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Week of 15 May 2006


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Monday, 15 May 2006
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08:11 - I see there is now discussion of using the National Guard to patrol the Mexican border.

Frist is by all accounts an intelligent man, so he must realize that this can at most very slightly reduce the porosity of our southern border. Patrolling something like 2,000 miles of border is not something that the National Guard is prepared by training or equipment to handle, particularly with the tiny numbers being suggested. I've seen figures as low as 3,000 National Guard troops, or about 1.5 troops per mile. With the current state of border defenses, which is to say essentially none, it would require at least 20 divisions to seal 2,000 miles of border effectively. (Obviously, one division can't hold 100 miles of front against any military opponent, but in this case it wouldn't be facing enemy armor or even infantry.) We don't have 20 divisions available for such duties. We don't have 20 divisions, period.

The only feasible long-term solution is to establish a security fence that extends continuously from the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville, Texas to the Pacific Ocean south of San Diego. That security fence needn't be particularly expensive to build, relative to the costs we already bear as a result of illegal aliens crossing our borders.

All that's really needed is a double-row concertina barrier near the border, with a heavily-mined gap between the rows. Liberal use of electronic sensors would minimize the number of troops required to watch and defend the fence. Behind the fence, extending for 10 miles, would be a dead zone, also mined, in which anything that moved would be fired on without warning. Helicopter gunships and artillery firing cluster munitions would serve to further discourage would-be border crossers. Anything shot would be left to rot, pour l'encouragement des autres. Finally, a third fence ten miles back would delimit the dead zone.

Constructing such a security fence would cost a few billion dollars, much less than what we already pay every year because we lack such protection. And we could more than offset the cost of building the security fence by rounding up and expelling the millions of illegal aliens now living in the United States. (I would extend that to include the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of illegal aliens, stripping them of their citizenship, which they should not have been granted in the first place. Being born in the United States to non-citizen parents should not confer US citizenship.)

There would also be ongoing costs, of course, to maintain and repair the fences, as well as the costs involved in keeping several divisions of border guards on duty along the border. But we can't afford not to do it. Nor can we afford to have our military border guards arresting and detaining people. They're not police. Their job isn't to arrest and detain. Their job is to shoot to kill, in defense of their country.


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Tuesday, 16 May 2006
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08:35 - Netflix is starting to throttle me again--delaying shipments, shipping discs from far-distant distribution centers, and so on. I returned two discs in one envelope to the Greensboro distribution center on Saturday, 13 May. Those discs should have been logged in by Netflix yesterday morning. They weren't. They haven't been logged in yet this morning, either. I'm sure the postal service isn't at fault. They invariably get discs to and from the Greensboro distribution center in one day. It's only 25 miles from us, after all. But Netflix won't allow me to report the discs as lost in the mail until 18 May. That sure is an easy way for them to throttle, and it's pretty outrageous given that they make such a big deal about offering one-day service.



I ordered some stuff yesterday from NewEgg, including some optical drives. I didn't order a lot of small items that I'd planned to order, because I wasn't willing to pay NewEgg's extortionate shipping charges. Supposedly, NewEgg consolidates shipping charges for orders with multiple items. By playing around with my shopping cart, adding and removing items and checking the shipping charges, I determined that they don't actually do that.

I was going to order some floppy drives, for example. The drives cost $6 or $7 each, but the shipping charges on them were typically $5 each. Adding one drive to my existing order boosted the shipping charges by $5, which it shouldn't have since I was already being charged $9.78 shipping for two optical drives. Adding a second floppy drive boosted the shipping charges by another $5, which is simply outrageous. Adding a third floppy drive boosted the shipping charges by yet another $5, which defies reason. Then, to top things off, I added a small cable, which sold for $1.99. The shipping on that cable was another $6. Sure enough, when I added it to my cart, my shipping charge jumped by $6. Give me a break.

The moral is that you should watch shipping charges carefully if you order from NewEgg, particularly if you're ordering several small, inexpensive items. I suspect they make most of their profit on shipping charges.



Every morning, I back up our data. Being a belt-and-suspenders type of guy, I back up our main working data directories on the server (which happens also to be Barbara's main desktop system) to a directory on my main desktop. I then copy the backup directory to another backup directory on an external hard drive on still another system. That external hard drive is 500 GB, so I can keep a couple of months' worth of daily backups on it, with each backup set in its own directory.

