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The Backup Strategy

They say you have to back up. Back up your data or you’ll regret it. Well, now I’m pretty aware of why you need the backups, because of two recent events. In the first, the backups worked; the second, they didn’t.

In the first case, (the one that worked), my wife and I had to transition our iPhoto library. We had about 15,000 files on our underpowered iMac. Various online sources say may be too many, and we were seeing that our iPhoto was running very slowly. So we elected to split the library into multiple yearly libraries. To facilitate this split, we used iPhoto Library Manager to do the split. Fortunately, before I did the split, I backed up our photos to seven or so DVDs.

And it was a good thing that I did, because when we exported the photos from the main library to the yearly libraries, it failed to export the video clips that were stored. Instead it exported the thumbnail photos that represented the video clips.

I don’t think this is a problem with iPhoto Manager, as the internet lists the same problem with iPhoto itself. I suspect it’s an error in the iPhoto APIs that iPhoto Manager uses.

Fortunately, we had the videoclips stored on the DVDs and could recover them. My wife and I would have been extremely angry if we had lost all the video clips of our son from age zero to three, including him walking and talking for the first time.

The second case was one of me being dumb. I had moved personal files off my work machine onto my laptop, and I had also synchronized that to the home Linux server that I’m in the process of setting up. I then had a brain freeze, and thought that all the files on the iMac were synchronized too. I ended up deleting six years worth of GnuCash data files.

I had been backing up the iMac to an external drive using Retrospect Express. And I didn’t have it on a schedule, so it became a manual process that I would forget to do, and ended up pretty much stopping back in September. I can say good things about Retrospect; I managed to restore the files quite easily. Unfortunately, due to my own laziness, those restore files are three months out of date. But it does provide me a good opportunity to revamp my GnuCash file structure.

Scott Hanselman details what his backup strategy is, and it got me to thinking that I need a better home back up strategy. Probably three way sync between the iMac, the Linux box and my laptop. I’ll be investigating soon.

Updated: fixed typos.

2008 01 12 Jim Tech Comments (0) Permalink

Monday Fitness Update

Got on the scale today. Still 180 lbs, no change.

The good news is that I’m way down on drinking Coca-Cola. Haven’t had any for a week, and I’m not really missing it.

The bad news is that I’m way up on alcohol — we had the annual-ish boys steak night on the weekend and restraint went out the window. Coupled with the lack of exercise, I’m not surprised where I am.

However, the weather here is ridiculously warm for January, so I should be able to get out and run this week. And soccer starts up again on Thursday.

2008 01 07 Jim Fitness Comments (0) Permalink

New Year’s Resolutions — Fitness

Well, it’s that time of year again, to think about how to make the next year even better. I’m going to post a few resolutions so that they are in a public place. I hope that will motivate me to keep to my commitments.

For the fitness aspect, I realise that I have to get into better shape. I’m not in a bad way — I’m 5′10″ and 180 pounds. That puts my body mass index at 25.8, which is listed as “overweight.” However, I’m in the 49th percentile, so there are heavier dudes out there.

I figure about 165 lbs is the right weight. I’m looking to improve my speed and strength for outdoor soccer next season, when my team moves up a division.

For the first time, I’m thinking that I have to attack this from both the food and exercise angle. I used to just eat (and drink) whatever I wanted. That’s got to stop. I need to deal with the following:

  • Snacking on chocolate,
  • Drinking cola,
  • Drinking alcohol. I do love the beer and the scotch.

For the fitness, I think I have to do the following:

  • One long run — I once managed to run a marathon, so I should be able to get back into this. The Wife gave me a heart monitor, so this should be more efficient.
  • My indoor soccer game — this is great for anaerobic and core strength.
  • One workout. Not sure if this should be in a gym or if I can do some outdoor circuit training.

The final thing is to get a way to track what I’m doing. I’m a big fan of Get Rich Slowly, which is a “get financially fit” website. They’ve launched Get Fit Slowly, so that the writers can track their fitness. They recommend www.fitday.com to track their progress, but I may go with The Daily Plate.

I need to keep posting to keep on track.

2007 12 28 Jim Fitness
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Toronto Real Estate

The wife and I are sitting around, trying to figure out if we can buy a new house. We’re looking to move slightly up into a different school catchment, but stay in the same overall ‘hood. So I cooked up a spreadsheet that calculates all the variables that I could think of:

  • What we’d sell this house for
  • The new land transfer tax scheme
  • Possible ranges of interest rates
  • Property tax estimates

.. and then spit out how much more our monthly payment would be.

And given that we can’t keep to a budget to save our lives, it would seem that the answer is “No, you can’t move”.

2007 12 04 Jim Toronto Comments (0) Permalink

Eclipse on Mac OS X Cocoa

Just got my new MacBook Pro laptop up and running, and I’m stoked with it. I really dig working on it. I also dig Eclipse as an IDE and development platform.So, it was interesting to see these two coming together: Steve Northover has posted about how he was working at Apple to get SWT (the core of Eclipse) working on Mac Cocoa. Kim Horne has posted that

Long term we absolutely NEED Cocoa for continued existence on the Mac - Carbons days are numbered. If you’re an Eclipse user on the Mac you owe it to yourself and the community to participate in this as best you can. If you don’t feel you’re able to submit patches then well-investigated bug reports will do. This is a huge amount of work and every little bit helps!

So, since I know a little about Eclipse, and absolutely nothing about Objective-C, I elected to get started. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Next is trying to get Eclipse itself to launch, but this was enough for one night.

2007 12 03 Jim Cocoa
Eclipse
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First!

This is my first post to my blog. I hope there will be more to follow.

2007 12 01 Jim Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink