I haven't actually read TFA, but if he has a problem porting between Mac OS X and the iPhone, just wait until he tries to port his app to Windows CE, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian.
There are some important architectural points to keep in mind if you ever hope to take your application cross-platform. One is the separate the "engine" or core code cleanly from any kind of user interface. That way you can keep what is most fundamental about your application constant, then write a new UI to exercise it for each new platform.
Another consideration is to avoid using any platform specific APIs, formats or protocols for anything that extends outside of the application itself. I'm sure Apple's Core Data is the best thing since sliced bread - until you try to email a Core Data document to your buddy who's got an Android phone.
What is ironic is that the iPhone provides sqlite, which is a simple SQL database that keeps all its data in single files. sqlite is Open Source, and widely available, so you really could use an sqlite database as a user document, in just the same way that you couldn't do with a Core Data doc.
Web Apps Don't Work When You're Not Online
on
Cross With the Platform
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What's worse, you're at the mercy of the web app vendor. If they take down their app or start charging more money for it, you're SOL.
While the 68k Classic Mac binding hasn't been maintained for a while, it wouldn't be hard to get it working again. That would enable you to use the same client code all the way from the Mac Classic running System 7 to Mac OS X, Windows 7, Haiku, BeOS, Linux (mostly), BlackBerry and the iPhone.
All with one set of C++ client code, compiled to native executables for each platform.
If you want iPhone support, you'll need the Subversion source base; the code works, but we haven't rolled a release for a while.
This was around 1985. To be able to build a computer for ten million dollars that solved a particularly important problem a thousand times as fast as a ten million dollar general-purpose computer would be a significant achievement.
As for telling me stuff that ought to have been top secret... you don't know Tsutomu. I wouldn't dream of accusing him of any kind of crime, but he did like to brag about what a cool frood he was.
You all must remember Tsutomu Shimomura, who enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame as a result of nabbing Ub3r-H4x0r Kevin Mitnick. Tsutomu and I were good friends at Caltech back in the early 80s. We were both "Scurves", or members of Ricketts House.
Tsutomu never actually got his degree. I have long lost touch with him, so I don't know whether he ever went back to school, but at least for many years he was working as a research physicist with no degree of any sort. Not even a BS. I actually got better grades than he did. The reason Tsutomu didn't do so well is school was that he was spending all his time publishing original research.
Anyway, Tsutomu got hired away from Caltech by Los Alamos National Laboratory. His first project there was a cellular automaton implemented in hardware. It was a massively parallel computer, with each "processor" implementing the operation of a single cell. The first cellular automaton was the well-known Conway's Game of Life, but there are many other kinds. Some cellular automata are designed to solve specific kinds of problems. In Tsutomu's case, he was simulating supersonic fluid flow, for use in designing fighter planes, reentry vehicles and the like.
He described his device as "About as expensive as a Cray, but it solves just that one problem at a thousand times the speed of a Cray".
I don't have a link or a literature reference for you. I don't know whether he published an unclassified paper about it, but if he did it shouldn't be hard to dig up.
A while back I asked on an astronomy newsgroup where SETI was being discussed, how far away a civilization with the same level of technology as us, could detect our own signals. A SETI researcher said that it was about three light years. He said the most powerful signal that humanity radiates is the Distant Early Warning Radar, used to detect incoming Soviet nuclear missiles.
The closest star, Alpha Centauri is about four light years. It is likely that the nearest technological civilization is quite a lot farther than that.
He said that we were counting on detectable civilizations being lot more advanced than us, and so radiating a lot more power than we do. But I'm not so sure that that would help - possibly when a society gets more advanced, they develop more efficient communications technology and so radiate even less. An example is our own technology in which we now use undersea optical fiber rather than beaming so much power out at satellites.,P>
Were I not taking several doses of powerful stimulants each day, I probably would have interrupted myself in the middle to go roller skating or something.
