Given enough time it happens to us all. We clobber some important file we’ve been pouring ourselves over for the last 4 hours, and *poof* it’s all gone. Many companies setup regular snapshot copies of your home directory at regular intervals so when this happens you can quickly go to your snapshots and pull your lost file out of the ether. While you may only use this occasionally it’s like an insurance policy that’s really worth the regular cost.

I do a lot of work on my laptop and until now I didn’t have the luxury of regular snapshots of my work. Using a program like dirvish it’s easy to setup an automated snapshot of whatever files you want with minimal disk usage. Because dirvish uses hard links to store the incremental backups each backup copy will only consume the difference of the changed files. This way you could store multiple snapshots at a given interval without multiplying the disk usage, here’s how I did it on my Macbook, other Unix systems should be nearly identical.

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I walked down my street, past the crowds of laynard people. Past the giant projection screen showing Oracle ads. Past the street closed with the giant Oracle tent. Past the three Buildings dedicated to Oracle OpenWorld. Past the Oracle buses and Oracle bus stops. Past the posters plastered on the sidwalk. To a sliver of a cofee shop on market, where I order a medium hot earl grey tea, and I find this:

SF is great because you always get to see the most interesting things. So Folsom Street Fair is one of these things.I really should have taken more pictures, like the two guys playing with themselves in the middle of the street…. or the guy tied to a tree with a jock around his face…. or maybe the on-stage riming show by porn stars…. well you get the idea….

So this actually arrived a while ago, but my site was down so… let’s pretend this it’s three weeks ago. My much anticipated Monome 40h arrived and while it was a little difficult to get it up and running, the support forums were enough to get it going. I’m working on a library to be able to program this directly in python/php/c etc, should be available soon (assuming the server stays up that is).

Sounds like Monome won’t be making any more of these so they can concentrate on their next project m80h? I’m very happy with it, and can’t wait to see what they do next. My only dissapointement is that the led intensity is for all the entire unit and not each individual button. Here’s some pics from my gallery…

I recieved a community notice that Howard Street would be closed all week long. Turns out it’s for the Oracle OpenWorld Convention, seems like they’ve closed down the entire street so that they can join the two convention buildings with a tent. How much room do you really need? At least it’s easier to jay walk without getting hit by a car now.
-More pictures-

The Register Article: Bigger, longer, uncut: Oracle OpenWorld

OpenWorld Homepage

For someone like me that knows very little about electronic music, this is a great resource:

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

Just finished reading “Before Night Falls” by Reinaldo Arenas, I felt compelled to read the book after seeing the movie of the same title. It’s the memoirs/autobiography of the Cuban author and poet Reinaldo Arenas. I thought the story was an excellent reading of what life was like during and after the rise to power of Fidel Castro (not that I have any idea about what it’s like). It’s especially clear how much of a threat artists and homosexuals are to any dictatorship, this will never cease to amaze me. While I would consider the book explicit both in it’s description of events and sexual encounters I never felt that it was written with the intent of getting a rise out of readers. It reads much more like the telling of one’s life without the self-censorship so many people are born into.

I dropped my Sony Ericson phone today for a new Blackberry Pearl 8100.  What a hot piece of hardware.  While some reviews describe it as a phone for the girls, I think any geek would be stupid not to snatch one of these up.  I’m not willing to carry around with me a giant blackberry or treo phone, it’s just too inconvenient.  But the pearl is the best of both worlds.  I’m able to dial-up on Caltrain with my MacBook and I can get email/IM/Text/web while I’m out and about away from my laptop.  Everyone I’ve shown it to so far has gone goo goo over it once it’s in their hand.  Hot Hot Hot…. now if I could only get it to work with iSync.

Review:
http://crunchgear.com/2006/09/18/blackberry-pearl-8100-hands-on-2/

How to dial-up with your Pearl on the Mac:
http://www.fibble.org/archives/000508.html

While in the midst of writing my own GDB scripts to anylize PHP core files, I was informed through a response to the xdebug mailing list that these functions already exist in the php-src/.gdbinit file. How clever! Some useful functions are:

(gdb) zbacktrace
[0xfff40040] arsort() mail.php:287

[0xfff40040] send_message() lib.php:18

[0xfff40040] post_reply() lib.php:312

[0xfff40040] ??? index.php:15

(gdb) printzv return_value
[0xdd474c90] (refcount=1) NULL

Some other usefull commands…

dump_bt — Dumps the current execution stack
print_const_table — User-defined
print_ft — Dumps a function table (HashTable)
print_ht — Dumps elements of HashTable made of zval
print_inh — User-defined
print_pi — User-defined
printzn — Print type and content of znode
printzops — Dump operands of the current opline
printzv — Prints content of zval
zbacktrace — Prints backtrace
zmemcheck — Show status of a memory block

More information on GDB command files here

“I did not know then where that river was headed, where that frenzied race would end, but something was calling me to go with it, saying that I too had to throw myself into those raging waters and lose myself, that only in that torrent, always on the move, would I find some peace. but I did not dare jump, I was always a coward. I would go as far as the riverbank, where the currents where roaring my name; another step, and the whirling waters would swallow me. ” - Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls