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You’ve heard it over and over. Backup, Backup, Backup. You are magically supposed to know how to do it and make it happen. This time, I’ll show exactly how I backup my HOME directory and manage those backups with rdiff-backup.

I’ve gone into why rdiff-backup was selected previously, but the main reasons were:

1. Incremental
2. Versioned
3. Compressed
4. Latest backup is available as a mirror so restore 1 file at a time or all at once

Install rdiff-backup

Run synaptic package manager or whatever package manager you prefer and install the rdiff-backup package.

Today, I’ll try to explain why you probably want the 64-bit version of Windows7 regardless of your current needs.

Which processor?

To get us started, you want a 64-bit processor with “VT support.” There’s no downside to getting a 64-bit processor. You can run them with 32-bit software and they aren’t expensive any more. The upside in capabilities that 64-bit CPUs provide far outweighs the slightly higher cost. This is a no-brainer folks.

Why 64-Bit OS?

There are 2 reasons you want a 64-bit OS. Accessing more RAM and moving data around faster. Access to more RAM may not be an issue for 90% of the users out there today, but in 3 years, it is likely you’ll want to access more RAM than what the 32-bit OS can. The RAM cutoff for 32-bit happens at 3.5GB-4GB of RAM.

If you do virtual machines, you want a 64-bit OS. There are exceptions, but if you are already using VMs, you wouldn’t be reading this anyway.

Why Not 64-bit OS?

Software incompatibilities and drivers. Out of these, access to drivers is the more important since Win7 allows you to run programs in Compatibility Mode. There are 11 choices from Win95, Win98, ME, NT, XP, Vista and all the different service paks for each of these. If you can’t get a program to run in those modes, there’s always a WinXP virtual machine – free download from Microsoft. Basically, software compatibility shouldn’t be a showstopper for anyone this time around. The difficulty to configure a particular program is minor, but I don’t think I could explain it to everyone. 90% of you will figure this out easily.

Drivers are a different issue. For me, all my equipment had Win7 drivers, including a Hauppauge TV tuner. Microsoft has a tool you can run that will tell you whether all your equipment has drivers or not. For me, there were a few drivers that it could only say post-install upgrade needed.

Your CPU isn’t 64-bit, then obviously you don’t want a 64-bit OS. What were you thinking? Chances are, your computer is 4 years old or more. Time for an upgrade?

Why 32-bit OS?

1. You only run 1 program at a time and it isn’t a game, anything from Adobe, or you need some old driver that doesn’t have a new version known to be compatible with Win7. Many Vista drivers are compatible, but don’t expect WinXP drivers to work.
2. You know that you will never need more than 4GB of RAM for the entire OS and all programs.

Why Not 32-bit OS?

1. Gamer? The hottest, new games are designed for 64-bit and lots of RAM (6GB+)
2. You want to be ready for the next 8 years worth of programs.

Win7 is an OS like WinXP was. You’ll use it for many, many years and mostly be happy.

Did I forget something important for why you would want 64-bit or 32-bit?

In the beginning, people didn’t really like WinXP, if you recall. Windows7 has been reviewed very favorably and it is nice enough for a Linux guy like me to write a number of favorable articles about it. There are enough good things in Win7 that I’m a convert from both Vista and WinXP. OTOH, I didn’t pay for it and wouldn’t.

If you are happy with WinXP, I can’t recommend you upgrade at this point unless it is free or there’s a feature that you need/want. Win7 media center is nice.

Broken PC?

I know a few people who are not really computer savvy that have gotten their computer so messed up that it is unusable. It boots, but can’t really do anything. These people think they need to:

1. buy a new PC or
2. pay $200 to a PC tech to get it fixed.

Both of these methods will work, but why? Chances are, their Windows computer has been hacked or is running spyware. In fact, that last internet website they visited for a fun game may have installed the spyware and then something known as a rootkit. Basically, it isn’t safe to use that PC anymore for any reason.

There is a FREE Option, Linux

So, the PC isn’t really broken, but anything on the hard drive shouldn’t be trusted. Many Linux distributions come as a Live CD – this means you just put the CD into the computer and boot up. Here’s a youtube video showing what this looks like . Most computers will load the OS from CD never touching the hard drive. Using one of these, you can use your computer for common tasks that don’t need a hard drive. Using google, google mail, yahoo mail, hotmail, …. anything online.

Using Linux has no risk to your data or even your hard drive. If you don’t like it, don’t boot from the CD anymore and find another way to use your PC again. Take it to a tech for $200 or buy a new one for $500-$1500. You risk nothing, provided you don’t tell it to install to the hard drive. It will not automatically install to your hard drive unless you ask it AND there will be multiple screens and points where you have to answer yes – wipe my disk clearly.

Online Banking

Recently, the Washington Post Security Fix Guy has recommended everyone perform their online banking using an Ubuntu Live CD. The people with the greatest risk are those using the large USA banks, since hackers have created programs that hide in Windows and watch when you login to those banking web sites, then cause transactions from your account to their account(s).