Stimulant treatment for ADHD gets a bad rap. It's commonly said that we are drugging our children just to get them through school. It's not that way; ADHD is treated with stimulants because they boost certain neurotransmitters in a way that overcomes most of the illness' debilitating effects. People with ADHD don't generally get high when we take stimulants. In my case, taking Amphetamine calms me down and enables me to write code productively. When my medicine is working particularly well, it gives me a rather lethargic, calm and almost sedated experience - during which I am able to write mountains of code.
One wouldn't think so - and I certainly didn't myself at first - because the symptoms of Bipolar Type Schizoaffective Disorder are so obvious, severe and quite commonly life-threatening: visual and auditory hallucinations, paranoia and delusions - in my case, I am constantly pursued by a shadowy law enforcement agency that I can see but you cannot. I call them The Thought Police, because they are the police inside my head, but ironically just knowing that you're paranoid doesn't make the paranoia go away. I fear The Thought Police like nothing else, because they come not to arrest me, but to kill me.
A symptom called "Flat Affect:" makes it nearly impossible to express emotion in any normal kind of way. It's not that I don't experience emotion - I very definitely do - but I am unable to show my feelings outwardly. My expression is always wooden, a poker face. It makes it very, very difficult to connect with other people, especially the opposite sex.
My most prevalent schizoaffective symptom is depression which is often profound and can be suicidal. I also experience a profoundly euphoric state called mania. One might think that it's not so bad because it is actually a very happy, joyful feeling, it is actually the worst of the schizoaffective symptoms because when I am manic, I am utterly and completely out of touch with reality. I am like a bull in a china shop. When I am manic, it is a matter for the police - lots and lots and lots of police.
But all of this pales in comparison with my Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. One reason is that I understood from the very beginning that my schizoaffective disorder was bad and just why it was bad, so I was able to work from the very beginning to overcome it. But I had been in psytherapeutic and psychiatric treatment for twenty-four years before I was finally able to understand just how destructive my OCPD had been, not just to me, but to everyone that I cared about.
Simply being crazy is not so bad. There are many ways to cope, many ways to get by. What really is bad is to be crazy, yet completely unaware of it, Thus it was with me and my Obsessive Compulsive Personality.
I would be very grateful if you would read this short essay, it is just five pages or so:
You, sir are a special kind of crazy. They may even name a type of crazy after you.
People will no longer be called "odd" when they are batshit, self destructive crazy. They will be called "ogg".
Schizoaffective disorder all by itself leads many to suicide. How is it that I could have all of these awful disabilities and even survive?
I have been through some profoundly awful times. During my early twenties I spent five years almost continuously suicidal. Yet somehow I made it through all that.
I have met many other schizoaffectives, but so far I have not met even one who is had been able to hold a job for any length of time.
If anyone can make a credible offer to sequence my genome, drop me a line at mdcrawford at gmail dot com and I'll arrange for you to get a sample of my DNA. I will gladly sign an informed consent that would permit you to release the lot of it publicly - you need not be concerned about issues of confidentiality. Really I would prefer it that way.
I have two distinctly different mental illnesses, a neurological condition that affects my brain, and a circadian rhythm disorder that more or less makes it impossible for me to hold any kind of nine-to-five job.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, which is just like being Schizophrenic and Manic Depressive at the same time. That was diagnosed in 1985. I also have Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. That's quite a different thing than the more well-known Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCPD vs OCD). I was told of the diagnosis in 1994 but I have reason to believe the diagnosis was made long before, but my therapist chose to wait many years to give me the bad news.
The neurological condition is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I got that diagnosis in 2008. ADHD isn't taken very seriously by a lot of people, with some believing that it's not a real illness. It's no joking matter: I got the diagnosis in a psychiatric hospital where I committed myself rather than go off the Golden Gate Bridge as a result of my profound inability to focus on my work. I had been begging all manner of medical and mental health practitioners for help with it for ten years, but none of them had the first clue as to how to help me. It was only the shrink in 2008 who was able to make a real difference.
My circadian rhythm disorder is Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. It is the main reason I am a software engineer - my degree is in Physics, and not Computer Science. When I noticed that many of my programmer friends worked at night, I figured that being a coder would be the only way I would ever be able to hold a real job. All of my life I have slept during the day and stayed up all night. My mother said I was this way even when I was a newborn in the hospital.
My reason for wanting my genome sequenced is not at all to help myself, but to help others with my conditions. Besides understanding my various illnesses, I also want the medical community to figure out why I have done so well despite what would normally be a profound disability:
It is very, very rare for someone with Schizoaffective Disorder to live independently, let alone hold any kind of real job. I have a degree in Physics and have been a coder for twenty-two years. But most who share my diagnosis have to live off the disability check, be cared for by their families, spend their lives in institutions, or survive somehow on the streets, tormented by despair and madness.
There was a time when I was so hopelessly in the grip of my delusions that when God Almighty Himself sent me visions in the sky, I would photograph them. But when the pictures came back from the developer without my visions in them, I figured it was due to my inexperience as a photographer and not because those hallucinations were the products of my own demented imagination.
My hope is that by having my genome sequenced, I might not only ease the sufferring of others, but prevent a lot of otherwise needless suicides.
I am absolutely serious: mdcrawford at gmail dot com
For several years now I've been giving away free copies of my piano CD. I have received several requests from residents of Iran, and I would like very much to send them, but I haven't wanted to even try to figure out how to get approval from the Bureau of Export Administration.
It's not like my music is some kind of weapon.
You'd think that following the rules would just be a matter of looking up which countries are embargoed, but it's not that simple. In many cases it's not the country that's embargoed, it's specific individuals or organizations - in the case of Iran, it's the Revolutionary Guard, among others.
I'm pretty sure there's a procedure by which I could get a license, and I would be happy to go to all the trouble and expense that would be required. What I'm not looking forward to though is if and when I do get the required licenses, having to explain to the clerk at my post office that I have the permission of the Feral Gummint to mail my music to Persia.
That Wikipedia article says that Agomelatin is undergoing clinical trials in the US. I wonder if there is some way I can get myself included in the trials.
... when I worked for shops that had the idea that they should start every work day with a 10:00 AM team meeting.
I have worked at two companies that did that. Typically I'd come staggering in at 10:05 looking like I just crawled out of bed, because I really did just crawl out of bed.
If I ever made my 10:00 AM meetings on time, it was usually because I had been up all night working. I would then go home to sleep after the meeting.
I've been a coder for twenty-two years now. Other than those two companies, no one has ever had a serious problem with it. Lots of employers have expressed annoyance with the hours I keep, but the quality of my work has always been a persuasive argument.
In part it comes from trying to fit myself into a schedule that doesn't work for me, in part it's because I find my new job so absolutely fascinating that I never want to go home.
Just this weekend I decided that I must ensure I get enough sleep every night. I'm part way back to normal, but when I got home from work Friday afternoon, I was totally wrecked. It's going to take a few more days before I'm back to normal.
Wikipedia has a good article on Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.
As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.
I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.
Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.
Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.
I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.
I was the AC who started this thread, with the two external drives and the safe deposit box.
When I set up my backup system, one of my concerns was that my loved ones might need to restore my backups, should I get hit by a truck someday.
I realized that if my filesystem is a rat's nest when I back it up, then my backups will be rat's nests as well, as would any restored data. So I have spent several months scrupulously organizing all of my filesystems on all of my computers.
That simplifies my backups, and would make it much easier to find what one needed when doing a restore.
My external drives both have ext3 filesystems. But they each have a small FAT32 partition containing installers for Mac OS X and Windows ext3 filesystem drivers. There are three such drivers available for Windows; I included all three.
My backups are not quite yet where they need to be, but they're getting close. I have automated continuous backup of my Subversion repository for instance. Whenever I do a checkin of my own personal code, a post-commit hook backs up my entire repository with the hot-backup.py script, then within three hours a cron job replicates the repository backup to my external drive.
I also need to write up detailed instructions that my survivors could follow, then mail them off to all of my relatives.
