DropBox: The more I know the better I feel

What began as an intriguing backup/sync solution I stumbled across has turned out to be one of the most incredible services I continually use. Literally, as far as daily utility and usefulness I'm matching it right up there with Gmail.

While there are a plethora of online backup online services out there: Mozy, Carbonite, iBackup, etc... However, DropBox is the only one I have found that A) has a Linux client & B) syncs as many computers as you use (in fact, synchronizes your files at all!). Not only does it give you access to as many local clients as you want, you have one of the most useful and intuitive web based file management user-interfaces I've seen. It also stores the changes to the files you save (*NOTE: I personally haven't really tried this or looked into a whole lot so, I won't completely vouch for this part of it). All in all, my experience: awesome!

Blogger v. Firefox w/ flashplugin-nonfree

Acontinuation of my previous post. And an attempt to write a new one.
I am trying to keep as best I can the number of times my session crashes. Fortunately, Firefox has the handy "Restore Last Session" feature and Blogger's Draft "autosave" has allowed me to keep most of this. Also bearing in mind I have two tabs open: Blogger: Posting Editor(obviously) & Bagomego.

CRASH COUNT: 5

And the final score: Firefox: 6, Blogger 9.3, Adobe -2.3, My Sanity 0.

*scoring system is completely subjective and not specifically related to any notable counting methodology.

Intrepid Upgrade

Ubuntu, why are you so hard on me? After putting of the upgrade for some time I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". With hopes of 64 bit java and flash support, the option of package Open Office 3.0, I was nearly giddy about the options.

But, as of yet I am not convinced. My main frustrations: sound and flash support. Okay, you could theoretically say they are both conveniences. But honestly, if you cannot watch a HULU video without crashing Firefox 64 bit or have no sound from Firefox 32 bit, this is obviously not an upgrade.

So, I slowly amassing a list of fixes, how-to sites, and bug pages. And still can't keep things a float. I'm hesitantly even toying with the idea of a fresh install. What is this, Windows?

So here are the things that don't seem to work:



• Firefox 64bit Flash streaming video (at least not without crashing). Update: Rather than every time, it is now only intermittently, which I guess is an improvement. Unfortunately, firefox is also intermittently crashing on any site that has flash embedded (even though I'm using NoScript and Flashblock extensions).
  

  Flash streaming doesn't seem to work with the flashplugin-nonfree in the repositories. Nor does downloading the alpha release 10 from Adobe Labs. And creating a symlink in ~/.mozilla/plugins Next I'm going to try the install script from Hildoer and hope for the best.
  



• Firefox 32bit sound (My first try at a workaround).Update: No dice. My same sound issue, or rather lack thereof.


• Update: As far as streaming flash video goes, my only saving grace seems to be Opera. So, alas this is what I have come to, I have to completely change browsers just to open a web site with flash. An uneducated guess, but it may have something to do with the fact that it still uses 32bit wrappers for the adobe plugin.

Et tu Kansas?

I am disheartened to hear that Kansas seems to falling the way of California. The article in the Wichita Eagle gives the brief on the situation. Kansas is in a money crunch with the next weeks payroll in the balance.

Perhaps sobering to think about are the untold millions of outstanding government contracts and pending payees. Beyond the citizenry and their state tax refunds (which are currently on hold) there are the health care providers for their state sponsored Medicaid, the public school programs, and contract labor.

Simply makes me wonder, who is next. . .?

Ubuntu update with some display complications

After an update yesterday that included some linux-headers, my screen resolution for Ubuntu 8.04 was all messed up (I couldn't get anything better then 800x600 on my Dell M1710.

Needless to say I was irritated considering the native resolution should have been 1920x1200 @ 80mhz. I tried doing various reinstalls and removals of things referencing nvidia from synaptic, but didn't get any sucess. A least until I found a reference to a little tool called Envy.

That certainly made things function and could not have been easier. It requires that you uninstall any previous drivers, but I had already taken care of that. Typing sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk got the tool downloaded from the repositories and envyng -t got it running. You get 8 options and have to type in one of the numbers (simple right). I choose 1 since I wanted to install the NVIDIA driver. A few minutes letter I had all the drivers I needed. I also got the sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings package for the GUI tweaks for the display.

Simple as that, or complex as that depending on your perspective. Regardless, I'm now running stably at 1920x1200 @ 79mhz and am loving it.

Ubuntu Hardware Info without a GUI

Getting hardware info from Linux, especially without a graphical manager, looked like an insurmountable task. But after some digging I came across this article about hwinfo.

With a simple (in Ubuntu at least) sudo apt-get install hwinfo you can get a quick view on your system hardware without having to dig through manuals or opening the case. Tie hwinfo with using free -m or free -mt and you have just about all you need.

System Backup

Back it on up

While an absolute necessity data backups can often be a real hassle. In an attempt to simplify the management of data backups for our corporate systems I came across the open source solution of BackupPC.

The initial setup of the backup server on my Ubuntu 8.04 Server, was pretty easy. The included configure.pl install script pretty much handles all the heavy lifting for setup. All that is left is the backup machines configuration. The good news, you don't have to go to each individual machine to install any client or special software, and it works equally as good on windows or linux. (Although I've so far only configured for windows boxes so far. After you add the name/IP of the "host" machine (i.e. the computer that you are wanting to backup) you have go to the "select a host" drop down menu and click the one you want.

The main screen is fairly unimposing and will give you an easy snapshot of how backups have been going; that is it will once you've configured everything correctly. When you choose the Edit Config option from the host screen, the array of configuration options and settings may take you aback. It certainly did me, especially since I wasn't sure what a most of the options were even talking about. But have no fear, that's what documentation is for. And BackupPC has some comparatively good documentation for any open source project.

I could go into the minutia of my specific configuration settings, but that will be for another time. Needless to say, I am so far a fan (as I've only had it running for 2 weeks and have yet to try to implement a restore on anything, I will leave a definitive judgment until later.