phillhutt

So, about a week ago I ordered some speakers and a reciever via the magical internet being. I got a pair of black Wharfedale Diamond 9.2 Loudspeakers and a Harmon/Kardon Stereo Reciever HK 3490. I am stoked with both of them, I’m still breaking them in but they sound great, looks great too. Only problem I really have is I don’t have the ideal place to put them, but I can live with that for now. I have ordered a new and bigger desk that will help a bit. I’ll post up some pics once I get the new desk on Tuesday. For now, here are a couple of pictures of me putting the speakers wires into the banana plugs I bought from monoprice.com. I bought 50ft of 12 gauge wire to go with the speakers.

Just a quick one on a few things I have found lately. I’m sure lots of people are already familar with this stuff but I have never quite needed it so I have never played with it. The main thing being – Google Calander!

Lately I have decided to start using google calander to help me organise stuff. It is handy because I can use it at home and/or at work and I have access to everything regardless of where I am. You can set it up to sent you reminders via either email, pop up or SMS (text message, duh). I haven’t used the txt option yet, but I can imagine that it would be mighty handy. You can also import other peoples calanders. The only one I have put in is the public holidays one since I actually have no idea when the holidays are here in the States. But there are other ones I noticed like movie release dates or TV shows or whatever that I imagine lots of people would find handy. If you really want you can add “Barack Obama – The Illinois senator’s campaign events”. Sounds a bit stalkerish to me!

The second thing that I just noticed about google (gmail to be more precise) is that if you go into the settings you can set it to always use https, which I don’t think they used to have. I am really happy about this, it makes me feel a lot safer and it was to me, the only down side to gmail. But no more!

That’s it. I was happy to find these handy things and actually use them. I know they’ve been round for ages but oh well. Feel free to comment if you have found other cool uses for calander.

I haven’t made any posts for a while, mainly because I have stopped tinkering with my computers for the moment. Partly because I’ve been busy, partly because I’ve done all I can without spending a bit of money to buy some new bits. (See below)

(From above) The money problem is more or less at an end. I have a job. Amazing! I have entered the wide world of records management. I work as a technical support person for a company called Oneil Software, we make software to store and manage records for records management companies. I have spent the last few days in training and I have many more days of training to go. If you belive people around the office it takes years to fully grasp everything that it can do and I’m starting to see how that is possible. Very interesting. One of the biggest things I have to learn about isn’t simply the software, but the whole industry of records management which I am starting to find very interesting also.

Since this blog is supposed to be about things that I’m interested in, in general, not just technology, I figured I might start making some posts about a couple of my other interests such as finance and soon to be records management. I’m considering mentioning music and movies but I think that might be a little too far away from what I want to write about. As in, it’s not really contributing to my or others knowledge base. (Not that much of this rant is contributing to much anyways).

So, part 1 of my finacing saga: In anticipation of my first pay check (first one for a few months at least) I have opened a savings account with ING Direct. A mighty 3% interest. That should be just enough to cover inflation right? So far I have $10 in there, which is ok because they have no minimun balance. There are no fees or other bullshit that puts me off most banks. I hate paying fees unless you’re really getting something out of it. The main drawback to this account, which is fine if your money is properly organised, is that it can take several days to transfer money from it to whatever account you use for your everyday banking (at another bank). So this is for sort of medium ~ longish term savings I guess. Money that you are not going to ever need immediately.

So, once I start getting paid I can start thinking about setting up automatic transfers to sort out my money as it comes in. I can’t do anything about my 401k for a few months, which is good because it can give me some time to learn about it. They don’t really have anything like that in New Zealand and I like to know all the ins and outs of something before I start using it / buy it. Be it a new mouse, stereo or something I pour thousands of dollars into.