Recovering my data would be complex enough that these instructions would have to come right out and tell my mother to get my sister to do it for her. Happily my sister is hip to The Penguin.
What I meant was that I didn't permit regular users to write into Program Files. My problem was that quite a few of the applications I had installed expected to be able to write into their own installation folders.
Even Microsoft is an offender - one has to be an Administrator to run the Visual Studio debugger. I don't see why that should be necessary, unless one is debugging a Service. If one is debugging a non-Administrative executable, Administrative priveliges shouldn't be necessary at all.
I set it all so it was Read-Only to regular users, then removed my own Administrator privileges. When I logged in as "Mike", I was just a regular user, and had to log in explicitly as Administrator to do anything administrative.
Well that didn't last long. Nothing worked anymore.
To get my box back, I had to both make my Program Files folder writable, and I had to give my "Mike" account administrative priveliges.
I'm pretty sure "App Store" must be some kind of Apple trademark.
However, it is possible to lose the rights to your trademark if it falls into common use. That's why so many companies defend their marks so vigorously.
They used it for the Black Box from the first space shuttle explosion. There is a sort of paint consisting of microscopic magnetic spheres that are black on one side and white on the other.
When you paint a tape with this, you can see the magnetic patterns on it. You would then take high-res digital photos of it, and recover the data from the photos.
It worked for the space shuttle tapes, but as you can imagine it is very expensive to do.
Quite commonly backups are done by copying an entire filesystem, and then doing incremental backups of just the files that have changed.
I'm very concerned about just being able to find the particular file that I need, so I have my backups organized by topic - on each of my backup filesystems, there is a directory for my financial data, for my source code, for each of my websites and so on.
In each directory I put a bzip2ed tarball named for the date - for example "OggFrog_SVN_2009-09-16.tar.bz2". Most of my files compress quite a bit so I don't need to worry yet about running out of space.
The stuff that doesn't compress well mainly consists of media that is already compressed - audio files, my digital photos and so on. I tend not to keep infinite backups of that stuff, but just the latest copy.
It was quite a chore to get it all organized, as to make it work I had to organized the file structure that the backups came from, so that it would be easy to create each topic backup. But now that I have it all organized it is quite easy to deal with - and it's easy to find old files on my backups.
First let me point out that there are natural disasters that could potentially take out your backup, if it's on the same campus as your TV station - think of Hurricane Katrina. And for sure you want your Final Cut projects to survive a direct nuclear hit.
Anyway, I have a Fedora box with a RAID 5 made of four 1 TB disks. There is a partition on the RAID called/backup0. That's not really a backup, but more meant as a convenience. I back up all my data to/backup0, then right away use rsync to copy the new data to an external drive that is either/backup1 or/backup2.
I have a safe deposit box at my bank. Every week or two I swap the external drive on my desk with the external drive in the safe deposit box.
So the reason I have that/backup0 filesystem is so that I don't have to sync the two external drives to each other - otherwise I would have to make twice as many trips to the bank, and there would be some exposure were my house to burn down while I had both external drives at home.
My suggestion for you is to find two other University facilities that are both far away, and offer to trade offsite backup services with them.
You would have two backup servers in your TV station - one for each of your partners - and they would also each have two, one each for you, as well as for each other.
That way only a hit by a large asteroid would lose all your data.
I got religion about backing up thoroughly after losing my third hard drive in twenty years as a software engineer. Fortunately I was able to recover most of that last one, but one of the other failures was a total loss, with very little of its data being backed up.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some important architectural points to keep in mind if you ever hope to take your application cross-platform. One is the separate the "engine" or core code cleanly from any kind of user interface. That way you can keep what is most fundamental about your application constant, then write a new UI to exercise it for each new platform.
Another consideration is to avoid using any platform specific APIs, formats or protocols for anything that extends outside of the application itself. I'm sure Apple's Core Data is the best thing since sliced bread - until you try to email a Core Data document to your buddy who's got an Android phone.
