Bitfever

A college said to me today:

"The most used sentence on Blog is probably: 'Sorry I havn't been blogging for so long."

So long story short I had enough from both Typo and Mephisto software.

Mephisto was to much chimera of a CMS and a blog. And Typo is full of legacy code and hogs a lot of ram.

So I decided, being a rails coder, I should write my own – and here I am.

The software running this site will be Open Source (GPL probably), after I cleaned up the code and added some small, missing features. Oh and I have to find a name…

The main goal was to keep it a simple slim blogging software, with a nice, well chosen, set of features

So what are the main features:

• Articles with comments, of course
• RSS and Atom Feeds
• Tags and categories
• Static pages (e.g. for legal stuff and the like)
• Live search
• Recieve trackbacks for articles (no trackback sending or pingback support – yet)
• Markdown text-formating with AJAX-preview

I'm using the latest beta of Adium and there is a huge bug there. It spawns Threads like there is no tomorrow.

But see for yourself:

1.1 Gigabytes of memory in over 1.169 (Java-)threads. Something is very wrong!

Update: If you are experiencing this Problem. Delete your preferences and start over with entering your account details.

That solved the problem for me.

We collect audio, video and other content every day. For example the disk of my PowerBook can hold up to 75 gigabytes of data. Some is used for Software and some for the OS, granted, but most of it is used for data of all kined. My collection digital pictures I have taken is larger than 5 gigabytes - let alone my movie clips or music. And taht is only the stuff that I can carray around scattered over several hard discs I have a lot of data. Raw movies, programs (as a backup copy!) digitalized video archives, and a lot more…

The problem is backups - my Laptop holds a big part of my life. E.g. my whole address book, a lot of stuff for university, code for personal and work projects and a lot more. If that all would be lost, e.g. throug a broken hard-disk or my laptop would be stolen, or whatever...taht would be a big bang. The personal value of some of the things (photos etc.) can be considered even higher. So I have to backup all of that stuff, but how?

Well the process is quite simple:

/usr/bin/rsync -aEze ssh --delete --exclude "Library/Caches" --stats --progress ~/ toto@$BACKUPHOST.:$BACKUPDIR/$NODENAME/$USER

This backs up my homedirectory including all metadata (note the -E option) to an external firewire hdd on my home server.

The problem is that this is one copy on one other hard drive. So some bad excident (maybe a thunderbolt hiting the powerline near my flat..., or both discs failing at the same time) could destroy both hard drives.

To perevent this I want to have a copy on some other medium. But there is no - affordable - medium wich is not a hard drive and can hold up to 80 gigabytes. In addition to that - like all my backups - it has to be encrypted; my datad should not lay around for everyone to take away.

So I want to split the backup into small segments. The OS X hdiutil can do this with disc images - even with encrypted one, but I could not get it to work, so I got DropDMG to try it out. It seems to work, but the spliting of a 75GB image into 4,4 GB chunks is 3/4 complete and has already taken more than one day. Even on an quite old 450MHz G4 with 512MB RAM that is to much -way to much. There has to be another solution... maybe I should buy another firewire disc...

Update: Well DropDMG crashed after 85%. So I have to find another way...

After several attempts, wich failed, I finally managed to upgrade this blog to the latest bleedin' edge Typo svn version.

I just had to remeber

• That there is something like rake migrate - wich is a wonderfull invention to migrate your database
• And that I have to check my own typo template - wich renders this wonderfull layout - aginst the latest bleedin' edge azure default template - maybe they changed something that breaks your blog.

So now I'll be rememberd

Disclaimer: OK, if you have never used LaTeX or do not know what it is just ignore this post.

Just so I will always remeber it:

\usepackage[bookmarks=true]{hyperref}

Generates links for the table of contents and other references (e.g. to \ref{} and \label{}) in the Document. the bookmarks=true option generates a PDF toc wich you can klick on in Acrobat or Preview.

Nice!

Thanks to Patrick Jöckel

Peter Rukavina has developed a AppleScript, that sets the Adium status message to your current location in Plazes. You can find a howto in his Blog.

Very nice!