Broken PC, How to get Linux?

Most of the people who will be helped by this method have 1 computer at home and don’t have access to another. There’s good news. The Ubuntu Foundation will snail-mail a CD anywhere -- for free. Now you just need to get to a computer to request it. Go to your public library or ask a neighbor, or call me and I’ll enter the data so you’ll get the CD in a week or two.

Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu is a full featured operating system like Windows7 or Vista. It is big and capable and the load time reflects that. The Live CD should work with 95% of the PCs out there. Put the CD in and boot. That’s it. Ubuntu runs best when it is installed to a hard drive, but you can test drive it forever if you like without touching your old hard drive. Just know that CDRom drives are much slower than normal hard disk drives. Ubuntu will run nicely in 512MB of RAM.

There are smaller Linux distributions when all you need is to get online. Smaller is better for speed, RAM use and simplicity. You can find many more Linux Distrubutions, some highly specialized at Distrowatch.
There’s a search tool that will help you select the best distro for your needs. Do yourself a favor and stay with the major distributions and only those that are debian-based. Debian is an major distribution known for stability and program management ease via APT. APT rocks, see my prior article on why.

Be Prepared

All of us have a broken PC from time to time. Be prepared by creating (or getting) a Live CD Linux distribution and using it once now, when your PC is working is a good idea. It is really easy.

Spam Comments

So, the number of comments here has gone way up, sadly, most are spam comments with links. We use moderation, so those comments will never be seen, but it is still a pain to DELETE them. I’ll probably resort to blocking entire ISP ranges for those outside the USA. The problem isn’t that bad yet.

Gallery

Also, my photo gallery was found by Google this week. Ouch. I’ve blocked google’s image scanner and relocated the program and images, so they aren’t found anymore, but the damage may be done. Without the database that contains the descriptions, the photos aren’t very useful, but that isn’t the point. There are over 24GB of photos and short videos. That’s about 10,700 files.

Beautiful Fall Weather

The leaves are changing and dropping here. We had our first freeze warning this week too. High temps are in the 50s now, so working outside in the afternoon is comfortable again. Time to charge the camera and head into the woods for some fall snapshots before all the leaves are gone. My maple trees have dropped some leaves, but the remaining leaves are still green today.

I know it is fall when there are many changes to the tzconf, that’s timezone file for non-computer people. Basically, many governments tweak their timezone changes in the fall and spring. In the USA, we call it Daylight Savings and shift 1 hour forward and back every spring and fall. A few years ago, they changed the dates when it happened, screwing all electronic equipment that had the dates hard coded. They moved it a few weeks longer in the fall so Halloween trick-or-treaters will have more sunlight on Oct 31. There have been studies performed that DST actually costs more to than it saves. I don’t know, but it does seem strange to arbitrarily change clocks forward and back through political will. Seems that summer hours and winter hours would be easier.

In my previous entry Easy Software Updates and Patches, I explained how FANTASTIC Linux and apt-get are at maintaining system, configuration and application files. Maintaining with the latest version, automatic updates or completely manually controlled.

I think the scope of this coverage and excellence was lost on a few readers. So, let’s use some exact numbers to make the point. All data will come from my personal, currently running desktop Ubuntu 8.0.4.3 system – Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.24-24-generic

Total Number of Available Packages: 25,221 <— these are all free packages for this OS

Total Number of Installed Packages: 1291 <— these are installed. OpenOffice, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, VLC, FreeMind, Notebook+ …. and over 1200 others. All free. Most are GPL licensed.

Total Broken: 0

Total to Install/Upgrade: 0 <—- usually about 1-10 packages are updated weekly. 1 click to get the list, 1 more click to upgrade them all. I could setup completely automatic updates, if I wanted.

Total Used Disk Space: 5.5GB used. <— At installation, I gave it a 10GB disk about a year ago

Don’t miss this part

25,221 applications, all free, most are GPL, GNU Public Licensed.

Isn’t this worth checking into? The price is … er…. free.

According to the Washington Post security guy, Facebook applications have been hacked. This isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last time.

If you are using Facebook or MySpace, I have to ask, “Why?”

I’ve attempted to create both video and audio webcasts. None of my attempts have turned out well. They didn’t turn out badly, but I’m unwilling to share since I’m not proud of them either. Primarily, my issue is with a complete lack of talent for this medium. It is what it is.

However, as an end user of both video and audio webcasts, there are a few things that providers should do that they often don’t do to make the consumers happier. Boooo.

What media providers should do:

1. Use RSS feeds to share the last 5-50 webcasts.
2. Use standard formats to share all content.
3. Allow the widest possible viewership by allowing downloads of the content
4. Always provide a patent-free format
5. Provide transcripts – for text searching later, not as the primary format for incompatible media formats

RSS makes life easy for your viewers/listeners. Other aggregators are find too, like iTunes, but you don’t want to prevent some people who wanted your content by preventing, YES, PREVENTING them from using some service they elect not to use. Not everyone wishes the use aggregators, the reasons do not matter.

