I don’t often write RC scripts these days, most things are in ports and works out of the box, but now and then I need to write something and don’t feel like pouring over the tons of man pages for something I do once or twice a year.
Today a few sites mentioned an excellent article titled ‘Practical guide to BSD rc.d scripting‘ which seems exactly like the thing I need, shows detail examples with explanations of each knob in the typical file, great read.
I’ve been looking for book catalog system for a while now, I’ve tried a few but all desktop based ones. The problem with these are that they’re not platform independent, hard to share with other people, just more things to backup etc etc.
I have been considering writing my own for a while now, today again I figured I should start on this, then I read about Library Thing on Blogspotting.
Library Thing is fairly typical for todays online tools, you add the books by ISBN or title, author etc, it searches Amazon in many countries or the Library of Congress in order to find all the information about the book, including images. You can tag your photos, it shows tag clouds, author clouds etc and will help you find other people who share your taste in books.
Crucially it has a export function that lets you save your data locally, import into Excel or whatever. Great site, I put my 170 books into it in about a hour.
You can see my catalog of books, hopefully soon there will be a API that lets you build on-top of it. So far I am within the free account limit, but I cannot see why I wont upgrade to a paid account soon.
It seems my wishes has come true and Google has finally launched a Blogsearch service.
It does not have all the bells and whistles of other blog search tools, you cannot restrict searches to OPML feeds etc, but I’ve never used those features in the competition. I just do a simple text search and want results.
The search supports all the usual google search modifiers like link: but also has some blog specific stuff: inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:, more at the FAQ.
UPDATE: Scoble is doing some comparisons between google and others, check his blog for new entries but so far see these: 1, 2, 3.
I came across an excellent guide to IPSec called An Illustrated Guide to IPSec it’s very thorough and well worth checking it out if you are interested in the inner workings of IPSec.
For a while I’ve been wondering what to do with all the photos I take, edit but don’t put on my photoblog. At the moment for example I’ve been posting a series of shots I took in Greenwich Park one day, but at 1 photo a day by the time I’m done there are tons more I need to put somewhere.
So I signed up for a Flickr freebie account to check it out and I almost immediately signed up for a Pro account. It really is so simple to use and organize your photos, especially with the fancy flash app they have for organizing.
The idea is to just upload all the web versions of photos I edit in photoshop, last year it was around 400 for the whole year, this year it’s nearing 300 already. I’ve uploaded all of 2005 photos and some of 2004 to My Flickr account, at the moment things will be arriving in a weird order, new to old, as I catch up with history but soon you should be able to subscribe and get a more real time view on what I take and how often etc.
I especially like the community bits, already some people have commented on my photos, added to their favorite lists etc, that’s really nice as it can be really difficult to build up any kind of community around ones own photos, but since Flickr is so strongly community orientated it’s pretty nice as a photographer.
I am still getting used to the idea of tags instead of categories, but it seems to work ok so far, everything of course outputs RSS or Atom so you can subscribe to a feed of all photos, or just for instance Photos of People.
Links:
My Photo Stream
My Photo Tags
Sets of Photos
Calendar View by Date-Taken
I recently got a LaCie 250Gb external drive to do some off-site backups of my data. I am a bit worried about security though since it is so easy to get these USB devices talking to just about anything.
I read up about disk encryption software commonly called On The Fly Encryption – OTFE for short. I use XP and OS X as my desktop Operating Systems but I think I’ll stick this drive mostly into my XP machines for now so I am focussing on software for that at the moment.
The amount of data I need to encrypt is probably much less than 5Gb, it is just things like mail, configuration files, a few database dumps and so forth, the rest could go in the plain onto the disk. However some of these tools allow encryption of full devices so that would be an ideal. I would for example not be too happy if my raw files of my photos gets stolen, this is the main chunk of data I need to arrange off-site backup for.
There are a number of free and commercial options, I tried a few in each catagory:
| Product Name | Cost | Comments |
| FileDisk | Free (GPL) | Command line only, though the FreeOTFE author wrote a GUI front end for it. It seems to be unmaintained though and certainly was the reason for quite a few hard resets of my box today. |
| FreeOTFE | Free (GPL) | Early days in developement but looks promising. I had it stop responding a couple of times when copying large files onto it. Lacks good progress indicators for things, so you think its crashed when its just taking its time. A big plus of this product though is that it has the ability to make Linux compatible crypted disks, this could be a big selling point. |
| TrueCrypt | Open Source (Own License) | Works flawlessly so far. I particularly like the nice progress bars on creating and formating of the data files. |
| CryptoExpert Lite | Free but restricted | Has maximum file size limitation so did not try it. |
| Softwinter Sentry | $49.95 | This product also worked flawlessly, not as nice progress bars but it works. |
From the above table it should be clear that amongst the products I tried TrueCrypt and Sentry are the winners, I’d consider buying Sentry if I needed very long term storage and need the kind of backing that a company tends to give, backwards compatibility and so forth.
My usage however as a off-site backup system means I will be overwriting the last backups – or perhaps rotate them for 2 or 3 months – so I most certainly do not need long term archival.
TrueCrypt can also encrypt a full partition so I also tested that and I must say it works great. The initial format over the USB2 of 200Gig would take about 5 hours – so I did a quick format for testing but this is not suggested for actual use. This works great so I will put all my data on the crypted partition and leave a 32Gig FAT32 on the drive to store the TrueCrypt software on etc. You do not need to install anything on the windows machine to run TrueCrypt so can even be run off a memory stick.
My choice therefore is TrueCrypt, kudo’s to them for a very professional looking product with a good UI and great documentation to go with it.
While researching this I came across this site that has a whole lot of useful encryption related information.