What is ironic is that the iPhone provides sqlite, which is a simple SQL database that keeps all its data in single files. sqlite is Open Source, and widely available, so you really could use an sqlite database as a user document, in just the same way that you couldn't do with a Core Data doc.
What's worse, you're at the mercy of the web app vendor. If they take down their app or start charging more money for it, you're SOL.
All with one set of C++ client code, compiled to native executables for each platform.
If you want iPhone support, you'll need the Subversion source base; the code works, but we haven't rolled a release for a while.
Its Open Source under the MIT License, chosen specifically to be compatiable with both GNU GPL and proprietary development.
As for telling me stuff that ought to have been top secret... you don't know Tsutomu. I wouldn't dream of accusing him of any kind of crime, but he did like to brag about what a cool frood he was.
Tsutomu never actually got his degree. I have long lost touch with him, so I don't know whether he ever went back to school, but at least for many years he was working as a research physicist with no degree of any sort. Not even a BS. I actually got better grades than he did. The reason Tsutomu didn't do so well is school was that he was spending all his time publishing original research.
Anyway, Tsutomu got hired away from Caltech by Los Alamos National Laboratory. His first project there was a cellular automaton implemented in hardware. It was a massively parallel computer, with each "processor" implementing the operation of a single cell. The first cellular automaton was the well-known Conway's Game of Life, but there are many other kinds. Some cellular automata are designed to solve specific kinds of problems. In Tsutomu's case, he was simulating supersonic fluid flow, for use in designing fighter planes, reentry vehicles and the like.
He described his device as "About as expensive as a Cray, but it solves just that one problem at a thousand times the speed of a Cray".
I don't have a link or a literature reference for you. I don't know whether he published an unclassified paper about it, but if he did it shouldn't be hard to dig up.
It's hard work being a degenerate, you know. It's good to know that my efforts are paying off.
The closest star, Alpha Centauri is about four light years. It is likely that the nearest technological civilization is quite a lot farther than that.
He said that we were counting on detectable civilizations being lot more advanced than us, and so radiating a lot more power than we do. But I'm not so sure that that would help - possibly when a society gets more advanced, they develop more efficient communications technology and so radiate even less. An example is our own technology in which we now use undersea optical fiber rather than beaming so much power out at satellites.,P>
Stimulant treatment for ADHD gets a bad rap. It's commonly said that we are drugging our children just to get them through school. It's not that way; ADHD is treated with stimulants because they boost certain neurotransmitters in a way that overcomes most of the illness' debilitating effects. People with ADHD don't generally get high when we take stimulants. In my case, taking Amphetamine calms me down and enables me to write code productively. When my medicine is working particularly well, it gives me a rather lethargic, calm and almost sedated experience - during which I am able to write mountains of code.
A symptom called "Flat Affect:" makes it nearly impossible to express emotion in any normal kind of way. It's not that I don't experience emotion - I very definitely do - but I am unable to show my feelings outwardly. My expression is always wooden, a poker face. It makes it very, very difficult to connect with other people, especially the opposite sex.
My most prevalent schizoaffective symptom is depression which is often profound and can be suicidal. I also experience a profoundly euphoric state called mania. One might think that it's not so bad because it is actually a very happy, joyful feeling, it is actually the worst of the schizoaffective symptoms because when I am manic, I am utterly and completely out of touch with reality. I am like a bull in a china shop. When I am manic, it is a matter for the police - lots and lots and lots of police.
But all of this pales in comparison with my Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. One reason is that I understood from the very beginning that my schizoaffective disorder was bad and just why it was bad, so I was able to work from the very beginning to overcome it. But I had been in psytherapeutic and psychiatric treatment for twenty-four years before I was finally able to understand just how destructive my OCPD had been, not just to me, but to everyone that I cared about.
Simply being crazy is not so bad. There are many ways to cope, many ways to get by. What really is bad is to be crazy, yet completely unaware of it, Thus it was with me and my Obsessive Compulsive Personality.
