Journalspace no more

Journalspace, an online blog hosting site, is down for the count. It appears they had a mirrored drive setup, but no backups to tape. I can tell you from experience that simply mirroring drives is not a valid backup solution. It's great having redundancy, and mirroring/RAID can ensure uptime. But simply keeping a real-time mirror of your data isn't enough, as it seems the folks that ran journalspace.com just found out in the most painful way possible.

The one obvious gotcha is what happened to them - your data gets corrupt. If you have a real-time or near real-time mirror of that data, then guess what? Your backup is also corrupt. Point-in-time, whether to tape or disk, is essential for any critical data, and a valid retention plan is a must as well. Just overwriting the previous backup isn't good enough - what if your backup fails to complete one early AM and the disk or server fails before you can re-run?
Sure, losing a day of changes or data if last nights backup fails sucks, but at least you had a valid backup from the day before to use as a restore point. If you are just re-writing over the previous backup, you wouldn't have had anything to restore from and that is the same result as not backing up at all.

Bottom line? Tape sucks, sure. Tape drives and autoloaders can be cranky beasts. Changing tapes sucks, too. But losing your data and potentially putting your company out of business sucks more.

Entered the New Age of HDTV Saturday

I finally bit the bullet and bought an HDTV this weekend. I've had a mental block to spending a ton of money to buy something I already have - a television. But the one we have is old, and a little dodgy - prone to going purple around the edge every now and then - as well as a low end model even when I bought it.
So Saturday Jenn and I braved the (thin) crowds of Xmas shoppers, located a 42 inch plasma on sale for less than 600 bucks at Best Buy, and I went back later with the Wagon of Doom and brought it home.

With a side trip to WalMart for good measure to purchase a high-mount stand that will hopefully prevent TV and Two Year Old from becoming too closely acquainted.

3-4 hours of TV Stand assembly, and ten minutes of Actual TV fiddling and I was watching TV! Which I could have done on the old television without the expense or the fiddling.
One of these days I'm gonna catch the tail.

Internet Find-ability

We're hiring here at Mediaguide and researching peeps who have submitted resumes in response to our various job postings, so the question arose:
"What would people find about you if they googled you?"
I'm happy to say "Not much."
I'm not This Guy or or This Guy. And I'm not the guy that imitated David Lee Roth with a peanut allergy either.
Not that I'm not on the 'net, obviously, just that I'm apparently pretty sneaky :)

South Park Mac vs. PC vs. Linux video

Argh!

My pirate name is:

Calico Davy Flint

Often indecisive, you can't even choose a favorite color. You're apt to follow wherever the wind blows you, just like Calico Jack Rackham, your namesake. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Road Trip!

Heading off toIndianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indianapolis Moto GP races starting Thursday. Riding a 14 year old Buell out there, 660 miles or so one way. Hmmm. Should be interesting to say the least. Will have pics and stories later.

I can has cake?

Monday, the 18th, was the 15th anniversary of Debian GNU/Linux so in honor of the occasion I stopped by the supermarket and picked up a cake.
The woman in the bakery section asked "Is Debian a girl or a boy?"
We went with the blue icing.

Another Philly Icon gone

Robert Hazard, Philly Rock n Roll icon and all-around hero to a lot of Philly kids my age, died recently. He was 59. I can still recall driving around in the back of my brother's car with Pat and Pat, my two best buds at the time, when I was too young to drive but too old to be home on a Friday night. We would blast "Escalator of Life" and "Change Reaction" on the Pep Boys cassette deck duct-taped into the dash of my Mom's old Plymouth Valiant, cruising around the Deptford Mall parking lot. Somehow we thought loud music, an old four-door, and rude suggestions loudly made would impress the girls. Sometimes, we were right.
He'll be missed, he was a Philly original and the scene in the City of Brotherly love owes him a debt of gratitude, as does Cyndi Lauper for writing "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" :) .

Frist Post

First post to Wordpress on the new blog. I finally got tired of running multiple boxes 24x7 at the house, especially in the summertime without central air - the heat in the office was starting to get unbearable, as was the electric bill and the wife-annoyance factor.
I chose Rapid Xen and signed up for a VPS on a Debian server running as a Xen instance in their Chicago facility.
Excellent hosting provider so far (all of two days, so hey, not a lot to base it on). The sign-up was painless, I got an email the next day letting me know the server was up and running and giving me the IP address to go log in and get running.
All it took after that was a quick change in DNS and an apt-get to install the software, and here it is.
I suppose one of these days I'll cutomize the theme a little and make it a bit more "personal".

I'm officially turning into my Dad. I said the following to my daughter today: "Be careful you'll poke out your eye."
I probably turned into him a long time ago, but this is one of the first times I stopped and realized it.
Of course, it was good advice to give, even if the two year old probably didn't comprehend exactly what "poking out your eye" means, she stopped swinging around her belt.
And promptly started pelting me with Goldfish.

I can officially say it's been a loooong time since I used Windows. Out of habit I hit ctrl-alt-right arrow on the keyboard to switch to a different workspace, since I had just kicked off a long running job and wanted to open another ssh session to work on another project, and the screen on my laptop went sideways. It was early on a Sunday AM and I hadn't had a second cup of coffee, so I was a little more surprised and confused than I normally would be at such an event. I tried ctrl-alt-left arrow and it flipped it the other way. Ctrl-alt-down flipped it upside down, so I tried the only remaining combo: ctrl-alt-up, which made everything hunky-dory again.
Sigh.
I suppose if I am ever forced to use Windows Vespa I'm going to lose what's left of my mind.