Fortune Magazine reports that Michael Dell, who has already become Linux-friendly, is interested in licensing Apple’s Mac OS.

…Dell (the company) has for several years fearlessly—and lucratively—sold servers loaded with Linux, the operating system Microsoft reviles and dreads. And as the industry’s top dog it wields more bargaining power with Microsoft than other PC-makers. So I emailed Michael Dell, now the company’s chairman, and asked if he’d be interested in the Mac OS, assuming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs ever decides to license it to PC companies. (For now, Jobs says he won’t.)

In the past two days, I noticed the Nazi analogy being used twice in two separate newsgroups in UseNet. That was when the point when members brought Godwin’s Law to everyone’s attention.

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one…

…whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress…

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

How long can this go on? The BBC reports that yet another Windows flaw has been discovered. And once again, hundreds of millions of obedient users will go out of their way and patch up their operating system.

Windows users are being urged to download the latest security updates from Microsoft to fix critical flaws.

The software giant has warned that three loopholes affecting Windows and Internet Explorer allow an attacker to take control of a personal computer.

In the mean time, ever since the Apple move to Intel, some people have installed pirated versions of Tiger (Mac OS X 1.4) on their Intel PC‘s.

n this day and age when people become more familiar with the term “blog”, there is a certain dissatisfaction — some would say an anti-climax.

Blogs are a linear form of publishing. There is barely any hierarchy and rarely a connection between items. There are no levels, sub-levels, or context and hence there is little or no interest in blog archives, which often become a graveyard. Fortunately, only about 5-10% of this site’s content is arranged in the form of a blog.

Also see contextually-related items called Blogging Burnout or Business Week Blogs and Business.

Life in Manchester involves passing by some worrying signs. Here are a couple that I grabbed a picture of:

I am slightly confused by the upside-down car, but I’d say these figures are terrible news

This one speaks for itself

Ever wondered how popular your first name was? Is it becoming less common as the years go by? Or is it on the rise? It takes only 5 seconds to find out.

There are fast and automated ways of backing up *NIX servers. Backups should include databases as well as home directories, of which there can be many.

Compressed Archives

If backups can be downloaded via links (e.g. under cPanel), a browser can have its default action for .gz files set to “save in home directory”. A little script can then timestamp all the archives and put them ‘in storage’:

    # Once back-ups have been put in home directory, move all
    # to a time-stamped directory in the back-up area
cd /home/user/
mkdir `date +%Y-%m-%d`
mv backup* /home/user/backup/Home_Directories
    # move home directories
mv *.gz `date +%Y-%m-%d`
    # move databases to the new directory
cp -rf `date +%Y-%m-%d` /home/user/backup/Databases/Recent
    # merge if required
rm -r `date +%Y-%m-%d`
    # clean up, NOTE: mv cannot merge

FTP

If your webspace host offers FTP access alone, there is no simple solution. Command-line ftp might be of use though.

SCP

Copy files from the server to your local machine. This step must be invoked from the server’s side. The form of the command resembles the following:

scp -r ~/public_html your_user_name@machine.domain.suffix:/home/user/backup

mySQL Dumps

Set up cron jobs on the server, e.g.:

0 23 * * 1,4 mysqldump --user [DB_username] --password=[DB_password] [DB_name]> ~/tmp/mydatabase1.dump
0 23 * * 2,5 mysqldump --user [DB_username] --password=[DB_password] [DB_name]> ~/tmp/mydatabase2.dump
0 23 * * 0,3,6 mysqldump --user [DB_username] --password=[DB_password] [DB_name]> ~/tmp/mydatabase3.dump

The code above keeps a stack of 3 databases, which can be used to rollback data shall something catastrophic happen. Databases can then be snatched along with home directories. The above code can be extended so that dumps are compressed and file destinations are remote.