Finally, I write the backup directory from my main system to a DVD+RW disc on a Plextor PX-716AL, and run a verify pass with K3b. That disc goes into a wallet that sits on top of my desktop tower beside my desk. I can easily grab it any time we leave the house. (If we'll be gone for more than a few hours, I also disconnect the external hard drive and take it along.)

Yesterday, as I was backing up to the Monday DVD+RW disc, it occurred to me that it had been quite some time since I'd replaced those discs. Although K3b had verified the disc to be error-free, I decided to run an in-depth surface scan on the Monday backup disc with Nero CD-DVD Speed on a Windows box with an NEC ND-3550A drive. I ran the scan at maximum speed, which is more likely to uncover problems with the disc. Here's what Nero CD-DVD Speed showed me.

Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc

Even though that disc passed the K3b verify pass with no errors (and also passed the more superficial Nero CD-DVD Speed ScanDisc test with a 100% score) the in-depth Disc Quality scan shows this disc to have a hideously high number of errors. The "Quality score" is 0, and that's on a scale of 0 to 100. How can a disc that K3b and ScanDisc verified as having no errors have so many errors? It's because K3b and ScanDisc are only checking that the disc is readable. If the data can be read, they consider the disc acceptable. But the Disc Quality test goes much deeper, looking at how many error-correction retries were needed to read the data.

So I decided to write the same data to a DVD+R disc and scan it for comparison. Here's what Nero CD-DVD Speed showed me on the DVD+R scan. (This scan is shorter because there was actually only 3292 MB of data on both discs. The DVD+RW scan covered the entire disc surface because that disc had previously been completely written to capacity; the DVD+R scan covers only the disc surface that actually had data written to it.) Although it might not look it, this is actually a pretty high quality disc. A total of 44,670 PI errors looks high, but in fact it's very low. (Note the scales on the charts. For the DVD+R scan, they top out at 10 and 50; for the DVD+RW scan above, they top out at 200 and 2,000.)

Disc Quality results on a Verbatim MCC 003 8X DVD+R disc

I let the Plextor PX-716AL have its way with the disc, which meant it burned this 8X disc at higher speed than it wrote the 4X DVD+RW disc. This DVD+R disc maxed out at nearly 12X. If I'd written it at 4X fixed speed, the number of errors would have been much lower. Instead of a Quality score of "only" 96, the disc would probably have had a Quality score of 99 or 100, which is typical for Verbatim MCC003 discs written at moderate speeds in a Plextor drive. Still, a Quality score of 96 is good enough that I wouldn't hesitate to depend on this disc. That 96 means that the disc was readable with very little need to use ECC to reconstruct the data during the read. It should remain readable for a long time.

I don't use DVD+RW discs for daily backups because I begrudge the $0.25 cost of a DVD+R disc. I use DVD+RW to avoid becoming covered up in backup discs. But I'd never run a scan on one of my DVD+RW backup discs before, so I decided to see how a fresh DVD+RW disc compared in quality to the well-used DVD+RW disc. I don't recall exactly when I started using this disc set, but it's probably been a couple of years. That means that each daily disc has been written to 100+ times. DVD+RW discs are rated for 1,000 writes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can maintain high quality after even 100 writes. Here are the results of scanning the new DVD+RW disc.

Disc Quality results on a new Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc

The good news is that the Disc Quality scan results are much better on the new DVD+RW disc. The bad news is that the Quality score is still only 30. Obviously, either written DVD+RW discs are inherently of lower readability than DVD+R discs, or the NEC ND-3550A drive simply doesn't like DVD+RW discs (or at least the Verbatim MKM A02 discs written in the Plextor PX-716AL drive.) Just to be sure, I wrote and scanned several more new DVD+RW discs, and the results were similar. I suppose if I wanted to be rigorous, I'd replace the ND-3550A drive in the Windows box with a Plextor and recheck the discs, or at least update the ND-3550A firmware, which I haven't gotten around to doing.

I don't think I'll bother, though. The available evidence suggests that DVD+R discs are more reliable, so I plan to modify my backup methods. I'll replace the old Monday through Saturday DVD+RW discs with new DVD+RW discs. I've never had a problem retrieving a file from a DVD+RW backup disc, so I'll take the chance of continuing to use them for daily backups (in addition to the multiple network volume backups I keep.)

