Monthly Archive for January, 2005

Backups

a Flickr photo shareHaving read a few recent posts from Andy Budd and Jason Kottke, I’ve grown sud­denly wor­ried about the prospect of losing my Powerbook’s data. For the past couple of years, I’ve man­u­ally backed up crit­i­cal files to CD, but I was lucky if this got done once per year…

After briefly flirt­ing with DVD archiv­ing (thanks for your help Jason), it was clear that this would be only slightly less annoy­ing than CDs. And, web servers offer even less disk space…

No, I decided that it was time to set up sched­uled back­ups, to hard disk.

First, I started with an old Dell Desk­top, which we set up in our litter-​box closet. We bought a USB Wi-​Fi “G” adapter to con­nect the PC (and our printer) to the net­work. I should also men­tion that I added an 80GB inter­nal drive…

With the hard­ware in place, I decided to use Déjà Vu to run the back­ups — this app does every­thing a backup app should do, but I like the way it is inte­grated in System Pref­er­ences, as a pref­er­ence pane. It’s lean, clean, and fits well into the OS.

After an hour or so of Setup, I’ve got sched­uled weekly back­ups of my user direc­tory, start­ing tonight at 3am…

I know that I’ll sleep more soundly!

links for 2005-01-30

links for 2005-01-29

Weighted Category Lists

After a few site tweaks ear­lier in the week allowed me to imple­ment new cat­e­gories in this weblog, I decided to add weighted cat­e­gory lists, much like Flickr & Technorati.

I mod­i­fied an exam­ple given by hitormiss, which looks like this:

<?php
$min­font = 1;
$max­font = 5;
$fontu­nit = "";
<MTCategories>
$catlinks{"<$MTCategoryLabel$>"} = "<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>";
$counts{"<$MTCategoryLabel$>"} = <$MTCategoryCount$>;
</MTCategories>

$spread = max($counts) - min($counts); if ($spread <= 0) { $spread = 1; };
$fontspread = $max­font - $min­font;

$fontstep = $spread / $fontspread; if ($fontstep <= 0) { $fontstep = 1; };
fore­ach ($counts as $cat­name => $count)
{
$catlink = $catlinks{$catname};
print "<a href=\"$catlink\" title=\"$count entries\" class=\"cat".
ROUND(($minfont + ($count/$fontstep)))."\">$catname</a> &nbsp;\n";
}
 ?>

[You can also down­load it in a text file]

Put it in your Move­able Type archive tem­plate, and you’re good to go. It will write 5 CSS classes — cat1, cat2, cat3, cat4, cat5… (of course, you’ll have to define those in your stylesheet!)

You can head over to my archives page, to check out the imple­men­ta­tion. (Notice that the 5 largest cat­e­gories are the orig­i­nal 5… i will be clas­si­fy­ing old entries in the next couple of days…)

(I apol­o­gize if not all the code is view­able here — I sug­gest you high­light and copy/paste to a text editor, which should work)

links for 2005-01-28

The Bravery @ TTs

“mic stand 2″, posted by nedward

On Tues­day, we checked out NYC’s latest hyped offer­ing, The Brav­ery, at TT’s, and it only cost $8. Labeled by the BBC crit­ics as the Sound of 2005, it looks as though they have a shot at living up to the hype.

Usu­ally a staid Cam­bridge crowd, TTs was absolutely electric… check out my photos.

links for 2005-01-27

8-year Anniversary

Just a note of thanks to Stef & Nobuko for rec­om­mend­ing Dali’s for our anniver­sary dinner.

Pres­ley and I have been together now for 8 years, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a finer expe­ri­ence. Because of the bliz­zard, we had to delay one day, but it was worth the wait… (a couple of photos of us… gag!)

Tapas items that we ordered:

  • Mejil­lones con Agua­cate (Green-​Lipped Mus­sels w/Avocado)
  • Queso de Cabra Montaña (Baked Goat Cheese w/Tomato & Basil)
  • Gambas al Ajillo (Garlic Shrimp)
  • Vieiras al Azafrán (Scal­lops in Saf­fron Cream)
  • Ravi­o­les de Mariscos (Lobster/Crabmeat Ravi­oli w/Langostino Sauce)
  • Solomillo en Tostada (Beef Ten­der­loin w/Pimento on Toast)

And, for dessert:

  • Filloa al Licor (Fruit-​filled Dessert Crepe accented with Choco­late Sauce and Orange Liquor)

Some Anniver­saries past:

links for 2005-01-26

Fast Food Nation

Is it wrong to look at moth­ers in the mall food court, and wonder why they let their kids eat McDonald’s and Pizza?

(There are lim­ited culi­nary options near my workplace)

Facelift

It was a long time coming, but I gave this weblog yet another design tweak, con­vert­ing the horrid image map nav­i­ga­tion to CSS-styled unordered lists.

This design has served me well for the past 2+ years… a major re-​design has been in plan­ning for more than a year, but I almost enjoy tweak­ing this one more. There is value in constancy.

The real motive for doing this, is that my cat­e­gory choices for posts have been lim­ited to the same 5: books, music, movies, fea­tures, and posts… I couldn’t add new cat­e­gories, because the image nav­i­ga­tion, and com­plex script­ing behind its dis­play wouldn’t allow for it.

Stupid right? Design­ing with flex­i­bil­ity is some­thing that I am learning… pixel-​perfect, heavily-​graphical sites can turn out to be a pigeonhole.

Maybe I just needed 2+ years to strip away, and un-​design it to the point where the con­tent becomes the most impor­tant component.

Anyway, every­thing is a bit in flux at the moment, so there might be fur­ther changes to come.

links for 2005-01-25

links for 2005-01-24

Blizzard of 2005

Brookline Ave

I just came in from shov­el­ing the dri­ve­way of our next door neigh­bor, where he kindly let me park the 9-3… more than two feet of snow, bliz­zard con­di­tions, and very cold tem­per­a­tures — reminds me of the Buf­falo bliz­zards of my youth…

Every­thing is closed, and I’m wait­ing to hear if I have to go in to work tomor­row morning… in the mean­time, i put some photos on “Flickr”:.

Also:

links for 2005-01-23