I heard Anil Dash talk at Northern Voice last weekend, and he explained the date-stamp as a kind of social-contract that says to people ‘I promise to post more here soon.’ That was pretty timely for me — I’d been thinking about taking the date-stamps off of my blog, so that I could feel like less of a turd when I don’t post anything for months and months. I still might. Who knows?

Anyway, I’m sorry I broke my promise. In the interest of our friendship, dear reader , I’ll be perfectly honest (I mean, it’s not like there’s many of you, so I think I can get away with it) — I can’t promise that I’ll post more here soon. All I can promise is that in between now and the time that I post again, which will likely be months from now, I’ll be feeling guilty about this gaping void of a blog at least once daily.

Cheers to that!

Check out their inspired (and well-writ) Community Standards. I wish the rules for RL were this simple and straightforward! In fact, it’s really fun to read these standards and substitute ‘Real Life’ or ‘Vancouver’ for every time you see the term Second Life. Try it!

Here’s an example:

Intolerance
———–
Combating intolerance is a cornerstone of Vancouver’s Community Standards. Actions that marginalize, belittle, or defame individuals or groups inhibit the satisfying exchange of ideas and diminish the Vancouver community as whole. The use of derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual preference is never allowed in Vancouver.

Isn’t that sweet?

Here’s the rest of the Big Six guidelines. Have fun!

Second Life: Community Standards
================================

Welcome to Second Life. We hope you will have a richly rewarding experience, filled with creativity, self expression and fun. The goals of the Community Standards are simple: treat each other with respect and without harassment, adhere to local standards as indicated by simulator ratings, and refrain from any hate activity which slurs a real-world individual or real-world community.

Behavioral Guidelines - The “Big Six”
=================================
Within Second Life, we want to support Residents in shaping their specific experiences and making their own choices. The Community Standards sets out six behaviors, the “Big Six”, that will result in suspension or, with repeated violations, expulsion from the Second Life Community. All Second Life Community Standards apply to all areas of Second Life, the Second Life Forums, and the Second Life Website.

Intolerance
———–
Combating intolerance is a cornerstone of Second Life’s Community Standards. Actions that marginalize, belittle, or defame individuals or groups inhibit the satisfying exchange of ideas and diminish the Second Life community as whole. The use of derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual preference is never allowed in Second Life.

Harassment
———-
Given the myriad capabilities of Second Life, harassment can take many forms. Communicating or behaving in a manner which is offensively coarse, intimidating or threatening, constitutes unwelcome sexual advances or requests for sexual favors, or is otherwise likely to cause annoyance or alarm is Harassment.

Assault
——-
Most areas in Second Life are identified as Safe. Assault in Second Life means: shooting, pushing, or shoving another Resident in a Safe Area (see Global Standards below); creating or using scripted objects which singularly or persistently target another Resident in a manner which prevents their enjoyment of Second Life.

Disclosure
———-
Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Lives. Sharing personal information about a fellow Resident –including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location beyond what is provided by the Resident in the First Life page of their Resident profile is a violation of that Resident’s privacy. Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life and on the Second Life Forums.

Indecency
———
Second Life is an adult community, but Mature material is not necessarily appropriate in all areas (see Global Standards below). Content, communication, or behavior which involves intense strong language or expletives, nudity or sexual content, the depiction of sex or strong violence, or anything else broadly offensive must be contained within private land in areas rated Mature (M). Names of Residents, objects, places and groups are broadly viewable in Second Life directories and on the Second Life website, and must adhere to PG guidelines.

Disturbing the Peace
——————–
Every Resident has a right to live their Second Life. Disrupting scheduled events, repeated transmission of undesired advertising content, the use of repetitive sounds, following or self-spawning items, or other objects that intentionally slow server performance or inhibit another Resident’s ability to enjoy Second Life are examples of Disturbing the Peace.

Warning, Suspension, Banishment
——————————-
Second Life is a complex society, and it can take some time for new Residents to gain a full understanding of local customs and mores. Generally, violations of the Community Standards will first result in a Warning, followed by Suspension and eventual Banishment from Second Life. In-World Representatives, called Liaisons, may occasionally address disciplinary problems with a temporary removal from Second Life.