I'll get rid of the Sunday 1 through Sunday 5 DVD+RW discs, and begin doing my weekly Sunday backups to DVD+R discs. That seems a reasonable compromise. Instead of burning through 365 DVD+R discs a year, I'll use only about 50, which can be archived onto an empty spindle as they're replaced by the next Sunday disc.



C|Net posted an interesting article yesterday about advertisers' attempts to deal with viewers' multitasking. They just don't get it. From the article:

David Sklaver, president of KSL Media, who buys advertising time for clients like Western Union and Bacardi, said multitasking was either "a blessing or a curse" for advertisers. "If someone is watching a TV drama and has CNN News on the Internet," he said, "it's most likely you don't have an engaged viewer." But on the other hand, someone watching a sports event on television could enhance the experience by simultaneously surfing the Internet for game statistics.

Let me give them a clue. It's never a blessing.

If I'm watching a TV drama and have CNN News on the Internet, (a) I'll have recorded the TV drama and either pre-zapped the commercials or will jump through them with the 30-second advance button, and (b) I wouldn't dream of visiting CNN.com without my ad blocker running. So I'm not seeing any of their damned commercials anyway, and I'm not unusual in that respect. It's true that I've been doing this longer than most people, simply because I had a computer next to the sofa in the den and a PVR when both of those were rare, but the fact remains that most people who have PVRs and computers in their dens aren't going to be seeing many commercials no matter how hard advertisers try to force commercials down their throats. Ad-supported broadcast television is dead. Get over it.

"Engaged" is apparently the new buzzword. What advertisers fail to understand is that essentially no viewers are "engaged" in the sense they define the term. People don't want to watch commercials, period. That's what drove the revolution over the last twenty years, from VCRs to DVD recorders to TiVo to PVRs and home media center PCs.



I've complained about Wikipedia before, but I happened across a sentence the other night that really illustrates the all too common problem of poor writing on Wikipedia. It comes from an article on the Shawnee Indians.

After the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, the Shawnee fought with the French during the early years of the French and Indian War until they signed the Treaty of Easton in 1758.

The author of that sentence is a master of ambiguity. Does "fought with the French" mean that the Shawnee and the French were enemies or allies? Did the Shawnee sign the Treaty of Easton, or did the French sign it?


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Wednesday, 17 May 2006
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09:04 - I see that Mexico is threatening to sue the United States if the US deploys the National Guard along our own border. That crosses the line into the surreal.

Mexico claims that the US doesn't have the right to prevent illegal aliens from entering the United States. Although Mexico couches its argument in humanitarian terms, the simple truth is that Mexico treats the United States as a dumping ground for Mexican citizens that Mexico has neither the desire nor the ability to support. In essence, Mexico shifts huge social welfare costs to US taxpayers by exporting millions of unskilled people. Those costs, variously estimated at between $30 billion and $100 billion per year, are footed by US taxpayers.

The problem is that Mexico is exporting its losers. As Fred Reed says, Mexican ophthalmologists aren't swimming the river. Instead, we get Mexico's stupid ones--largely unskilled and unemployable--and no small number of criminals. 

Americans almost universally want illegal immigrants to be expelled from the United States. I know. I've asked people what they think. Liberals want them expelled, as do conservatives, as do libertarians. Blacks want them expelled, as do whites. College professors and manual laborers want them expelled. No one wants them to remain here. No one, that is, except our elected "representatives".

The media frantically attempts to tar those of us who vocally oppose illegal immigration as somehow racist or anti-Mexican, which we are not. I would happily welcome that Mexican ophthalmologist and his family. I'd love to see them move in across the street. We need more ophthalmologists and scientists and engineers. What we don't need are more unskilled illegal immigrants. We have too many unskilled citizens of our own to support as it is.

The only explanation I can think of for the federal government's failure to clamp down on illegal immigration is that it fears revolution in Mexico and so willingly allows illegal immigration to continue as a sort of safety valve. If that's the real reason that our government takes no action to prevent illegal immigration, it's an ill-considered one. Mexico can indefinitely supply as many illegal immigrants as the US is willing to accept. The trickle has become a flood, and the flood an invasion. We simply cannot continue to accept Mexico's cast-offs. We cannot afford it, either financially or in terms of the damage it is doing to our society. It has to stop now.



