Sub Ubi

The United States has 4.6 percent of the population of the world but 22.5 percent of the world’s prisoners.

I’d seen TiddlyWiki a while ago, but the 2.0 version is kinda swish. This is a Wiki in a webpage; through the magic of Javascript, it allows you to edit a webpage, in the browser, and have the content saved back into the same file. What you end up with is a functional Wiki in one file.

I’m going to experiment with using a couple of Tiddlies, and have Firefox open them as one tab group. This should allow me to have one for contacts, notes, todo, etc. I might just use the GTDTiddlyWiki for the “ToDo” type content; we’ll see.

Also, someone bundled up the GTD TiddlyWiki as a Dashboard widget. That’s pretty slick. I can bring up the Dashboard, and right there is a TiddlyWiki. That’s kinda cute. Handy for a place to take notes, anyway—and more lightweight than MoinMoin, which I’ve been using for some time.

I’ll be posting over on untyping about the building of our new server, for those who are interested. It’s a long way from my first Slackware install in the basement of the Physics department at Kenyon…

What a wonderful name! Sony just never seems to get things right with marketing and branding. Between the death of the minidisc as a viable digital format for music, and it’s complete failure to capture the MP3 market, they stand to miss out on the ebook market as well, just for lack of features and poor naming. (“Reader”? How generic can you get?)

A friend in Germany pointed me at the iRex Iliad. In terms of features, it seems to have several key advantages over the Sony Reader:

Notes

¹ There are approximately 200MB of unused, on-board memory, but that’s used for font installation as well.
² The USB keydisk is an amazing feature; it apparently can act as a USB host, so I can plug any keydisk in, and read files off of it. If I was able to transfer files from the USB keydrive onto a CF/SD card as well, that would be cool. But either way… just being able to plug in a USB keydrive as external storage is some smart thinking.

Comments

All told, the Iliad looks like a much nicer product.

1. [Size] It is significantly larger than the Sony; it is just about the size of a printed page. For a device that you read on, that matters a lot.
2. [Input] The Sony has no input on the device; it looks like I can scribble on PDFs using the Iliad. This is critical as well; although I am not terribly concerned with being able to “write”, per se, I do want the ability to underline and otherwise mark critical sections of text. If the handwriting recognition is good enough (or I can “zoom in” to create hi-res handwriting), then this would be an amazing tool for grading documents of all kinds.
3. [Battery] I can’t tell, but it looks like the battery on the Iliad isn’t as good as the Sony. This is probably due to the runtime on the device remaining active for handling input, etc. Ideally, they ship the device with the ability to lock it into a low-power mode, where all I do is read and turn pages. That way, I can either run in an “interactive” mode, or I can just read text.

Those are the features, in order, that matter most to me. For that reason, I’m eager to hear more about the Iliad, and hope that its April release isn’t a vaporware target. Waiting a bit (but not forever) for a device that’s almost the size of a printed page (vs. the size of a paperback) is absolutely worth it—since the display technology on both is practically identical (both use eInk technology).

Must… wait…

My del.ici.ous bookmark widget doesn’t want to work—something must have changed. So, a few links I want to revisit regarding backups:

• http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
• http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Backup/index.shtml
• http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/01/rsync.html
• http://acs-wiki.andrew.cmu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Cyrus/Backup

To be expanded later.

I’ve long feared the use of CD-R and DVD-R as backup media. They are fundamentally unstable technologies. The burn might look good, and it might verify, but 1 year later I might not be able to read the data. I know tape is a great deal more stable, but I’ve often been put off by the high cost of tape drives.

Now I’m about to put a new machine on-line. Along with two friends/colleagues, we’ve purchased a 1U rack mount server. It’s a dual PIII 1.4GHz machine, 2GB of RAM, and a mirrored pair of 250GB drives. We’ve replaced all the moving parts in the server (the drives are new), and are being quite fastidious in our design and setup of the system. Our goal is to make the administration as simple as possible while allowing for a diverse number of users and uses. I’m confident, based on our experiences with our Bytemark virtual machine, that we’ll have a great box in place.

What’s the missing link? Backups. We’ve got complete sensing on the machine, so if one of the drives in the RAID array tanks, we’ll know by email, SMS, and every other messaging mechanism known to us that something’s gone wrong. I’m developing a little language for specifying backups over the filesystem, databases (both Postrgres and MySQL databases run on the machine), Subversion, and anything else that comes up needing to be backed up. Those backups will go first to disk, and then off-site.

