edundancy makes computers much safer, more stable and more reliable than other aspects of our lives. Paper loss, theft — or more personally — physical damage, illness and other disastrous scenarios may be difficult to avoid. They all relate to the physical whereas information itself is metaphysical.

In IT there is rarely any need to step back and cope with losses. Only momentum can be hindered. The famous song by the Beatles suggests that the same does not hold for actual life. The phrase “How I long for yesterday” means that restoration of a past state is often not possible. On the contrary, with information stored electronically, assuming frequent backups are retained, we can fully restore what we had yesterday. We have what businesses have come to know as “damage control”.

On a more technical tone, I back up my Web servers every 2 days and my databases every single day. My entire hard-drive (excluding applications and media such as music and video) gets mirrored twice a week. Rather than overwriting old backups, I keep a stack as large as the hard drives can hold, so they are usually nearly full. More efficient backups would involve CVS-like mechanisms or tools like rsync, but practicality greatly depends on the bandwidth available.

Backup makes the haven when disaster hits. Copy, copy, duplicate and mirror. Excessive backup: no such thing. You never know how this will save you from a broken hard-drive, a mistakenly deleted directory or mysterious critical changes to settings.

recently sought and discovered a plug-in for WordPress (a blogging tool) that generates PDF‘s from WordPress data. This eases the process of printing, viewing and sharing pages as PDF’s preserve their structure across platforms.

The WP2PDF Web site covers much of the detail and contains an on-line demo. As an example, press below (bottom-right corner) to see a PDF version of this post. If you have a hard time installing the plug-in (hand-tweaking is involved), see my notes about a possible bug and the way I got around it. Image embedment works only in the minority of cases, so if you find a solution, please post it here.

There was one particular reason for my interest such a plug-in. That reason was Mambo (picture below), which has PDF/PS support built-in. Mambo is an excellent Open Source CMS that is currently used by ManLUG, of which I am a member.

A screenshot of the Mambo installation for ManLUG

aving gathered statistics, I estimate that my Firefox theme adaptations had over 100 downloads from this domain. The more popular of the two themes is the Mac OS X clone (shown below). It can be downloaded or directly installed. Enjoy!

Note: this theme should be compatible with all platforms

Click image to see it full-sized

Top-left: The older days of Apple who have recently sidled next to Intel; Top-right: So-called Microsoft’s Hardware Department; Bottom: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM (*NIX)

A very unusual story comes from eWEEK. Microsoft have apparently demonstrated Linux to their audience.

While the answer is unclear, Microsoft Corp. surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show here this weekend by allowing a third party to present a “hands-on lab” that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software…

…the lab let attendees, many of whom were not familiar with Linux, experiment with KDE (K Desktop Environment) as well as see the Apache Web server in action…

Quite frankly, I consider this to be yet another attempt at being cocky. It was not too long ago that Microsoft paid one of the most popular bloggers in the world to evangelise their company and software products. They also scheme to adopt a large group of bloggers who will preach about Microsoft ‘goodness’. Biassed journalism — now isn’t that something that Microsoft can buy? I also wonder if they demonstrated Linux on some antiquated Debian distribution.

t was only a few months ago that my colleague’s forum got hijacked and vandalised, never to come back on-line again. Over the weekend, my host came under a denial of service (DoS) attack because of outdated, non-secure installations of phpBB (not worthy linking to), which proved to be far from reliable. Several sites including mine were suspended for hours in order to avoid another such attack, which brought the server down and crippled it for 40 minutes. I was possibly among the culprits as my phpBB installation was not patched up properly.

WordPress 1.5 likewise. Security flaws are continuously discovered and about 4 fixes have been released in the past few months. If you install software, make sure it is secure, patched up and avoid installing it whenever unnecessary. More installations lead to more maintenance and potential loopholes.
 

The iMac I sometimes use at work. It’s
rather obvious I’m right-handed.

have a few pet peeves when it comes to the placement of peripherals for the sake improved interaction. For instance, I would strongly encourage placing the mouse right next to the keyboard and adjacent to the keypad (not diagonally). The thumb is then close to the secondary ENTER button and only a mere distance from the arrow keys, which are frequently used for navigation, for example in file managers or text editors. Conversely, the mouse can be picked very quickly to assist editing.

At the same time, the left hand remains poised over the left section of the keyboard, close enough to SHIFT, ALT and CTRL (or equivalent) which are better off used as keyboard accelerators (shortcuts) at the speed of will.

Will mentioning of the name be good for business?

here is a fun and yet scary thing about maintaining sites which hold good search engine ranks. The mentioning of names (names of places, but of individual people in particular) ‘invites’ visits by the ‘owner’ of that name or its friends, associates, and clients.

If the person in question is technology-savvy, it should not take more than a day for him/her to locate the source. So-called hat tips make the approach even easier (intentionally so) and services like Technorati assist the process as well. To those who approach the computer only on occasions it can take weeks or months to find out what others have said about them. This perhaps would finally occur when ego surfing (searching names that relate to self).

This power can be exploited or misused, but most importantly, it is something a webmaster must always be aware of.