Tweets on 2009-11-21
Saturday, November 21st, 2009- Google Scholar now includes legal opions (http://bit.ly/1hLU35) including favorite ever : http://bit.ly/8tqHa0 #
Archive for 2009
Tweets on 2009-11-20
Friday, November 20th, 2009- Kindle for Windows app launched – http://bit.ly/HQaYf #
Tweets on 2009-11-14
Saturday, November 14th, 2009- Singing in the rain is playing at Starbucks. How appropriate. Except for the singing part. #
Tweets on 2009-11-13
Friday, November 13th, 2009- Does Ingrid Michaelson's sound remind anyone else of Ani Difranco? #
Tweets on 2009-10-09
Friday, October 9th, 2009Open Source Backups with Bacula
Thursday, October 1st, 2009We are waiting for funding at work to buy licenses of Veritas NetBackup but in the mean time I was charged with finding a reasonable free open source backup solution. Our environment is fairly typical with a mix of Linux and Windows clients with an LTO tape library attached to a Linux server.
From my research I really only found two candidates; Amanda and Bacula. Unfortunately Amanda has always been a non-starter for me because of their insistence that it’s a bad idea to save more than one backup job to a given tape. I have never encountered the SCSI resets which cause tape drives to arbitrarily rewind and no commercial software that I’ve seen shares this integrity concern and limitation.
So that left me with Bacula. I had never used the software before but it wasn’t difficult to set up. The mtx tools were able to communicate with my tape library and I was able to get backup jobs running in no time. The job definition model is different from what I’m used to with Veritas or Legato, but it wasn’t hard to get up to speed.
The GUI for Bacula is fairly limited and does not support creating policies, adding or removing tape drives, or really anything other than running jobs and restoring files. Everything else involves editing text configuration files and command-line tools. Being a long-time UNIX person that isn’t a problem for me.
If you’re looking for a free and robust backup solution, Bacula may fit the bill.
Tweets on 2009-09-28
Monday, September 28th, 2009- Checking out the Hulu desktop app. So far seems pretty cool. #
Tweets on 2009-06-05
Friday, June 5th, 2009- Thought I was getting laid off yesterday but apparently safe until the 12th – maybe longer. Stressful. #
Kindle DX is the Kindle I’ve Been Waiting For
Sunday, May 17th, 2009I have been excited about the prospect of eInk readers for a long time. Back in January of 2006 I wrote about looking forward to the Sony Reader but expressed that a tabloid sized version that would allow me to read periodicals is what I really want. It looks like Amazon’s upcoming Kindle DX
I’m a fan of books. I read a fair amount and I like having a bookshelf of paper volumes. I’m not sure that I would use an eInk reader to take the place of my paper novels. The value for me in an eInk reader is in periodicals and PDFs of technical manuals.
I have a paper subscription to The Economist but there is no value to me in having piles of previous weeks issues laying around my house. I wouldn’t mind switching that to an eInk version. And as I wrote back in January 2006 I’d love to be able to get trade press such as Daily Variety delivered electronically.
I also download a lot of PDF manuals for various technical products. I don’t like to print them out as it’s a waste of paper. On the other hand, I am not thrilled with reading lengthy documents on an LCD or CRT screen. The main reason I haven’t bought an e-reader so far is that they have not had good native support for PDF. The Kindle DX does support PDF without having to convert the file which is a must-have feature for me.
I haven’t preordered a Kindle DX but if the user experience reviews are positive once it’s released I think I may purchase one. The selection of periodicals available in the Kindle store is limited but I hope it will expand over time. It really seems like an excellent platform for regional trade papers. If I could get Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on the Kindle I’d consider renewing my subscriptions to those papers. Digital delivery is the future of news. At least for me.
Playing Around with FriendFeed
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed for the past week or two. It does a lot of things better than Twitter. Notably I am not limited to the 140 characters and it allows a conversation around a post. The conversation piece is pretty key.
On the other hand, it doesn’t have quite as mature an API and the third party apps for FriendFeed can’t compete with the third party Twitter apps. I have BuddyFeed on my iPhone but unfortunately the FriendFeed API does not allow modification of my subscriptions so I’m limited to reading what I’m already subscribed to. With Twitter, I’ll often find a mention of someone new made in a tweet of someone I’m following and decide to follow that new person. To do that with FriendFeed is overly difficult at the moment.
I have decided not to cross-post my Twitter content to FriendFeed. This is an area where best practices have not yet emerged. I think it’s best to keep the content separate. They are different services. I follow many of the same people on Twitter and FriendFeed and I don’t want to see duplicate content. In fact I wish there were a way to filter out all content posted from Twitter that does not have a reply on FriendFeed. Perhaps there is such an option, but I”ve not found it.
I have also configured my blog to post its updates to FriendFeed. Apparently there is support for Disqus comment integration, although I can’t figure out how to turn that on. Hopefully that will be coming soon. I like the idea of a single conversation around an idea instead of having it fragmented across varoius sites.