I also just read a great thing in a blog I read www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com. It is not as literal as the URL makes it sound, but he has some interesting posts and some interesting ideas on finance and psychology of saving and spending. He likes to rant a lot. I do like a good rant. This “great thing” that I mentioned was actually in the newsletter I signed up to. He says this: “You guys may remember that, earlier this year, I used social psychology to gain 5lbs in one week (yes, gain). I used public commitment — a public bet with friends, combined with frequent updates that they could all see on a wiki, to actually gain 15lbs over the entire bet. Plus, some trash talking that made them feel like small children and me like a dominant, Zeus-like figure. I won, duh.” He goes on to say how you could apply that to your finances: “Make a public bet with your friends that you’ll save 10% of your money for the next 3 months. If you don’t, you have to give it all to them (or donate it to charity)”. How about that eh? Imagine doing that yourself. I bet (no pun intended) that if I did that I’d do everything I could to save that 10% so I could save it for myself rather than give it away (not that I don’t like giving to charity). Anybody up for something?

The interesting part is how you can use the same principles to lose weight, stop smoking, or gain weight.

The interesting part is how you can use the same principles to lose weight, stop smoking, or gain weight.

So, if all goes well there should be another post about what I’ve learned about records management, and maybe you will learn something. Maybe.

Here are just a couple of pictures that I took while I was putting together the freeNAS with the CF card.

GOTO batchscript

:batchscript

Yup, the other day I had to do some googling to find out how to write some nasty batch script. (GOTO ftw). It’s pretty simple, just enough to prompt you for y/n and then an IF statement to see you typed y. I did this because ideally when you shut the computer down it prompts you to ask if you want to do a sync or not. This is so that if you just want to reboot, you don’t have to wait through it to sync, plus if you haven’t actually changed anything you don’t need to do a check. After writing the script I added it to the logoff scripts so that it would be done when I shutdown. Unfortunately it doesn’t run those scripts until after it shutsdown the whole GUI thing, so it basically just freezes while it waits for you to type ‘y’ but you can’t actually type it. So that didn’t work. I think I’ll just change it so that you just run the file, it does and update and then shutsdown the computer when it’s finished. Or just add it to the task sceduler. It probably uses a small enough amount of resources to just do it’s thing regardless of what I’m doing and it shouldn’t impact whatever I’m doing (unless I’m trying to play Crysis maybe).

Setting up cwrsync was a little strange because rsync still thinks it’s running in linux so you have to deal with the whole absoulte path thing e.g. /usr/… Solution: use absolute path ‘a la unix’, replace backslashes (\) with slashes (/) and put -/cygdrive/- in front of the drive letter.

@echo off
SET /P Choice=Do you want to do a backup before shutting down (y/N)?
IF NOT ‘%Choice%’==’y’ GOTO end

SETLOCAL

SET CWRSYNCHOME=”C:\rsync”

SET CYGWIN=nontsec

SET HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%

SET CWOLDPATH=%PATH%
SET PATH=%CWRSYNCHOME%\BIN;%PATH%

rsync -av –exclude=*.db –exclude=*.ini “/cygdrive/d/Pictures/” “/cygdrive/z/phill/backups/Pictures”
:end

This is my batch files or .cmd file actally. It syncs up my Pictures folder on my NAS (which has been mapped to Z: drive) with the pictures on my computer. I noticed that when I open up picasa, it seems to change the modified times of the .ini and .db files it puts in the folders. I didn’t see any point to keep these files synced, so I excluded them. Otherwise everytime I opened picasa it would go through and update all these files. Even though they are small, it still takes a while for it to traverse my whole Pictures folder updating these files.

I found that to do this simple task, cwrsync doesn’t actually have to be installed. You just need the binary and some of the .dll files. You don’t need to use the cwrsync server thing either. I guess it just depends on the setup.

Next is to get this going on my parents machine. Hopefully it works in Vista.

Just as a thought, I wonder what would happen if I replaced the the shutdown.exe file with my own one that ran my script and then did shutdown.

