It wasn’t long ago that the Internet Archive was mentioned. This amazing, non-profit resource has been storing snapshots of the Web since 1996. It is now revealed that the entire system is Linux-powered. It can hold over a petabyte (1000,000 gigabytes) in volume and yet remain affordable.

ne issue is particularly detrimental to OSS: the issue is branching. Implementation takes different directions (often due to third-parties involved) and compatibility begins to break. Linux and its distros are one valid example. Here is an example taken from skinning (AKA themes) to support the argument.

Different unique ‘skins’ for an application get distributed or different stylesheets written for a Web-based application. This gives a rich variety to choose from, but here is the snag:

• The user gets accustomed to the new interface
• A new version of the application comes out
• The user might have to re-install a new ‘skin’
• The user relies on the ‘skinners’ to carry on maintaining the project

Some may have heard of GIMPshop, which wraps the GIMP in a Photoshop-like environment. It can serve as a practical example for the pitfall.

The take home: it is safer not to be ‘distracted’ by minor components or release variants of main-stream systems.

discovered this long-standing site with a large number of links to just about any emulator type for a variety of operating systems. The ones of interest to me were Palm, Super Nintendo and Megadrive emulators for Linux.

I then took screenshots of some favourite old games: Mario, Street Fighter and Sonic.

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…

Firefox and Thunderbird do not integrate well under Linux. In order to associate the mailto protocol with Thunderbird, follow the steps below:

• Download this small shell script and put it somewhere sensible in your hard-drive
• Change line 3 to include the path of your thunderbird directory where it was initially installed, e.g.:
  export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="$HOME/Main/Programs/thunderbird"
• Open Firefox and enter the page about:config
• Add a new string; name it “”network.protocol-handler.app.mailto” and set its value to the full path of your new script, e.g. ~/scripts/tbmail.sh

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.

eer-to-peer (P2P) and the World Wide Web (which we most commonly perceive as hypertext — HTTP) are separate. When one uses an Internet connection to directly communicate with a remote machine, then traffic is uncensored, often not monitored, and there are no restrictions imposed on the exchanged material. This justifies the potential illegality of P2P networking.

There are less controversial ways of obtaining media. When it resides on the World Wide Web and hosted by a trusted source, it is then subjected to copyright laws. For this particular reason, it is safer to download MP3 files from trusted Web sites, many of which distribute music for free in interests of self-promotion. Downloads are also far faster because data is delivered by a Web server. An older item explains how to automatically (READ: recursively) download music from the Web.

I have just discovered an inexhaustible source of music, which is also delivered as an RSS feed. That source is the MP3Blogs Aggregator. You must read this entry on the subject in order for everything to make sense. The gist: infinite amount of freely-distributed music reaching your hard-drive on a daily basis.