Use standard formats for the content. Standard formats are those supported by 99% of the viewer / listener devices. These formats exist.

1. For audio, there are a few acceptable formats. MP3, WAV, and OGG are it. All other formats are proprietary and need to be avoided.
2. For video, there are a few more acceptable formats. FLV, MPEG2, MPEG4, xvid, MKV container with . Perhaps it is easier to point out unacceptable video formats: MOV, RM, WMV, QT, SilverLight and browser only formats are all unacceptable. RealMedia and QuickTime formats are worse than Microsoft. Microsoft’s older formats are small, efficient. RealPlayer and QT formats require heavy apps to use which behave like viruses. Have you tried to remove realplayer or quicktime from your system? It isn’t easy. Unacceptable. Don’t make users download a plugin either. If an old version (0.98 or earlier) of VLC plays the video, it is probably fine for distribution. VLC should be the content format test, period.

Allow the widest possible viewership. This means you need to allow people access to the content in the way THEY choose. Many people place audio and video casts on portable devices to listen and watch during their commute times. Millions of people do this every day.

Why use a patent-free format? Some of the most vocal people insist on completely free access. I’m not one of those people. It is fairly trivial to create patent-free formats on-demand. You don’t need to keep those formats around, just allow the user to select them.

So, if you are providing video or audio casts, please make them available to the largest possible audience by following the guidelines outlined above. Please.

What brought this on? I visited a website where I PAY for the content and some of that content is video-casts. I was unable to view or even hear it. Unacceptable. It seemed they went out of their way to make it so I couldn’t gain access to the content either. They are a big company, so my request for compatible formats will probably go unsolved. Their website is extremely complex and fancy. For the most part, it works extremely well, even from an old Linux machine.

Which content providers drive you crazy?

This question has been asked thousands of time. Is Programming Art or Engineering?

The answer depends on whether you program

• for fun or work
• for yourself or for someone else
• something you need or to specifications
• for games or productivity
• because you love programming or to pay the bills

My first professional programming experience was 90% engineering and 10% art. We weren’t allowed to be too creative because maintainability and easy to understand were critical requirements of our code. Real-time avionics code shouldn’t be inspired very often. Once, I had to make a complex calculation run in 1 cycle when it was over running the allowed cycle time. Real-time code has stringent time requirements. That meant significant optimization was needed to fit the longer calculations into the allowable time. The cost was maintainability and I think only 1 other person out of 8 reviewers actually validated the complex equations used. A few months later, 512 test cases validated the results perfectly. Due to the nature of this code, everything was performed following stringent processes.

Later, I worked with a very talented team were we’d whiteboard a design then made it happen. This was 80% art and 20% engineering. Occasionally, we’d create a UML diagram and work on some new stuff that had never been done before. Very interesting work with very little process.

Next I worked in a 20 person company producing database access software. Blah. Boring. I think the boring part made it more engineering than art. When I started there, they had ZERO process and had trouble reproducing the code, much less predicting when a new feature or bug would be ready for use. I introduced process to help predictability. Since we created the requirements and the designs, it was higher art. Perhaps 30% and 70% engineering.

I hack some code for fun now, no professional programming anymore. That hacking is to solve a problem, an itch, as it
were. Most of the time, these are 10-30 line scripts and not really very complex. 100% engineering. Every once in a while, there is a new problem that I’ve never seen or solved before. When the solution comes to me, there’s a little happiness … call it art or inspired. Those are 90% art and 10% engineering. I have a process, but it isn’t formal.

So, you see there really isn’t a single answer to whether programming is art or engineering. There appears to be a correlation between the amount of process involved and the amount of art that I assign to the effort. Perhaps this differentiates between art and engineering?

Does the programming language make a difference? Is Ruby art, but Java engineering? PHP? Perl? Shell? Fortran?

What do you think? Drop some feeback.

Don’t recall where I came across this link to smart company logos, but is was interesting enough to publish here.

I’ll be relocating since I’ve won the lottery. All my contact info will change, so don’t be worried if you don’t hear from me for a few months … or years. See!

Dear Winner,

You have been awarded the sum of USD$1,500:000 which was won by your
E-MAIL Address in our Euro Millones International Lottery. The following particulars are attached to your lotto payment order:

(I) Batch No: BDC/MTW/STN
(ii) Ticket No : 45-46-52-58-68
(iii ) Lucky No : 5 -7-9-10-38
(iv) Ref No: PLC/LAC/076/TCC.

Do get back to this office with your name & address and the above mentioned particulars via; (ruralagencia@aim.com)

Best Regards,
Mr, Jose Vinals
Tel:  +34 603 111 071.

I have a feeling that if you send your information to the same emal address, you may have won too!

Obviously, this is spam. It is the first real spam that I’ve gotten in years, so I’m excited. The first email server it hit was listed as Ono network in whole Spain which appears to be a cable ISP.

Oh, so I won’t be disappearing. So sorry.