Lorcan Coyle's Home on Tinterweb

I had a hard drive failure two weeks ago. Luckily almost everything on the system was fully backed-up so it wasn't too much of a pain. I had used unison to backup my home directory and the subclipse eclipse plugin to backup my eclipse workspace. The data that were lost (and ultimately mostly salvaged) were the websites on my system, the contents of my mysql databases, as well as data stored in other user accounts on my machine (although I don't take responsibility for these data). I used dd_recover to salvage data from the broken drive and wrote up a wiki page on the process I used. The process was somewhat successful and most of the important data was salvageable.

My experiences support the rule that prevention is better than cure. So, with this in mind I've set up a page outlining my current backup policies using rsync, unison, subversion, etc. This page will be grown over the coming weeks with backup information I am using to ensure that my websites and databases are not lost in future. In the spirit of openness I'd like people to take a look at my setup and poke holes in it or make suggestions for improvement. Feel free to reuse my scripts to build your own backup scripts as I have done from others (e.g., Mike Rubel's rsync scripts). Remember, backup early and backup often, there is no sympathy for anyone who loses data for want of proper backups.

I came across No-www some time ago and they caught my attention in a big way. Why do we use www? It's gotta be past its usefulness and No-www think we should deprecate it. So, with this in mind this website doesn't do www - if you load www.lorcancoyle.org you get lorcancoyle.org. I just got validated by the good people at No-www and am proudly displaying my Class B certification (near the bottom of the right sidebar). Hack the Planet, hack the 万维网!

I recently ordered 5 chumbys from www.international-orders.com. (Delivery was prompt, thanks International-Orders.com.)
The Chumby is great, it's basically a €200 alarm clock. It uses your WiFi to connect to the web and you can install all kinds of widgets for it. I'm mostly using it to read the news in bed in the morning, keep up with my google calendars, facebook status (pictured below), show visitors my facebook photo albums, subscribe to Dilbert, ICANHAZCHEEZEBURGER, PhD Comics, and watch webcams. You can even subscribe to podcasts! I might write some new widgets for it if I have the time, I'd like to see surf forecasts, more newspapers, and tv guides on it perhaps... (there's a virtual view of my Chumby here).

oh, it also serves as an alarm clock... worth every penny... maybe ;-)

Two days ago I upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook from Apple's paltry default 80G to 250G. I bought a compliant hard drive from komplett.ie for €76 and followed Apple's straightforward instructions. Everything seems to be working well, so it looks like I got a great deal on my upgrade (as I did when I upgraded the RAM in my laptop).

Monkey Bread Software produce a really nice piece of freeware Mac OSX software called
CombinePDFs that allows you to merge or combine PDFs into a single document. It's easy to work with and does exactly what it says on the tin. Thanks Monkey Bread Software :-)

There have been some bizarre cases of animals being taken to court in historical times but recently a court in Bitola in Macedonia has found a bear guilty of theft. Zoran Kiseloski took a case against the bear after it stole honey from him. The man initially dealt with the bear himself by buying a generator and setting up lights and pumping turbo-folk music (by Ceca, a popular Serbian musician) to drive away the discerning bear. However, the criminal mastermind bid his time and lay in wait for the generator to run out whereupon he pounced and committed the crime. Apparently the trial has taken a year to finish but justice was served and the criminal fined 140,000 denar (about $3,500). The government paid the fine to Kiseloski, because, unfortunately, the bear proved smarter than the authorities, and is still at large. I'll bet neither Kiseloski nor Ceca will get a proper night's sleep till the criminal is locked up...

This story got a lot of press, the best of it was on the Times online.

Setanta Sports have been running a series after premier league games on Saturdays and late at night after Champion's League games, where José Murinho gives his take on the latest news. This is some of the funniest TV I've seen in weeks, and the best part is that all the episodes are on youtube! Here's Sven's debut:

Be champions...

The episode where the special one confronts the Voyeur is especially great - "surely this is legal minefield":

Oscar Pistorious is a South African sprinter hoping to compete in the Beijing Olympics. His nickname is the "Blade Runner" because of the shape of his legs. Actually, he has no feet at all and has been dubbed "the fasted thing on no legs". Pistorious' legs were amputated below the knees as a baby (he was born without fibula bones in his legs) and he wears artificial limbs. He calls these his cheetah blades, made by Össur, who are supporting him in his bid. He has broken the 100m, 200m, and 400m records repeatedly in Paralympic grades and his eyes are now set on competing with the fastest able-bodied athletes in the world in Beijing in the summer. However, there's a snag. The International Association of Athletics Federations have ruled that his cheetah blades give him an unfair advantage against able-bodied athletes and in January banned him from competing in the Olympics. He has a chance to appeal this decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport at the end of April. If his appeal is successful I wouldn't bet on him winning medals in Beijing (his best 400m time is still more than three seconds off the world record, and almost a second behind Olympic qualifying time) but that's not what the Olympics are about. Even so, he's only been running competitively since 2004, and he's improving at a phenomenal rate, constantly breaking his own world records. I'd expect him to break more personal records in Beijing but the more interesting question might be what could happen between now and the London Olympics in 2012.

ConorN sent me a cool game called Magic Pen. Use the mouse to draw shapes, which manifest themselves as physical objects that obey Newtonian laws of motion and gravity. The goal is to move the red ball to capture the flags. Lots of structures, balls, pins, and swivels. Lots of fun but not quite as addictive as Planarity. Even so, I've spent far too long today playing it ;-)

I've been testing drupal as a blogging technology, and this is just a test post. The blog is going to be behaving strangely for the next few weeks till I finalise everything...