Sunday October 22, 2006 — At 4:30 (PST) one hundred and fifty housing activists turned out to open a squatted building in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside at 5 West Hastings Street. The North Star Hotel had been sitting empty since 1999 since it was ordered shut down by Vancouver City Council.

The Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) squat could provide homes for 30 local residents in a city where hundreds sleep outside each night. APC supporters chanted “Homes Not Games” and are asking the City of Vancouver to purchase the building for housing, rather than spending money on hosting the 2010 Olympics. Large 30 foot banners were unfurled from the top floor protesting the Olympics Games and the lack of affordable housing.

I heard the APC’s David Cunningham on the radio this morning, and I was quite impressed with his version of the APC’s position. According to David, the specific purpose of this squat is to pressure NPA politicians into fulfilling their election promise of purchasing at least one old downtown eastside hotel per year to convert for affordable housing. The year is almost up, he said, and since the NPA has done nothing in the way of fulfilling this promise, the APC is occupying this hotel (on the final day of Homelessness Awareness Week) to ‘get the ball rolling’.

The police are apparently meeting with the City today to decide their official position on the squat. David says the APC has a host of other tactics ready should the police break this squat before there is action from the NPA.

It’s just over 4 years since the Woodwards building was squatted, which was a complicated kind of victory for the homeless (or at least for homeless activists). Woodwards precipitated the opening of the Stanley Newfountain Hotel for social housing, while also pressuring the city into providing at least 100 affordable social housing units in the upcoming Woodward’s development.

I’ll be very interested to see how this squat unfolds, and whether the APC can impact the current NPA-dominated council to the same degree that activists and community members were able to impact the COPE council four years ago.

You must be thinking what the smuck am I talking about?

A bool is a treasure hunt, a good joke, something fun, that ends in an RC, or a candy bar, or a story.

But Scott was a bit of a nutter himself. There are good bools, like the one he’s left for Lisey, and there are blood bools, like the ones his father introduced to him. Blood bools are bloodletting, when you cut to release the bad-gunky.

Lisey’s Story is about bools: blood bools and good bools.

But Lisey’s Story itself is a mothersmucking good bool.

– Monique, SoMisguided.com

Learn more about bools, and prizes, and other things like books and tap dancing and salmon and marketing over at SoMisguided. Maybe you’ll win something too!

“Hey Aaron, how come you can walk through the world with such confidence and grace, always smiling, never ever ever sad?”

or

“Hey Aaron, I’m afraid all the time, but I notice that you aren’t ever scared of anything ever ever ever. What’s the secret to your fearlessness?”

my response is always the same: (cue the booming voice of amazingness)

“Well, friend, I can’t tell you how to become as great as me. But I can help you learn to regularly back up your files, which is the first step to becoming monster-awesomely unafraid and happy.” (end booming voice)

And here’s how you too can become monster-awesomely unafraid and happy:

Use RSync & Cron to do daily backups of your most important files

Today I lent out my usual backup solution (external hard-drive + silverkeeper) to a friend, so I had to figure out a new backup solution to use until he gives it back. I’ve experimented with rolling-my-own backups before (trying to use gmail as a backup server), but without much success. Until now. Today I rolled my very own set of backup scripts, and they’re working great. Here’s how I did it.

Strategizing

First, I thought for a while about what the heck I could back up to. Then it dawned on me: I have an outrageously good hosting plan on aaronpettigrew.com, so I can probably store it all here. Yippee! (For those who’d like to follow along: just modify these instructions to suit whatever backup destination is available. It should work fine.)

Using Rsync

Next, I started playing with rsync, a “[free] open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.” (Rsync is a unix app that comes installed on your mac, so no need to download it. Take note, though: if you’re running an OS earlier than 10.4 & you want to preserve resource forks, you might wanna install rsyncx.)

Rsync can be used either on the command line, or through the GUI (located in Applications/Utilities). The GUI is really cool & powerful. Try it out if you’re not interested in playing around with command line stuff. The ‘Quick RsyncX script generator’ is really great — you can set up your backup scheme, sources, destinations (including remote servers!) and some logic for the transfer. Then you can use the ‘Rsyncx scheduler’ to schedule your backups. Neat!

