I occasionally re-think my arrangement of automated backups. Recent reading about somebody else’s backup method inspired me to take better care of backups (yet again). I used to have 40 GB mirrors in 3 separate sites, which seemed beyond sufficient. Nevertheless, last Tuesday I bought a 300GB external hard-drive. Unwrapped, connected to SuSE and voila! New drive appears on Desktop. Linux has become easier than ever before. Almost frustratingly easy as there is no challenge and rarely a need to install any software.

The only downside of this device is the noise level, which is resulted from rotation at 7200 RPM inside relatively small housing. This can become loud and persistent during overnight baskups. Since the noise bothers me, I suppose could rely on earplugs. The internal hard-drive on the actual box probably has greater noise levels than the new external unit. Usually, however, it is idle or asleep, so only noise from the fan is a true factor.

I never lethargically back up my hard-drives, but nightime appears to be a must for backups, owing to (to put negatively — due to) duration. Matters used to be worse if defragging hard-drives, back in the days when I had a Windows laptop in my apartment. It required some overnight maintenance jobs and fortunately no such issues exist with Linux. Backups, on the contrary, become larger and larger (thus taking longer to complete).

All in all, I have 300 vacant gigabytes to fill. But where will I ever find that much pr0n? I kid, I kid. [smile /]

Bloggers should probably take a quick glance at the following item:

AUSTIN, Texas–Laina Dawes and Elaine Liner are pretty sure they were fired for blogging. It’s not 100 percent certain, of course, because no one ever told them so officially, but the evidence seems solid.

Addendum: New Met blogging rules spark anger (BBC)

IREFOX keeps eating Internet Explorer. Not literally so, but this Web site is solid proof of the growth of Mozilla Firefox. Below are browser statistics which have been accumulated for over a year and embody nearly 100 gigabytes of traffic.

Generated for Analog

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

ED Hat have got some nice promoptional videos that neatly explain the process of world transformation and fast adoption of Linux. The videos are titled:

• Truth Happens;
• Inevitable and
• Choice

Highly recommended for Linux enthusiasts!

PAMMERS are not utterly dumb. They constantly learn how to get past the filters and receive more attention from their recipient. Subject lines are often fudged in such a way so that they beg to be read, but it doesn’t stop there.

Consider, for instance, spam that goes ‘on top of the pile’ by having a future date (thus the title of this essay), assuming reverse chronological mail readers. Such spam can stand outamong the pile of trite spam. Also consider spam with very odd dates, no dates or ones which goes years and decades into the past. In the latter case, this puts message at the bottom edge of the inbox, which again, appeals for more attention.

Lastly, and perhaps most annoyingly, certain spam is being sent with a sender address which resides the recipients domain, which can under many circumstances have it automatically whitelisted.

couple of months back, Vista engineers ere bragging about Intel systems architecture which would enable quick startups from memory. This sounded like “hibernation mode” rather than standby, but it was still used as Windows Vista selling point, alongside updates without reboot. So here we shall address two issues.

Why should one bother rebooting? Linux rarely ever requires it. Frequency of updates is low and the severity of bugs is relatively low. And again, what is there to be gained from quick reboots or even the avoidance of bootstrapping? Saving a minute a couple of times a year? It would probably take longer to just set up such quick startup facilities. The whole scheme is unnecessary with energy saving modes, so again, why ever reboot in the first place? And why bother reducing booting duration?

Here are the annual winners in the domain of Open Source and GNU/Linux. The results were accumulated using a poll-based facility.

Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (19.49%)
Database of the Year – MySQL (62.98%)
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (84.84%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (71.90%)
Mail Client of the Year – Thunderbird (51.74%)
Text Editor of the Year – vi/vim (37.96%)
Open Source Game of the Year – Frozen Bubble (23.17%)
Window Manager of the Year – Fluxbox (27.11%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – KDE (64.86%)
Audio Multimedia Application of the Year – amaroK (41.86%)

[remainder of list omitted]

The choice of Ubuntu and KDE as top picks makes one appreciate the value of Kubuntu (KDE-based Ubuntu). It is said to be less stable and consistent than Ubuntu (GNOME), but nonetheless it combines a rich desktop environment with admirable hardware probing.