I would be very grateful if you would read this short essay, it is just five pages or so:
Kuro5hin's undermyne said of me:
I am grateful for all of your kind understanding.
I have been through some profoundly awful times. During my early twenties I spent five years almost continuously suicidal. Yet somehow I made it through all that.
I have met many other schizoaffectives, but so far I have not met even one who is had been able to hold a job for any length of time.
I have two distinctly different mental illnesses, a neurological condition that affects my brain, and a circadian rhythm disorder that more or less makes it impossible for me to hold any kind of nine-to-five job.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, which is just like being Schizophrenic and Manic Depressive at the same time. That was diagnosed in 1985. I also have Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. That's quite a different thing than the more well-known Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCPD vs OCD). I was told of the diagnosis in 1994 but I have reason to believe the diagnosis was made long before, but my therapist chose to wait many years to give me the bad news.
The neurological condition is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I got that diagnosis in 2008. ADHD isn't taken very seriously by a lot of people, with some believing that it's not a real illness. It's no joking matter: I got the diagnosis in a psychiatric hospital where I committed myself rather than go off the Golden Gate Bridge as a result of my profound inability to focus on my work. I had been begging all manner of medical and mental health practitioners for help with it for ten years, but none of them had the first clue as to how to help me. It was only the shrink in 2008 who was able to make a real difference.
My circadian rhythm disorder is Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. It is the main reason I am a software engineer - my degree is in Physics, and not Computer Science. When I noticed that many of my programmer friends worked at night, I figured that being a coder would be the only way I would ever be able to hold a real job. All of my life I have slept during the day and stayed up all night. My mother said I was this way even when I was a newborn in the hospital.
My reason for wanting my genome sequenced is not at all to help myself, but to help others with my conditions. Besides understanding my various illnesses, I also want the medical community to figure out why I have done so well despite what would normally be a profound disability:
It is very, very rare for someone with Schizoaffective Disorder to live independently, let alone hold any kind of real job. I have a degree in Physics and have been a coder for twenty-two years. But most who share my diagnosis have to live off the disability check, be cared for by their families, spend their lives in institutions, or survive somehow on the streets, tormented by despair and madness.
There was a time when I was so hopelessly in the grip of my delusions that when God Almighty Himself sent me visions in the sky, I would photograph them. But when the pictures came back from the developer without my visions in them, I figured it was due to my inexperience as a photographer and not because those hallucinations were the products of my own demented imagination.
My hope is that by having my genome sequenced, I might not only ease the sufferring of others, but prevent a lot of otherwise needless suicides.
I am absolutely serious: mdcrawford at gmail dot com
It's not like my music is some kind of weapon.
You'd think that following the rules would just be a matter of looking up which countries are embargoed, but it's not that simple. In many cases it's not the country that's embargoed, it's specific individuals or organizations - in the case of Iran, it's the Revolutionary Guard, among others.
I'm pretty sure there's a procedure by which I could get a license, and I would be happy to go to all the trouble and expense that would be required. What I'm not looking forward to though is if and when I do get the required licenses, having to explain to the clerk at my post office that I have the permission of the Feral Gummint to mail my music to Persia.
The condition is widely thought to be genetic, but the precise gene has not yet been isolated.
That Wikipedia article says that Agomelatin is undergoing clinical trials in the US. I wonder if there is some way I can get myself included in the trials.
I have worked at two companies that did that. Typically I'd come staggering in at 10:05 looking like I just crawled out of bed, because I really did just crawl out of bed.
If I ever made my 10:00 AM meetings on time, it was usually because I had been up all night working. I would then go home to sleep after the meeting.
I've been a coder for twenty-two years now. Other than those two companies, no one has ever had a serious problem with it. Lots of employers have expressed annoyance with the hours I keep, but the quality of my work has always been a persuasive argument.
I know it's off-topic and all, but please check out Bob the Angry Flower's take on Atlas Shrugged.
Just this weekend I decided that I must ensure I get enough sleep every night. I'm part way back to normal, but when I got home from work Friday afternoon, I was totally wrecked. It's going to take a few more days before I'm back to normal.
