rubric, reading, and repair

rjbs on 2005-03-26T22:54:36

If you look at the entries in del.icio.us for del.irio.us, you find someone with these tags: { ripoff lame loser sucks bastard plagiarism assclown failure faux false hellalame hellahellalame }.

Wow! Some other amusing tagsets: { folksonomy cool utilities pwned }, { AprilFools }, { AprilFools|Hope }, { heh }.

Every time I think about making a comment on the delicious-discuss list, I see some new person frothing at the mouth and decide to go back to reading. Hopefully soon I'll be able to go back to coding, instead. (I've been trying to make a bootable duplicate of knave's current hard drive, but it hasn't gone well.)

Higher-Order Perl, on the other hand, has been going quite well. I'm about done with chapter three, and I still feel quite with it. So far it's all things I know and use, although often explained or used in very memorable ways. I've also gotten to experience the joy of knowing what's coming when the author says, "You can make this code more flexible using techniques we'll see in Chapter N."

I think that I'm going to start getting into things that I know about but don't really understand soon, and I'm looking forward to it.

As for that drive-duplication, I'm not feeling very optimistic. I tried to psync / to a USB drive, but when I try to boot from it, it just sits there. More strangely, now all my applications are starting up with defaults and then saying, "I FOUND NEW PREFS!!! USE THEM???" It's hellahellalame. I'm going to try just imaging my disk and installing that image onto another disk. I'm also considering ordering a 40GB mobile firewire hard drive from LaCie. If it's simple to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or psync or Disk Utility to keep the external drive as a bootable replica, that would be a nice backup for situations like these in the future.

Despite the fact that this drive says it's USB 2.0, I always feel like I'm getting USB 1 speeds from it. In fact, System Profiler reports that the disk has a speed of up to 12 Mb/sec, so maybe it's just not high-speed USB. That's pretty stupid.

Gloria is making a bread pudding for consumption with Easter dinner tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to eating it (and the lamb, and potatoes, and everything else). Less than twenty-four hours until I can do so...


Cloning

pjm on 2005-03-27T00:53:37

Yep, CCC together with psync make a nice solution to keep a bootable backup. I tend to partition a FW disk into two or three pieces and keep rolling bootable backups on two of those pieces. It's saved me a few times when I've overwritten files inadvertantly: just jump into my /Volumes/backup{1,2} and pull the right file out.

Anyway: CCC for the initial clone (maybe "NetRestore" now: it seems to have superseded CCC; see www.bombich.com, but set the NetRestore preferences so that things are optimised for local restoring (ie, get it to do block level copying)).

Grab a psync package from http://bombich.com/ (which includes some nice bugfixes that aren't in Dan Kogai's CPAN version):

http://www.bombich.com/software/files/psync.dmg

And then throw in a cron job (if that's how you're going to be doing the synchronisation). Something like

15 4 * * 2,4,6 root /usr/local/bin/psync -q -d / /Volumes/backup1 >> /Users/pmccann/psync_output_1 2>&1
15 4 * * 3,5 root /usr/local/bin/psync -q -d / /Volumes/backup2 >> /Users/pmccann/psync_output_2 2>&1

Cheers,
Paul