To paraphrase Jerry Pournelle, I do these silly things because I'm silly.

Yesterday morning, I was about to burn my daily backup to a new DVD+RW disc, when I decided to try using the old disc. This time, I kept an eye on the scan as it ran. For most of the scan, the Quality score remained at 79. Very late in the process, a lot of errors started cropping up, which eventually dropped the Quality score to 0, as shown below. Interestingly, there were few errors while the scan was running against the part of the disc I'd just written to--about 3.2 GB. It was after that point on the disc when the errors started coming fast and furious.

Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc

I thought perhaps a fresh format would improve matters, so I did a full format on that disc, reburned the backup data to it, and ran another scan. Here are the results of that scan. The fresh format improved matters slightly. For most of the disc, the Quality score remained around 80, but again dropped fast near the end of the disc, where no actual data was written. The final Quality score ended up at 33, significantly better than the first pass, but still not very good.

Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc after a full format (13.11X read)

I decided to re-run the scan with a 1X read speed. As I expected, the results were better, although still not acceptable. The final Quality score was 45, although once again that was reduced from about 80 by the numerous errors that occurred near the end of the disc, past the actual data.

Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc after a full format (1X read)

I'm not sure what to conclude. The full format improved some of the numbers, but others were worse. And scan of the old disc was superior in some respects to the scan of the new disc, but inferior in others.

In practical terms, it probably doesn't matter. I have so much redundancy in my backups that I'm unlikely to lose any data even if a particular disc is completely unreadable. One conclusion I can make is that DVD+R is much, much more suitable for archiving data than is DVD+RW, as the screen shots I posted yesterday make clear. At this point, I'm treating DVD+RW as suitable for quick and dirty short-term backups, but nothing more.

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Thursday, 18 May 2006
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08:33 - My den system must be schizoid by now. In the last month, it's had half a dozen Linux distros installed on it, most recently SuSE 10.1, which I installed last night. It's not over, either. Xandros Server showed up a couple of days ago, and I'll probably install it on my den system in the next couple of days.

When I started to burn the SuSE discs, I noticed that my stock of CD-R discs was nearly depleted. I had only half a dozen Taiyo-Yuden CD-R discs left on the spindle, and I didn't want to waste them on burning copies of a distro that I suspected wouldn't last long on my systems. So I borrowed some CD-Rs from a friend. She had some Memorex CD-Rs (ugh) and some Office Depot CD-Rs (double ugh). But choosers can't be beggars, so I soldiered on.

As it turned out, the Memorex discs were actually made by Prodisc. Those are second-rate discs, to be charitable, which a quality scan of the burned discs confirmed in spades. They were at least readable, though. The Office Depot discs were actually made by Moser Baer, and are fourth-rate discs, only one step above complete garbage. Of the three MBI discs I burned, two had terrible quality scans (one at 12 and the other at 0), but at least they could be read. The third disc produced a fatal read error, so I reburned it to a Memorex disc.

SuSE 10.1 itself is quite impressive, despite a few glitches I encountered while installing it. During installation, it offered to test Internet connectivity by downloading the latest version of the Release Notes. I told it to go ahead, and it failed to connect to the Internet. (The problem was apparently temporary, because once it was installed Firefox fired right up and connected normally.) More seriously, SuSE 10.1 was unable to see any of the machines on our SMB network, despite the fact that Xandros, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and other distros see the workgroup normally. There were also a couple of other minor glitches. For example, although clicking the scroll wheel on my Microsoft cordless mouse works properly, the scroll wheel doesn't allow me to scroll.

I don't doubt that all of the minor glitches could be resolved easily, and that SuSE 10.1 is an excellent desktop Linux. However, I'll probably stick with Xandros and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Speaking of Xandros, although there's no official word about a release date for Xandros 4, unofficially it looks like it will be July or August.



I see Mr. Bush proposes to build a few hundred more miles of fence along the Mexican border. What an excellent idea. He could also save money on new prisons by building only one wall instead of all four.



14:23 - I had my first experience today with having someone else print photos for me. I was about to amend that to "print digital photos for me", but in fact I've never had analog photos printed for me, either. From the first black-and-white Velox contact print I made in 1964 at age 11 through the Cibachromes, dye-transfers, and platinum prints I did later, I've always printed my photos myself. But now I'm farming out the job. It didn't hurt a bit.

