So far I haven’t worried about backing up my system, mainly relying on plain luck. Fortunately, luck has been on my side. A few weeks ago I decided to format my Windows installation because there were issues that I just didn’t want to spend time troubleshooting. That is when the subject of backup came up again. I wished that I had a backup solution in place so I could just format the system without worrying about loosing any data. That’s when I decided to start spending some data analyzing my options and coming up with solutions.
Finally, after a few weeks of little bits of researches, I have found the solution. I played around with rsync, Microsoft’s SyncToy, SyncBack, and a few others; in the end settling on SyncBack. It is simple enough and does exactly what I want to do, a differential-mirror backup. If you are interested in backup solution, make sure to give SyncBack a try, especially since it’s free! 2BrightSparks also has an advanced, paid version called SyncBack SE, and I am still in the process of deciding if I should upgrade to that.
Read moreLast night I was moving the Shahab Lab website to Site5 and had the need to lookup some Rails commands. Looking around I found a few different resources, some were good, some were bad. To save you some time, below are a few that I thought were very good.
Read moreI switched to foobar2000 after Winamp declared it wasn’t going to save my playlists, mostly because I had been using my user profile for a while. It wasn’t just Winamp that gave me trouble, there were a few others. Anyways, I have been using a fairly simple setup of foobar, but today I decided I would see what was there. I ended up on this hydrogen audio thread, and I was amazed! People have made some crazy (read awesome) looking players out of the simple foobar.
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I had to come to Seattle for work, and the day that I picked to be here was the day that Washington had the worst weather in almost 20 years! My flight landed in Seattle around 9:45pm and my drive to the hotel in Tacoma, which was about 21 miles, took almost eight hours!! That is not a typo, it took me EIGHT hours!! It was amazing, the traffic was stopped for hours and hours! My average speed for the first seven hours was about 1.5 miles per hour!
All of this was because it usually doesn’t snow much in Washington, so they don’t have the right equipment to deal with it; and it snowed about two inches before my flight landed. Again, that is two inches. Add to that the fact that most people hadn’t driven in snow before, so they were either going extra slow, or extra fast, resulting in accidents; both of which added to the delays. And if that wasn’t enough, the temperature were below freezing, so the roads just became an ice rink. Want more? The roads in and around Seattle and Tacoma are generally sloped, at some places, at quite an angle. So if you had a rear-wheel drive, you can forget about making it any further on that rink!
Want even more? There is more! Because of the long delays, cars started running out of gas. So, there were cars abandoned in the middle of the road. Most of the people couldn’t even push their cars to the side of the road because the roads were so slippery; and anyone who wanted to try would probably end up on the road. What an amazing eight hours it were! :) You could walk quicker!
One of the factors was the Seattle Seahawks vs. Green Bay Packers game that increased the normal traffic to crazy amounts.
A lot of people are saying that this happened mainly due to the Seattle drivers, I disagree. No matter where you live, you couldn’t drive on these ice covered roads without ice chains on your tires or other specialized tires. From my experience, I haven’t seen many people with ice chain, even in the cities that get lots of snow. The main reason that only two inches of snow caused such massive delay was that the snow wasn’t plowed right away. If this was done in time then this wouldn’t have been a problem, as all of you folks living on the eastern part of the US know.
I was listening to radio as other drivers, stuck on other routes, reported what they were seeing: trucks and city buses stuck in the middle of the road, people abandoning their cars because they ran out of gas, cars in the ditches, accidents, bumps, slipping and sliding vehicles, amazing stuff!
All this brings one main question to the mind: Global Warming, is it real?
Read moreI just finished posting the first version of the Capistrano tutorial specifically geared towards Site5. It took quite a lot of work on my part, but I also learned a lot about Capistrano. I will be adding more things to this article as I learn more about Capistrano. Check it out, and make sure you let me know how it is.
Read moreI generally don’t upgrade my Cygwin installation as often as some of the other software that I use, but yesterday I upgraded it and found a surprise.
Every time I would start Cygwin, it would give me several “: command not found” lines and syntax errors. After I got a chance to look into the problem, it turned out to be a very simple one. Basically my ~/.bashrc and ~/.aliases were using the dos line ending, instead of unix. Given that fact, all I had to do was:
:set fileformat=unix
:wq
What do you know, the errors are gone!
Check out this cygwin announcement If you are curious about the details.
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Yesterday Microsoft launched their first version of the “MP3 player,” Zune. Microsoft has made a fairly late entry in this market considering that the Apple iPod has been in the market for a few generations! There are gazillions of a accessories for the iPod, including integration in higher end cars. Add to that Creative’s entry into this market with their Zen Vision:M in the last few months, and you get a fairly competitive market.
Apple started it’s iPods at $399 price tag, Creative started it’s Vision:M’s at $320, and guess where Microsoft landed? $249! I think that is an awesome price for a 30 gig MP3 player with FM tuner, and supports WiFi! Microsoft doesn’t need much press for their launch because Zune has been hyped on gadget websites for a while now, getting labeled as the iPod killer. Zune does look pretty exciting but I personally think that the coolest part if the WiFi.
To add to the excitement, Microsoft has also introduced a new Windows theme that matches the Zune’s default color scheme. Obviously I had to try it out! Check out this screenshot.
Let’s see if it can really grab a chunk of the MP3 market, and if really is an iPod killer!
Read moreI am proud to announce that I have implemented the reviews section and the imported the previous reviews, with all the images! So go check them out!
Once I am done with the GMAT, I am planning on posting a review for the Creative Zen Vision:M, which I have owned since they were introduced. My preparation for GMAT is going a little slow and I was a little disappointed with my performance on the data sufficiency section, it looks like I have got some work to do on that specific section. Wish me luck!
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