But where then? Even with a clean, automated framework for moving data off the server, that leaves me in a position where I need to store the backups in some kind of safe way. This post is just me exploring the cost and reliability benefits of several different options.

Notes

1. I’ve given tapes a 3y to 20yr life as good tape practice assumes re-tensioning every 2-3 years.
2. Apple Store link for VXA2
3. Exabyte page
4. Carts for VXA2
5. Coolatoola homepage for DV Backup
6. Apple page for DV Backup

I’ve been through this before, but it was worth seeing again.

So, if I want my backups to last a long time, I need to put them on tape. I can do that most cheaply with software like DV Backup, which allows me to store data on miniDV tape, turning a consumer miniDV camcorder into a digital tape drive. This is almost certainly the most stable format I can affordably purchase.

A tape drive is simply out of the budget; there’s no way I can afford, at this time, a real tape drive. And while I could use a hard drive, the shelf life of a pair of drives isn’t actually that great. Tape will last much longer, although it presents issues of data migration. Still, I’d feel better/can more easily afford (at this time) having to re-tension a miniDV tape every 2-3 years than having to buy new drives every 2-3 years.

For the short term, I think I’ll be using DVD. Our backups are intended for restoration in case of catastrophic failure, and therefore we’re only interested in restoring the last weekly or monthly. As soon as I can afford it, I’ll purchase a miniDV camcorder and begin using that as a destination for monthly (full) backups, and will keep those for a relatively long period of time.

I’m reposting this Guardian article in full. Someone will yell at me, if necessary, to pull it.

American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.

Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.

The troops told Dr Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned.

The director of the film, Callum Macrae, said yesterday: “The timing and nature of this raid is extremely disturbing. It is only a few days since we first approached the US authorities and told them Ali was doing this investigation, and asked them then to grant him an interview about our findings.

“We need a convincing assurance from the American authorities that this terrifying experience was not harassment and a crude attempt to discourage Ali’s investigation.”

Dr Fadhil was asleep with his wife, their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, and seven-month-old son, Adam, when the troops forced their way in.

“They fired into the bedroom where we were sleeping, then three soldiers came in. They rolled me on to the floor and tied my hands. When I tried to ask them what they were looking for they just told me to shut up,” he said.

When the rest of the world starts waging a war on terror, we’ll call them terrorists… because they will be attacking us, instead of us attacking them.

The US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration maintains a page of road song lyrics.

Wacky.

Image lifted from Engadget.

To followup my eBook rant, it looks like the Sony Reader is close to what I want. It docs via USB, and has the ability to read PDFs; that’s good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have search capability: that’s bad. (Details filtered through Engadget.)

So. Lets see.

• Just starting job.
• Big student loans.
• Mindstorms NXT
• Sony Reader

This set of things doesn’t add up.

I’m wiling to give the Reader a try; the ability to take 20, 30 articles downloaded from the ACM Digital Library or the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, walk outside with the Reader and my lab notebook, and spend a few hours reading sounds really appealing. In fact, I could walk all the way from my office down to Ye Old Beverlie, and read and take notes while imbibing Spitfire. Outside. In the beer garden. On a lovely, summer day in Kent.

Sorry, Ralph…

Mindstorms NXT… Reader… Mindstorms NXT… which do you choose? I guess I’ll have to find a way to finance both. Carrie, if you’re reading this… start skipping meals.

Bias is reporting 11 dead instead of 125.

The headline from the New York Times “International” section:

The headline from the Scotsman “International” section:

This is called bias, boys and girls. It is how you help an administration brainwash a nation. The 11 US soldiers who died volunteered to be in the military, for good or bad. Through action or inaction, the US voted to support this war; the 114 innocents who died today on the streets of Baghdad did not. The US brought this war to them.

Update, later same day:

I was just quickly skimming the news before heading off to a meeting this morning, and only had a chance to quickly skim headlines and some content. The apparent discrepancy that I noted is (in part) because the Times reported (yesterday) Attacks in Iraq Kill 120 as Post-Election Violence Escalates. In other words, the Times headline from today should be seen as a logical continuation of yesterday’s news. Still (RBK), taken in isolation, juxtaposed as they are, I think one headline speaks (more) clearly to the scope of the human tragedy, while the other does not.