There are any number of places that allow you to upload your images to their server and then pick up the prints an hour later. I chose Walgreens, not because they were the cheapest, but because they have a store that's only a two-minute drive from our house. I uploaded the images about noon. Unfortunately, I had to choose each image individually to be uploaded. Walgreens apparently has a batch upload process, but it didn't work for me, probably because it uses ActiveX or something. Still, it didn't take long to select the images to be uploaded, although the actual upload process took quite some time.

When the upload finished, I completed some web forms to choose the store where I wanted to pick up the prints, indicate size and number of prints for each image, and so on. The site is designed rationally, and is quick and easy to use. I suppose in this day and age it's not surprising that I had to click to accept an agreement that stated that I owned the copyright to the images or was reproducing them with the copyright owner's permission.

Once I filled out all the required fields, my order was processed, giving me the option of paying by credit card then and there or paying when I picked up the photos. I chose the latter and was informed (at 12:08 local time) that my photos would be ready for pickup by 14:08. Not exactly the promised 1-hour service, but not bad, either. As soon as I clicked OK to complete the order, an email arrived detailing the transaction, listing the pickup location, and so on. About 40 minutes later, I got another email to inform me that the photos were ready to be picked up.

I drove over to Walgreens, where a very nice young lady helped me. After I responded to her request for my last name, she replied, "What an excellent name." Her name, too, is Thompson. She's proud of it because it's her husband's name and he's serving with the US Army in Iraq.

Being me, I couldn't resist asking her about the equipment they use to print the images. It's a Fuji Frontier 340, which from everything I've read is a superb piece of equipment. She said that the equipment varied from store to store, but they were pleased to have the Frontier 340 because it was the best available.

Looking at the images, I can believe that. They're very good, indistinguishable from a 4X6 C-print made from a color negative. I uploaded the files in full 3008X2000 resolution, which was probably overkill for 4X6 prints. I suspect it would be possible to print cropped 11X14 or even 16X20 images from these files without excessive blockiness. And at $0.19 per 4X6 print, it makes no sense at all to print them at home.


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Friday, 19 May 2006
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08:53 - More mail.

From:    Rod Schaffter
To:      thompson
Subject: Suse 10.1; Samba and Epson 3490 scanner
Date:    Thu, 18 May 2006 15:55:23 -0400

Hi Bob,

SuSE enables the firewall by default, but it doesn't open the ports for Samba unless you tell it to.  To open the ports, go to Yast control center>Network services>Samba server, and tick the "Open port in Firewall" box.  Alternately you can go to Security and Users>Firewall and disable the firewall, which is what I did.

The Iscan package for the Epson scanners in included on the non-oss add-on disk-I used the proprietary version, but it doesn't find the scanner and install it.   After installing the package with YAST, go to Yast>Hardware>Scanner and set up the scanner and it will Just Work (although still not with Kooka in the last Release Candidate)

I will find out how it works with native Linux WIFI drivers as soon as the UPS man gets here with my new hard drive (it should have been here yesterday-3-day Select service isn't what it used to be).  I picked up another Armada M700 on eBay for $100 for the Wife to use, which is what the drive is going it.  The Armadas run Linux very well if the latest BIOS is installed.

Take Care,
Rod Schaffter
--
"Beneath the garments of our civility, we are naked men. The conditions for our survival must never be forgotten. We were not born in our clothing. Every fragment of our comfortable world was purchased at risk, from the wilderness of nature, and the wilderness in the heart of man. Our ancestors built and rebuilt, all ultimately, as Nehemiah built Jerusalem wall -- sword in one hand, trowel in the other."
--David Warren

Thanks. I'll play around with it a bit more. It seems that desktop Linux is making great strides. There are now several distros that are reasonable desktop choices for even novice users. As I said, I'll probably stick with Xandros and Ubuntu/Kubuntu, simply because I'm used  to them now. I'm even getting to the point where I can tolerate Gnome.

From:    Ron Snider
To:      Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: Backup routine ...
Date:    Tue, 16 May 2006 09:39:48 -0600  (11:39 EDT)

I need a backup routine at work. I am very sloppy and inconsistent about it.  I gather the essence of your backup routine is to have a "Working Directory" that you backup at the end of the day ... correct ?  Everything is in one dir, perhaps with sub-dirs, convenient to find at the end of the day  ?
 
