 500GB disk. All of a sudden it’s not such a lousy deal. It seems like the gods of data management have taught me a lesson and then quietly blessed my response. So now I’m feeling better about things.
In any event, rambling stories aside: “Don’t be a Gabriel, back up your fucking data!”
February 2, 2008 at 15:56 · Filed under Internet, Technology
There’s an interesting read on MS’s hostile takeover attempt on Y! over on Salon.com. I’d characterize what Microsoft is up to as more of a race not to be last rather than a move against Google of any real import, but it is to some degree based on my own views of the various technologies. I was once upon a time a Yahoo! regular, but completely replaced it with the early iterations of Google in my own life.
Despite the fact that I have very serious ideological and technical reservations about Google’s collection of information and ad-driven revenue model, I continue to be a very heavy Google user because the service is just that good. The idea that Microsoft who has missed web technology several times and really only has a market share due to non-technical users, bundling and vendor lock-in can somehow salvage itself just by buying Yahoo! runs in the face of my personal impressions of their corporate culture and strategy. It’s too bad really, Google needs competition not somebody to dismantle their only real competitor.
Here’s a Slashdot article on the topic just for good measure.
January 31, 2008 at 22:16 · Filed under Culture, Entertainment, Technology
I guess it’s somewhat comforting to know that Bono isn’t the only figure from U2 who has decided to devote his life to being a caricature of a twit. While I have some sympathy with the fact that there is a legitimate case that part of the digital music scene involves theft, every time some fool like Paul McGuinness shoots off his mouth and completely glosses over the real and very difficult issues surrounding digital rights and other technological “paradigm shifts” the issue is buried in yet another layer of total shite. For some reason hearing U2’s manager demand that U2 is somehow being “hurt” by iPods and ISPs makes me want to gag.
Apparently the problem could be solved if we all just dropped our iPods and bought Zunes. I think the most galling of his ill-conceived rant is that he equates all of the various components of the digital music spectrum from ISPs, users, MP3 player manufacturers and Silicon Valley hippies as equally evil. I have all the time in the world to talk to small off-label artists who actually feel the pain in their wallets, but for the most part they are amongst the savviest and are benefiting the most from this shift in power and consumption trends.
Anyway, here’s a link to a CBC article. Here’s a link to Steve Jobs’ somewhat more considered view on the topic for good measure.
January 26, 2008 at 12:02 · Filed under Technology
Was reading my technology news today and I saw this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. In short there’s a bug with the installer for Office 2008 that results in the wrong UNIX permissions being set on some of the libraries and support files installed with the suite. In and of itself this isn’t a big deal but, as the blog points out, Microsoft tends to get crucified even for little things that are honest mistakes. In my opinion Microsoft does some really stupid stuff, but not everything they do is bad. If you deal with enough technology vendors you soon discover that Microsoft is nowhere near the worst vendor in any respect. In fact I can think of several vendors which are regularly lauded in the Free/Open Source Community which are far shadier and routinely spew forth far crappier software. In fact, just the other day I was saying that I never thought I’d think Exchange was a good mail solution until I saw some of its competition.
January 20, 2008 at 14:38 · Filed under Internet, Technology
As you can tell I’ve been in the process of migrating to a new site design and toolset over the past few days. I’m trying to avoid too much custom code but I did make a slight modification to the plugin that renders the quotes feed on the rightmost column. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I discovered the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It’s most a most excellent debugger for walking through the code when there are issues (as well as flagging that there is a problem in the first place). In addition it can provide some useful profiling information regarding how your page loads, etc. In any event it was very helpful getting the page to render valid XHTML and JavaScript.
January 19, 2008 at 11:12 · Filed under Technology
Partly as a response to some of the slippery slope behavior I see taking place with some major GNU/Linux vendors regarding patents and licensing I decided to get off my figurative lazy ass (as opposed to getting off my actual lazy ass) and join the Free Software Foundation today. I would encourage anybody who feels strongly about technology and free software, or who has benefited from the GNU Project to consider contributing.
