Day: January 15, 2009

BQBackup.Com

Okay, I’m a  little paranoid about losing data (or as my wife puts it, pain-in-the-ass OCD). So as the data on this server has grown to 20+gigabytes, its been a challenge figuring out how to back it up in case of a failure at the data center, and also how to capture regular snapshots.

The current scheme is this. First I signed up with BQBackup.Com which is a New York-based company that specializes in hosting for online backups. $20/month buys 100gb of storage.

Second, I set up an rsync job in crontab so that every morning at 4 a.m. rsync starts on the server and syncs with my BQBackup site.

Finally, I installed Linux on my MSI Wind and created a couple of cron jobs that at 6 a.m. download the MySql databases from the main server, then rsync with the BQBackup site, and finally write the resulting 20gb to a year-month-day.tar.gz file. Throw those on a  hard drive and store at an undisclosed location offsite.

And just in case that all fails, the files on the MSI Wind get backed up to Jungle Disk along with the other 300gb or so of personal data I really can’t afford to lose.

EightMaps.com and the Future of Public Records

EightMaps.com is an interesting mashup of Google maps and publicly available information on donors to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 which narrowly passed in California. So you can select where you live and see if anyone nearby donated to a pro-Proposition 8 group.

It would, of course, be just as easy to set up a similar application showing who donated to groups opposed to Proposition 8 (my wife did even though I told her it was going to pass), so presumably my house would show up on such a mashup.

But using public records, we could get at a lot of interesting data. For example, I’m assuming that marriage records in California are public, so someone opposed to gay marriage could create  a mashup showing the homes of every single gay couple married in California prior to the passage of Proposition 8 (which would include quite a few people who are not residents of California).

All-in-all, this sort of use of public records in general seems abusive and I suspect over time will lead us to reconsider the wisdom of making so many records public. Frankly, I’ve never thought political donations should be public records. The interest in preventing corruption is more than overwhelmed by the chilling effect that mashups like this will increasingly cause.

Web Worker Daily Swipe at Review Basics

Pam Poole did a nice review of Colaab with mention of other web-based document collaboration services.

At the end of the review she couldn’t help but take a swipe at Review Basics. Poole notes that Review Basics goes so far as to let the user post a feedback on its demo using the built-in collaboration tools, so she did,

review-basics-ugh

In the ensuing comment thread Poole writes,

I hesitated to include that. I’m not militant or a prude. But there’s a time and a place! It’s all about context. I’m really curious to know if an equally suggestive picture of a guy would have bothered any guys.

Context is everything and I think, in this case, it would. Come on, this is a document collaboration service — images like this simply tell me you’ve got some very immature folks handling things. Do they really think I’m going to recommend that my co-workers go check out your service after seeing something like this in their demo? I shouldn’t have to send my boss a “possibly NSFW” notation if I want him to check out your demo!

Given that the document collaboration space is pretty crowded, I’ll just click over to one of your competitors rather than deal with this sort of nonsense.

Pandora Flexible Monitoring System

Pandora Flexible Monitoring System is an open source monitoring software package that will monitor a system or application and alert when you the user-defined status has changed.

Pandora FMS could detect a network interface down, a defacement in your website, a memory leak in one of your server application, or the movement of any value of the NASDAQ new technology market. Pandora FMS could send out SMS message when your systems fails… or when Google’s value drop below US$ 500.

Super Ubuntu

I have gotten so fed up with Windows that I’ve gradually been moving pretty much every computer I have to use over to Ubuntu. Super Ubuntu is Ubuntu plus a whole bunch of helpful stuff that helps save time getting everything up and running on a new install.

Super Ubuntu is just Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), but it also includes: