Safe as Milk

New-fangled hand dryer

Matthew: I have one question – where do you put your hands?

links for 2007-07-12

• How to setup your own P2P network using p2pp
  Some Columbia University people hacked up a Peer to Peer Protocol SIP application, and modified the WengoPhone to use it – pretty neat stuff, if you’re on a big intranet & want to have VoIP internally without the overhead of creating aa account on a SIP p
  (tags: openwengo wengophone p2psip)

The book on the GUADEC football match

If anyone wants to run a book on the FreeFA rematch, I figure that the odds on the various teams are (updated after news about Dodji):

• 2/1: Red team (from 6/4)
• 2/1: Black team (from 5/2)
• 4/1: Marine Blue team
• 5/1: White team

The Red team from last year ran the blue team very close, and should probably have won their semi-final – they’ve kept most of their players from last year, and should be a force to reckon with. Zaheer Merali, Glynn Foster and Dodji Seketeli in particular played their socks off, and they’ll be up for it again this year.

Update: Dodji went to get a visa for GUADEC, and was given an appointment at the embassy on the 5th of September – so he won’t be in GUADEC. This sucks in so many ways – and it’s incredibly frustrating to see bureaucracy keep one of our community away from the conference.

The Black team made the final last year, and have some good talent on there (footie mad Bastien Nocera, in spite of being a bad loser ;-), stands out, as does Daniel Glassey, a rock in defense).

The Blue team have lost a few players from last year, including their inspirational defender (no, not me) Alvaro Del Castillo. They still have the extraordinary Fernando San Martin Woerner in goal, and with the likes of Alberto Ruiz, Rodrigo Moya and Juanjo Sanchez Penas, they will play well. They may make the final, but don’t expect them to win this year.

And finally the white team – completely renovated from last year – will be the dark horse, but as the unknown quantity, must figure as the underdog.

So – who’ll put me down for a tenner on the Red team?

links for 2007-07-11

• I’m Sure You Can Deal – Worse Than Failure
  Urban legend, or funny because it’s true? Either way, things like Project Blackbox start to look pretty smart for people who want to avoid “accidents” (ahem)
  (tags: humour)

links for 2007-07-10

• Gmaps Pedometer

  Back in training – with no pain! I’m still taking it easy, but I did a nice easy 12k run last weekend which did the morale a world of good.

  (tags: running training)

Easy personal back-ups

I’m looking for a back-up solution which is easy to use. Ideally, I don’t want to have to decide what I need to back up and what I don’t – disk space is not an issue.

My dream app would be a graphical application which has back-up profiles – system configuration, personal data, application settings, media files, and maybe user-installed applications.

Ideally, I would be able to do incremental back-ups (à la rsync) where the weekly back-up will only be saving the new email, files and pr0n, and not the 30GB that was backed up first time round.

Also, a restore facility would be nice. In the past, when I have backed up files and had to restore, I have had issues because the user files were backed up for uid 501, and the corresponding account after installing the system anew was 502 (or something like that). I don’t want to have to think about user rights – I want to, as root, restore the system, and have user accounts, files, configuration all recreated as they were at the last back-up.

Anyone know of an easy one-click solution for Linux for the man who wants back-ups, but doesn’t want to have to think about them?

Update: I should probably mention that the back-ups will be to an external USB disk, and will be on-demand. I don’t want to leave the disk plugged in all the time, and I don’t want to have to think about plugging it in on Thursday evening to have the back-up done on Friday morning. Also, I’ll be backing up 3 different systems – including 2 on one double-boot machine. So ssh + rsync via a cron job is probably not the idel solution (but many thanks for the many people proposing it).

Google, Sicko & voice

The interesting thing about the recent Google “Sicko” controversy and the reaction to the controversy is the persistence of the myth that corporations have opinions on anything.

The story, for those who haven’t heard about it, is that someone from Google blogged about a movie they didn’t agree with, and a newspaper picked up the story as “Google didn’t like Sicko”. Since then, Google’s communication staff have been working hard to say “No, Google likes “Sicko”, really”.

Shouldn’t they be saying “Google is a non-physical non-thinking entity, it can’t like or dislike anything”? Isn’t the whole point of corporate blogging to show that a company is not a Borg-like entity where some company position (which the president or VP likes) gets proliferated down the organisation to be adopted by mindless drones?

How about this as a non-denial denial? “Google’s management is very proud that our employees have the ability to express their personal opinions through our corporate blog. The diversity of opinion is something which makes our company stronger and richer. We stand by our employees, and have complete trust in their ability to exercise good judgement in their blogging activities.”