So, after several days of speculation, Blizzard has announced Diablo 3! I don’t think I’ve been more excited about a game before. It’s a pity that it probably won’t be out for a long time yet, but something to look forward to. I downloaded the ~800MB gameplay video they released and it looks like everything I could hope for. I think they have taken some inspiration from games like Titan Quest but made it Blizzard style (read: better).

So, as mentioned two posts ago, I tried to install ruby (the programming language) on my NAS server. This was so I could use the ruby rsync to sync the freeNAS up with my Amazon S3 account. It is basically a watered down version of freeBSD, which is UNIX (not LINUX apparently) so of course it’s going to be an absolute mission. Firstly, a lot of the commands were different to those used in Ubuntu or Debian like I’m used to. For example they have “fetch” instead of “wget” and they have “pkg_add” instead of the useful apt-get package manager. It doesn’t seem to have man pages, I assume they must have taken that out of freeNAS in order to lower the installation footprint. All these things seem to make it very hard to me to work with it. Eventually I mangaged to find a (apparently) compatible ruby package (or port in BSD) and I think I even managed to install it at one stage, but I had no way of really using it. For example, if I installed it with Debian, I would immediately be able to type “ruby hello.rb” and it would run the hello.rb file. But this didn’t work with freeNAS, I didn’t know if it didn’t install properly or if you have to manually assign the link or binary or whatever. Also, when I was trying to follow somebodies install how-to they used shell scripts (.sh files) and either BSD doesn’t use them or freeNAS can’t run them as is, so I ended up giving up. For now.

I was quite interested to read about openfiler because it is based on a LINUX distro, something I’m used to and I don’t think it is quite as stripped down as freeNAS because it has a 1GB install rather than a 32MB one. So, something for another rainy day, either get ruby to work on my current freeNAS setup, find something else to install on it, or set up openfiler, or set up some other type of open source or freeware NAS OS.

Went down to good old Circuit City and got a Antec Tricool 80mm LED fan. Did some dodgy stuff to hook it up but it fitted all right. It’s running at 41°C now, about 5°C cooler than yesterday which is better than nothing. After hooking it up I realised that I would probably have to take it out in a few days when I get my awesome 128MB compact flash card and CF to IDE adapter which I ordered off eBay for about $10 after shipping. Pretty good deal!

Free NAS installation madness: I blame the heat. It took me most of a day of screwing around, but I got it to work. In the end, when I just opted for the easy way, it was pretty quick and easy to install really. Firstly, not having a spare compact flash card around (which apparently you can install it on, as well as a USB key), I decided to try and use an SD card plugged into my card reader. It just would not work. I booted up from a CD, and I designated it as the drive to install the OS on. It managed to copy over a config file and then it just stopped. I should probably explain what I was trying to install this on. It is an old Dell machine, with a 2GHz P4 and I think 1GB of RAM. It has two hard discs, a 120GB and a 4GB. So in the end I just installed the OS on the 4GB drive (which it actually decided to partition into a 96MB part, which it installed itself on and the rest is … gone? I don’t seem to be able to mount it). My plan for this is to buy a cheap 128MB compact flash card from ebay(~$5 after shipping), get a CF to IDE adapter from newegg (~$17 after shipping) and install the free NAS os on that to save power.

Bucket explorer madness: I bought bucket explorer. It is an alright program, works well, has a fair amount of features. But not the feature I bought it for. My fault, I was reading through their forums and saw reference to its syncing abilities … in version 2. Which has not been released yet. So, something to look forward to. They are having an open beta right now, so I expect version 2 isn’t too far away.

Next step madness: First thing I need to do is buy a fan for my hard drives in the NAS. We are sort of in a heat wave at the moment, or maybe it has just suddenly decided to be summer all of a sudden. Either way, my discs can get up to 48°C, which is 10-15 degrees more than I would like them to be.