For me, the one thing the GUI lacked was the ability to allow me to easily specify paths to a variety of files/folders that I wanted to transfer all at once. So I went to the command line, where the options are a little more plentiful.

Using Rsync on the Command Line

To get my bearings using Rsync on the command line, I opened the terminal application (located in Applications => Utilities) and typed

man rsync

at the prompt. This brought me to the rsync manual, which is long and boring and really helpful and actually pretty well-written for a unix manual. I scoped out the syntax for using rsync, and decided that, since I was going to backup to a remote machine (but not an rsync server, whatever that is), I’d probably be using something like this:

rsync -[options] SOURCE USER@aaronpettigrew.com:DESTINATION_FOLDER

So, I tried it out, using a small folder of .rtf files as the source, and entering a command much like this one:

rsync -a ~/rsynctest USER@aaronpettigrew.com:rsyncbackups

It worked! Hoorah!

But since it’s not just file transfer I’m looking for, but an incremental backup, I tested a little further: I modified one of the files on my machine locally, then ran exactly the same command a second time. And Voila! When I checked on my server, only the file I’d modified had been re-uploaded; the rest stayed exactly the same. Yay!

Specifying the files/folders to back up

So, now that I had the basics working, I worked on figuring out how to specify only a given set of folders & files to backup. It’s a bit tricky, but I finally got it. Using the

–files-from=FILE

option, I learned that I can create a list of folders and files that Rsync will read for backup. Creating the file is really easy — enter

pico dailybackup_filelist

Then type the paths(without beginning slash) to the files & folders you want to backup, one per line. Hit ctrl x to exit, and type y at the prompt to save. Yay!

Since this is my daily backup (and not my weekly or monthly), I decided that I want to back up my Address Book, my Firefox Bookmarks, my work-related documents, and my calendars from iCal. I thought about adding mail in there too, but then I realized that it’s all backed up on Google’s servers, anyway, so no big deal. So I added the following lines to my file:

Library/Application Support/Firefox
Library/Application Support/AddressBook
Library/Application Support/iCal
Documents/workstuff

Now, here’s where it got tricky. Rsync’s usual archive option (-a), which provides exactly the kind of incremental backup I want, doesn’t recurse directories with the

–files-from=FILE

option, so I had to add the -r in there, so that I get all the contents of the directories I specified. (I also added the -z option, to use compression in transfer & the -v option, for verbosity, so I could see what’s happening during the transfer). The other tricky part is that rsync still requires a SOURCE argument in the command (which took me ages to figure out). It’s hard to explain what I mean, so here’s what my command ended up looking like (note — it’s all on one line):

rsync -razv –files-from=/Users/my_user_name/path_to_dailybackup_filelist /Users/my_user_name/ USER@aaronpettigrew.com:rsyncbackups

Now, I’ll explain:

rsync -razv

- rsync; (-r) search all the files and directories specified; (-a) perform an archival (or incremental) backup; (-z) use compression; and (-v) show me the output.

–files-from=/Users/my_user_name/path_to_dailybackup_filelist

- perform the rsync from the files and directories listed in the file /Users/my_user_name/path_to_dailybackup_filelist

/Users/my_user_name/

- search in the directory /Users/my_user_name/ for all the listed files and folders that I specified before.

USER@aaronpettigrew.com:rsyncbackups

- put my backups on aaronpettigrew.com, in the folder rsyncbackups.

Alright, we’re almost home.

Setting up Rsync through SSH

Before I could pack up this little script, I needed to figure out a way to get Rsync to communicate with my server without passwords, I had to go here to learn about SSH keys. SSH is a secure shell, useful for logging in to remote machines (like servers!). Rsync can use SSH to communicate with servers, which is handy because SSH supports a neat authentication scheme, where I can make a key-file that exists both on my machine and on the server, and SSH will simply match the key-files to authenticate, no need for a password. Neat!

Once I had my ssh key set up, I told Rsync to use SSH to connect to the server by adding

-e “ssh -2″

I tested it out, and Lo! it worked! No passwords!!

So now my whole command looks like this:

rsync -razv -e “ssh -2″ –files-from=/Users/my_user_name/path_to_dailybackup_filelist /Users/my_user_name/ USER@aaronpettigrew.com:rsyncbackups

Cronward!!

Scheduling via cron

Before I could actually set this up in cron, I decided to pack the command I’d made into a nice little script. Why? I dunno, it just seemed tidier. So, I opened pico again and entered

#! /bin/sh

on the first line, to tell the system that this is a script, and then I entered my command on the second line, just as I have it printed above. Then I saved the file as dailybackup.sh, and that was that!

For editing cron, I relied on the awesome O’Reilly tutorial that I found here. These instructions even taught me how to mail myself a message every time the script is run, so that I can know if anything went wrong. Neat! I tested the cron configuration a little before I decided on my final configuration. Here’s how my cronjob looks now:

17 22 * * * sh ~/dailybackup.sh 2>&1 | mail -s “Daily Backup Report” my_user_name

So at 22:17 every day, my computer will automatically backup my important files via dailybackup.sh, and then it’ll mail me a message about how that went. Yay!!

…And that’s how you too can become monster-awesomely unafraid and happy. Good luck!!

I did a little research (and I mean a little), and I turned up this article (from my old employer, the North Shore Recycling Program, no less!) that seems to confirm Dave’s good news. According to the article, the GVRD, in partnership with Encorp Pacific & the EPSC, will be implementing an electronic product stewardship program by summer 2007. While the fine details of the plan are still being developed, it looks like the first instance of the program will allow for recycling of the basics: personal computers, monitors, televisions, laptop computers and printers. The program will be financed in part by ‘environmental handling fees’ that will be collected on all electronics products at the time of purchase. (For more info, check out the EPSC website.)

I think this is great news. I used to work at a recycling facility in North Van where one could only recycle computers as scrap metal, while tv’s, printers, etc. were just plain garbage. Obviously there’s a lot of valuable material that can be reclaimed from these things, but there’s never been an infrastructure here that allowed for easy collection & reclamation. This new partnership will mean (literally) tons of waste diverted from the garbage dump. Huzzah!

Here’s what’s happening, according to the thread:

The reason the card shows up but doesn’t work is because ubuntu is only distributed with its driver (so it can recognize it) not with its firmware (so it can USE it) for legal reasons. However you can take the firmware out of the windows drivers and put them into ubuntu and make the card work!

This inspired me to use the Ubuntu .iso I’d already burned (back when I was still excited) to boot as a live cd & see what I could get up to. It’s pretty cool to see my pb boot into linux again. Yee-Haw!

Most of the instructions for enabling my wireless card seemed to work, right up to the part where I have to reboot to see if I can connect. Because I’m using a live cd to boot, all changes I make get wiped on shutdown

So now I’m left with a decision to make: Do I keep going and re-partition my drive to install Ubuntu (which involves re-installing OSX, too) on the chance that my wireless card will work? Or do I stay quit and spend some quality time with, um, a book or something? What’s this worth to me?

I guess, now that the live cd is working, I’ll play around and see how Ubuntu stacks up. Then I’ll know if it’s worth the probable hassle.

Oh, and by the way, I’ve been writing this from firefox in Ubuntu (via an old ethernet cable). Yippee!

At least this time I didn’t get very far into my fantasy before I had to give up. One of the first articles I found about installing Ubuntu warned me that Airport Extreme (built into my powerbook) wouldn’t work, so I’d have no wireless access. Still, that article was a year and a half old, so things might have changed, right? No such luck. I checked out the Ubuntu user forums and confirmed that, as of 12 hours ago, the situation hasn’t changed.

The linux install is pretty useless to me without wireless (how could I maintain my café-going lifestyle?), so I’ve decided not to go ahead. Hopefully Airport Extreme support will get figured out at some point & I can join the fun. Until then, I guess it’s single boot for me…

Update: It does work after all. See this thread on the ubuntu forums for info on getting Ubuntu & Airport extreme to talk nicely.

technorati tags:ubuntu, wireless, powerbook