I have had 4 SheevaPlugs. Two died on me, one was replaced and the other I had to buy a replacement PSU. They are touted as plugging into a wall socket, but if you do that they are pretty precarious, and if you plug them in via a power cable, then they don't stack nicely. I prefer the PC Engines Alix boards (http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm) - based on the AMD Georde with 255MB of memory they seem to be as fast as a SheevaPlug (I read somewhere that the Kirkwood processor only has a 16-bit data bus whereas the Geode has a 32-bit data bus). The Alix systems have a nice Aluminium case and run cool and sweetly - a German company nrg-systems.de, sells cases that will take a 2.5" hard disk, which draws an extra 2 Watts above the 8-10 Watts that the base system uses. I have 3 Alix systems: one as my firewall, one running my Asterisk PBX and the other running Exim, Dovecot, NFS, Samba, etc. The three systems together draw less than 30 Watts, replacing a pair of 150 Watt tower systems that ran 24x7 saving enough on my electricity bill to pay for themselves in just over a year.
I have been buying organic food for 30 years or so and it is not because I believe it has higher levels of nutrients, but largely because of the lower levels of pesticide nutrients.
For example: a couple of years ago the fields next to our kitchen garden were used for growing potatoes for a major UK supermarket. They were sprayed 2 or 3 times a week with fungicides for about 10 weeks, before being sprayed with sulphuric acid to burn off the tops before harvesting. Of course the sprays drift in the wind, which is worrying for people living just metres from the fields.
Of course in the future organic farming (or at least farming with lower levels of chemical inputs) is likely to become more common, as peak oil drives up oil and natural gas prices, pushing up the price of fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides.
Back in 2000, I wrote the Apache Pocket Reference and mod_perl Pocket Reference in DocBook SGML using emacs, with a perl script to convert to LaTeX for me to be able to preview what I had written.
This year I updated the former book as the Apache 2 Pocket Reference. This time it is written in DocBook XML - again using emacs. Each of the 400-odd directives is held in a separate XML file and I have scripts that parse those files and the directive definitions in the Apache source code and report on inconsistencies.
I also published two vegetarian cookery books written by my wife. These were written in LaTeX - with each recipe being held in a separate file.
Writing a book is akin to a complex project. Keeping each section of the book separate and maintained in a version control system means that you can see which parts of the book are changing and do quick word searches just by using grep. Emacs also has various tags functions that allow searching and replacing across tagged files, so even managing a book split into almost 500 source files is quite easy.
Or simply use rsnapshot. However whatever backup solution you use, make sure to create dumps of your databases as backing up the database files while they are in use will give you backup files you cannot restore from. If you backup your database dumps, you can exclude your databases files from the backup.
I have used LaTeX since about 1990. I still have some old documents from that time that I can read - and with very minor tweaks re-format.
I wrote a book with LaTeX in 1994 and published my wife's full-colour cookery book with it in 2002. I am just finishing off a book written with DocBook XML and LaTeX is certainly simpler to use - in fact my wife prefers LaTeX to MS Word. My approach is to concentrate on the content and define a small set of macros suited to the job in hand (e.g. an "ingredients" environment in the case of cookery books).
Class design is a bit of a black art, and I could wish it to be simpler, but the key is to keep things simple and well structured. I find the LaTeX Companion series of books to be enough to get that job done. If you are rigorous about separating all the styling into the class files then you also parse the.tex files quite straightforwardly.
That web site will be going away sometime soon. Most of the stuff is on, or linked to from, refcards.com. There are currently about 60 cards listeed, including MySQL.
USB drives are just yet another obscure place that data can lurk, but even when you have a backup plan in place it is all to easy to lose data.
We found this out the hard way last week. Four years ago I published my wife's cookery book, which included about 80 commissioned paintings. All the text was stored in subversion but the image data took up about 40GB in its various forms. It was all backed up and we had multiple copies on different disks, but having just sold the rights to the book I discovered that I had reused the 250GB disk that held the images, putting it into a Windows XP system my wife used for her printing business. We had changed our tape drives a couple of years ago and didn't have any of the old tapes -- we just didn't notice when we lost the files. Fortunately we were lucky: only 10% of the disk had been reused, so I made a low-level copy of the disk, used scandrive to find undamaged superblocks and then e2fsck recovered the about half the contents of the disk. As we had the files in multiple formats we actually ended up only losing three of the images, which was miraculous.
I saw it too and while I learned a few historical facts, I thought that the script was poor, the acting was rather wooden, and the program could have conveyed the same information in a third of the time.
I have worked from home for 12 years now, having started when I moved back to Britain after contracting in Germany. Nine years ago I moved out of the city to live in a rural location. Out here isolation can become an issue, especially in winter when one could easily go for weeks without meeting anyone. On the other hand I am not tied to work at any specific time so I am free to go out on the spur of the moment -- for a run or to go sailing, or just to socialize. Virtually none of the people I meet locally are techies, so there is also a sense of technical isolation; however I phone work colleagues to get the contact I require and to have someone to bounce ideas off. Living where I do also makes me really look forward to the occasional on-site meetings!