Then, I would like to figure out some way of syncing up S3 with the NAS, rather than just with my PC. One plausible way of doing that is with a ruby rsync thing, but that was todays mission which I will have to post on tomorrow. That way, when I want to back something up, I send it to the NAS, and I have an onsite backup, then whenever it sends it up to S3 (nightly?) I will have an offsite backup also. Sounds really great.

So, in the end, I learnt a lot. Mainly that I do not like freeBSD unix.

Recently I have been considering the problem/importance of backing up certain data. The most important thing for me right now is the ~13GB of photos I have that aren’t really backed up anywhere. If I were to lose my entire hard disk today, I could get most of them back, but it wouldn’t be an easy task because they are on a hard drive in New Zealand. I think I have been very lucky so far because I haven’t had to deal with any loss of data even though I’ve never really had a decent backup system. One of my friends back in NZ had had a few HDD failures but he also had a decent backup system implemented so the loss of data was minimal.

Also, just for fun I worked out how long it would take to upload my 13GB of files at the lame 60KB/sec upload speed I have, and I think it was about 63 hours worth of uploading. Looks like my PC will be on for a few days.

Some few weeks ago I signed up for one of Amazon.com’s great services called Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).  It is a really cheap way to store any files up to 5GB in size. (I don’t have much stuff in there yet, but last month it cost me 5 cents) One of the reasons why it is so cheap is because they do not provide any front end interface to deal with it. So if you want to upload files to it you need a third party program, or you need to write something yourself. (They have development community for this and lots of contributions from outside Amazon itself). Here is a really great FAQ about S3 as well as a backup program someone has written (I haven’t tried it yet).

So; picking a program to handle the uploads, and do the whole sync thing so that when I put something new into my photos folder, or My Documents or whatever, it would start uploading it to my S3 account. The most popular or at least most used program I can find is called Bucket Explorer. It costs $29.99. I am a big fan of freeware, or open source programs, but for something important, I think it is worth shelling out the relatively small fee of $30 to get something that I can rely on since this is a fairly important task.

To go for the free option, there is a very simple handy little Firefox extension that I found called S3 Organizer. It’s quick and easy for uploading or downloading a file or two, but not as full featured as the Bucket Explorer.

So that about covers my intention for off site storage, but I also need to set up some kind of on site storage also. My options for me, for this sort of scale would be setting up a RAID ? as well as possibly an external HDD (which I would probably also need some sort of program to make it easy to sync up my files between my PC and the drive). The third option is to set up a NAS (network attached storage).  All of these options would be relatively inexpensive, it would just be a matter of buying several 500GB HDD. The best thing I could do would be to put another drive in my PC, set up a RAID. Get two more to put in the NAS, also in RAID. This is about the best option I can think of and would come out at $89.99×3 ~$270 for three 500GB Seagate 7200RPM 32MB cache drives, same as the one in my PC right now.

Next I need to buy/set up the Bucket Explorer and also consider the different options for NAS software.

This is not the first blog I have tried to start, but maybe it will be the last.

I set this up on my dreamhost account. It was super easy, you basically click one button, choose a couple of options, and bam its all done. Setting up the design and stuff is proving to take a lot longer. But thats ok, what is time for if not to spend on something like this?

I have decided that this is as much to get my interests and knowledge out there, as much as it is to simply bookmark things that I see around the internet. So many times I think, “Wow, that’s a great idea/cool story/useful program/handy website!” and then I forget about it. Then, the day comes along when I realise I or someone else would benefit from that info, but I can’t remember what it’s called or where to find it. Some programs or websites, considering how useful they are, are remarkably hard to find.

Today is a good day so far, I recieved a phone call from someone I had a job interview with last week. He wants me to come in again next week to meet the team and have a look around and what not. Sounds geat. I feel pretty confident about it, I’m pretty sure I can get on with everyone, put on a good first impression.

Tomorrow I intend to put up a list of some of the handy things I have found recently, or have actually been using.