Category Archives: Technical Note

Catching up on my week and ‘Are you backing up?’

Posted on by

Other than strata inspections during the day, I have been reworking my essay ‘Discovering English’. A discursive ramble through what I know about my only language, and how I, and others, communicate in English. I will post this in sections as I am satisfied with the text.

Today’s podcast

Yarnbombing: when Granny gets punk

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2011/3296728.htm

 Have you wandered about town and been surprised by a piece of knitting adorning a lampost or a tree or a car? If so, you have stumbled upon a growing phenomenon known as yarnbombing. It’s a kind of knitted graffiti, where the grandmotherly art of knitting has been given a punk edge.

I have been passing this interesting piece every day – it has been there since Christmas and now realize it’s street art. More photos on Artworks and the podcast is well worth a listen (the Vatican was yarnbombed!).

Backing up and restoring

I have always been an advocate of regular backups of my various computers. When I ran the computing facilities at CQU Sydney, we backed up to tape every night and were competent at restoring files. At Unilodge with an array of servers, this discipline continued and despite some awful disk crashes, we never lost any critical data.

When I dropped out of these activities and had a couple of Macs to tinker with, I continued backing up using Carbon Copy and again, never really lost a file. With OS 10.6.x came Time Machine, which backed up every hour to a dedicated desktop hard drive. Very cool! However, when my MacBook Pro fainted and I needed to move files to my MacMini, “Sorry, this is a different machine. No can restore!”. I finally got the MacBook back up and immediately returned to Carbon Copy and backed up the hard drive. Nothing like a failed restore to shake one up.

Planning ahead of the replacement with a 27 inch iMac and a 13 inch MacBook Pro, I bought a 3Tb Seagate GoFlex desk drive which worked twice then bombed. Seagate support was, despite the stress of having stored irreplaceable images on the drive, laughable. Their recommended dagnostic was Seatools – Windows ‘Yes, DOS ‘Yes’, Mac ‘NO’ even though the drive was Mac specific. DOS? – where have these people been? They basically refused to help other than replacing the drive without my data. I eventually got it working (dud power supply), and duplicated the critical data on to a LaCie desktop drive.

The current config is Carbon Copy backing up to the Seagate at 04:30 and the LaCie at 05:30 every day. The automatic backup occasionally fails so I check the logs regularly. I synchronise the Imac and the Macbook regularly so the Macbook files are safe.

The point of this note is to strongly recommend testing your backup (if you are doing one) with a restore. I note that one of my highly respected technical Facebook friends (they shall remain unnamed) lost their hard drive and publicly grieved. It can happen at anytime – an analysis by Google of their many thousands of hard drives found that 10 per cent failed in the first 12 months. I also note that Apple had a recall of MacBook Pro machines with failing Seagate drives – it can happen to anyone.

Thursday

Posted on by

The MacDonnell Range at Glen Helen, Central Australia

The Cook-Book

The draft was reviewed last night by a knowledgeable food and cooking person; favourably. It has now reached the stage of becoming semi-public so I can get further feedback on the layout and range of recipes and chapters. Current problems are:

  • Indexing – the way I have assembled it doesn’t lend itself to automatic indexing but a solution will appear as I get closer to that activity. It would be handy now.
  • Consistency – is a bit of a mish-mash; some items are capitalized in one recipe, lower case in another.
  • Naming – some recipe titles begin with ‘Lamb’, others may be ‘Kebabs with Lamb’ so I need to develop a naming convention.
  • Assembling the components into one document – Word is notorious for falling apart when working with long documents.
  • Page numbering – because the chapters are stand-alone, I can’t get consistent page numbering.

However, I am pleased with this result so far and will continue to improve on it and solve these problems.

Technical Note

I am migrating the cook-book to the web but to get to this there were some problems. Initially, I had intended to use Microsoft Expression on a Windows server that backs-up my music files. When I moved the cook-book files across from my MacbookPro, I discovered the Word documents could only be read in Wordpad – I hadn’t installed Office on this server.

As I have Parallels Desktop on the Mac and can operate a Windows virtual machine, I updated Parallels, Vista and Office and installed Expression. The only glitch so far is not being able to share folders (directories) despite following the instructions in the manual and the support forums. Not a big issue at this stage.

Positives are that Expressions imports Word and builds the pages automatically. Once I design a suitable template, this makes authoring much simpler. Another is that Expression connects, using ftp, to my server in New Mexico so I can upload files directly from the application. I am impressed – and Vista is faster than I have ever experienced.

Climate Change

Some indication of what the Australian public thinks:

“Nice try Penny, but it’s time to take another look”, The Australian’, 14 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/nice-try-penny-but-its-time-to-take-another-look/story-e6frg71x-1225818991552

Before Copenhagen, public support for tackling climate change was strong, with polls showing about three-quarters of Australians backing action. That support will be tested in the next few months as the government moves to reintroduce its CPRS legislation.