As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.
I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.
Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.
Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.
I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.
When I set up my backup system, one of my concerns was that my loved ones might need to restore my backups, should I get hit by a truck someday.
I realized that if my filesystem is a rat's nest when I back it up, then my backups will be rat's nests as well, as would any restored data. So I have spent several months scrupulously organizing all of my filesystems on all of my computers.
That simplifies my backups, and would make it much easier to find what one needed when doing a restore.
My external drives both have ext3 filesystems. But they each have a small FAT32 partition containing installers for Mac OS X and Windows ext3 filesystem drivers. There are three such drivers available for Windows; I included all three.
My backups are not quite yet where they need to be, but they're getting close. I have automated continuous backup of my Subversion repository for instance. Whenever I do a checkin of my own personal code, a post-commit hook backs up my entire repository with the hot-backup.py script, then within three hours a cron job replicates the repository backup to my external drive.
I also need to write up detailed instructions that my survivors could follow, then mail them off to all of my relatives.
Recovering my data would be complex enough that these instructions would have to come right out and tell my mother to get my sister to do it for her. Happily my sister is hip to The Penguin.
What I meant was that I didn't permit regular users to write into Program Files. My problem was that quite a few of the applications I had installed expected to be able to write into their own installation folders. Even Microsoft is an offender - one has to be an Administrator to run the Visual Studio debugger. I don't see why that should be necessary, unless one is debugging a Service. If one is debugging a non-Administrative executable, Administrative priveliges shouldn't be necessary at all.
Well that didn't last long. Nothing worked anymore.
To get my box back, I had to both make my Program Files folder writable, and I had to give my "Mike" account administrative priveliges.
That's just plain wrong.
However, it is possible to lose the rights to your trademark if it falls into common use. That's why so many companies defend their marks so vigorously.
They used it for the Black Box from the first space shuttle explosion. There is a sort of paint consisting of microscopic magnetic spheres that are black on one side and white on the other. When you paint a tape with this, you can see the magnetic patterns on it. You would then take high-res digital photos of it, and recover the data from the photos. It worked for the space shuttle tapes, but as you can imagine it is very expensive to do.
I'm very concerned about just being able to find the particular file that I need, so I have my backups organized by topic - on each of my backup filesystems, there is a directory for my financial data, for my source code, for each of my websites and so on.
In each directory I put a bzip2ed tarball named for the date - for example "OggFrog_SVN_2009-09-16.tar.bz2". Most of my files compress quite a bit so I don't need to worry yet about running out of space.
The stuff that doesn't compress well mainly consists of media that is already compressed - audio files, my digital photos and so on. I tend not to keep infinite backups of that stuff, but just the latest copy.
It was quite a chore to get it all organized, as to make it work I had to organized the file structure that the backups came from, so that it would be easy to create each topic backup. But now that I have it all organized it is quite easy to deal with - and it's easy to find old files on my backups.
Anyway, I have a Fedora box with a RAID 5 made of four 1 TB disks. There is a partition on the RAID called /backup0. That's not really a backup, but more meant as a convenience. I back up all my data to /backup0, then right away use rsync to copy the new data to an external drive that is either /backup1 or /backup2.
I have a safe deposit box at my bank. Every week or two I swap the external drive on my desk with the external drive in the safe deposit box.
So the reason I have that /backup0 filesystem is so that I don't have to sync the two external drives to each other - otherwise I would have to make twice as many trips to the bank, and there would be some exposure were my house to burn down while I had both external drives at home.
My suggestion for you is to find two other University facilities that are both far away, and offer to trade offsite backup services with them.
You would have two backup servers in your TV station - one for each of your partners - and they would also each have two, one each for you, as well as for each other.
That way only a hit by a large asteroid would lose all your data.
I got religion about backing up thoroughly after losing my third hard drive in twenty years as a software engineer. Fortunately I was able to recover most of that last one, but one of the other failures was a total loss, with very little of its data being backed up.