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I have had 4 SheevaPlugs. Two died on me, one was replaced and the other I had to buy a replacement PSU. They are touted as plugging into a wall socket, but if you do that they are pretty precarious, and if you plug them in via a power cable, then they don't stack nicely. I prefer the PC Engines Alix boards (http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm) - based on the AMD Georde with 255MB of memory they seem to be as fast as a SheevaPlug (I read somewhere that the Kirkwood processor only has a 16-bit data bus whereas the Geode has a 32-bit data bus). The Alix systems have a nice Aluminium case and run cool and sweetly - a German company nrg-systems.de, sells cases that will take a 2.5" hard disk, which draws an extra 2 Watts above the 8-10 Watts that the base system uses. I have 3 Alix systems: one as my firewall, one running my Asterisk PBX and the other running Exim, Dovecot, NFS, Samba, etc. The three systems together draw less than 30 Watts, replacing a pair of 150 Watt tower systems that ran 24x7 saving enough on my electricity bill to pay for themselves in just over a year.
I have been buying organic food for 30 years or so and it is not because I believe it has higher levels of nutrients, but largely because of the lower levels of pesticide nutrients. For example: a couple of years ago the fields next to our kitchen garden were used for growing potatoes for a major UK supermarket. They were sprayed 2 or 3 times a week with fungicides for about 10 weeks, before being sprayed with sulphuric acid to burn off the tops before harvesting. Of course the sprays drift in the wind, which is worrying for people living just metres from the fields. Of course in the future organic farming (or at least farming with lower levels of chemical inputs) is likely to become more common, as peak oil drives up oil and natural gas prices, pushing up the price of fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides.
Back in 2000, I wrote the Apache Pocket Reference and mod_perl Pocket Reference in DocBook SGML using emacs, with a perl script to convert to LaTeX for me to be able to preview what I had written. This year I updated the former book as the Apache 2 Pocket Reference. This time it is written in DocBook XML - again using emacs. Each of the 400-odd directives is held in a separate XML file and I have scripts that parse those files and the directive definitions in the Apache source code and report on inconsistencies. I also published two vegetarian cookery books written by my wife. These were written in LaTeX - with each recipe being held in a separate file. Writing a book is akin to a complex project. Keeping each section of the book separate and maintained in a version control system means that you can see which parts of the book are changing and do quick word searches just by using grep. Emacs also has various tags functions that allow searching and replacing across tagged files, so even managing a book split into almost 500 source files is quite easy.
Or simply use rsnapshot. However whatever backup solution you use, make sure to create dumps of your databases as backing up the database files while they are in use will give you backup files you cannot restore from. If you backup your database dumps, you can exclude your databases files from the backup.
I have used LaTeX since about 1990. I still have some old documents from that time that I can read - and with very minor tweaks re-format. I wrote a book with LaTeX in 1994 and published my wife's full-colour cookery book with it in 2002. I am just finishing off a book written with DocBook XML and LaTeX is certainly simpler to use - in fact my wife prefers LaTeX to MS Word. My approach is to concentrate on the content and define a small set of macros suited to the job in hand (e.g. an "ingredients" environment in the case of cookery books). Class design is a bit of a black art, and I could wish it to be simpler, but the key is to keep things simple and well structured. I find the LaTeX Companion series of books to be enough to get that job done. If you are rigorous about separating all the styling into the class files then you also parse the .tex files quite straightforwardly.
That web site will be going away sometime soon. Most of the stuff is on, or linked to from, refcards.com. There are currently about 60 cards listeed, including MySQL.
Thank god we've got the BBC.
We found this out the hard way last week. Four years ago I published my wife's cookery book, which included about 80 commissioned paintings. All the text was stored in subversion but the image data took up about 40GB in its various forms. It was all backed up and we had multiple copies on different disks, but having just sold the rights to the book I discovered that I had reused the 250GB disk that held the images, putting it into a Windows XP system my wife used for her printing business. We had changed our tape drives a couple of years ago and didn't have any of the old tapes -- we just didn't notice when we lost the files. Fortunately we were lucky: only 10% of the disk had been reused, so I made a low-level copy of the disk, used scandrive to find undamaged superblocks and then e2fsck recovered the about half the contents of the disk. As we had the files in multiple formats we actually ended up only losing three of the images, which was miraculous.
I saw it too and while I learned a few historical facts, I thought that the script was poor, the acting was rather wooden, and the program could have conveyed the same information in a third of the time.
I have worked from home for 12 years now, having started when I moved back to Britain after contracting in Germany. Nine years ago I moved out of the city to live in a rural location. Out here isolation can become an issue, especially in winter when one could easily go for weeks without meeting anyone. On the other hand I am not tied to work at any specific time so I am free to go out on the spur of the moment -- for a run or to go sailing, or just to socialize. Virtually none of the people I meet locally are techies, so there is also a sense of technical isolation; however I phone work colleagues to get the contact I require and to have someone to bounce ideas off. Living where I do also makes me really look forward to the occasional on-site meetings!
As far as I understand it anyone who responds is then your contact and you can legitimately add them to your own list.