I tend to work and store the fruits of that work in different folders, even on different drives (not in a backup sense, but as a not-too-thought-out organization routine) during the work day. This makes it awkward to remember what I worked on ... but eliminates the need to re-file  (or eventually file ? )  the work back in those dirs and sub-dirs following a backup ... because the work never left those dirs and sub-dirs. I assume you have to file the contents of your previous day's  "Working Directory" the next day ... or how do you handle that aspect?  Work for a week in the "Working Directory" and then file it all on Friday ?
 
Thanks for any insights,
 
-Ron Snider-
Edmonton

Having data scattered around is a scary thought. I organize all of our data into three directories, named usr, holding, and archive, all of which are located on our server, which at the moment happens also to be Barbara's main office desktop system. (The server and Barbara's desktop system are both sancrosanct, so it made sense to combine them into one machine).

The /usr directory contains all of our current (working) data. The /archive directory contains old stuff that we don't access very often. The /holding directory is a kind of intermediate holding bin between /usr and /archive. When I'm cleaning up our working data directories, I move files to /holding rather than directly to /archive, and then backup /holding to optical discs. That way, /archive is changed much less frequently and so doesn't need to be backed up as frequently (it currently requires six DVDs to backup /archive). When /holding reaches the size where it can't be backed up on one DVD, I sweep everything from /holding to /archive and pull a new set of /archive DVD backups. Those three main directories are also replicated on the hard drive of my main office desktop, under the names /usrback, /holdingback, and /archiveback.

The /usr directory has three subdirectories, /usr/thompson for my data, /usr/barbara for Barbara's data, and /usr/photos for digital camera images. Each of those subdirectories has many subdirectories, organized functionally for Barbara's and my data and by related groups for /usr/photos. For example, one of my subdirectories is /usr/thompson/ora, which contains stuff I'm working on for O'Reilly. That in turn has many subdirectories of its own. For example, one of them is /usr/thompson/ora/btpp2e, which contains the files for the new edition of _Building the Perfect PC_. That subdirectory in turn has its own subdirectories, such as /usr/thompson/btpp2e/first-draft and /usr/thompson/btpp2e/images, both of which are further subdivided by chapter. All of our other working data is organized similarly.

One problem is programs that use hard-coded directory names for their data or configuration files. For example, under Linux Mozilla and Firefox store their configuration files and similar data under /home/thompson/.mozilla, and Evolution stores its configuration files as well as the actual mail messages under /home/thompson/.evolution. Although it's possible to use symlinks to point applications like this to another directory, I find it easy enough just to copy those directories into the /usr directory structure.

So, each morning, I do the following:

1. Copy .evolution and .mozilla from my home directory.

2. Change to /usr/thompson, and delete yesterday's copies of .evolution and .mozilla

3. Paste the current copies of .evolution and .mozilla into /usr/thompson

4. Copy the directories Mail, .kde, and .mozilla from Barbara's home directory

5. Change to /usr/barbara and delete yesterday's copies of Mail, .kde, and .mozilla

6. Past the current copies of Mail, .kde, and .mozilla into /usr/barbara

7. Copy the three top-level directories in /usr

8. Change to /usrback and delete thompson, barbara, and photos

9. Paste the three top-level directories from /usr into /usrback

10. Copy the three top-level directories from /usrback

11. Change to the top-level directory of a 500 GB external hard drive that's connected to a Windows box on my desk

12. Change into the usrback directory on the external hard drive

13. Create a new subdirectory with today's data, e.g., /usrback/20060519

14. Paste the three top-level directories into that daily backup directory

15. Burn a DVD of /usrback on my machine to a DVD+RW disc (I have six DVD+RW discs, labeled Monday through Saturday, and five more labeled Sunday 1 through Sunday 5. I'm going to stop using DVD+RW discs for the Sunday weekly backups and start using DVD+R discs instead.)

I know I'll get email about how easy it is to use symlinks, rsync, and so on to streamline this whole process. Once we again have a dedicated server, I'll certainly set up rsync, but for now this method works fine for me.


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Saturday, 20 May 2006
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Sunday, 21 May 2006
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