Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and taented kshandra!! Have a great one!!

You just can't make this stuff up

From the BBC, no less, we get the headline FBI tries to fight zombie hordes!

Of course, it's about networks of hijacked computers, not yesterday's silliness. But the timing! (From wcg.)

Tracks

Adjusted the mix on "Guilty Pleasures" so that it's no longer dominated by the whistle part. Still wants my half-assed "drum" part replaced.

That leaves vocals on "Someplace in the Net" and some fixup on "Little Computing Machine", "I Wanna Be a Webmaster", and "TEOTW". Tonight and tomorrow; I think my throat is probably up to singing again.

Backup back up

Well, not quite, but getting there. Readers with long attention spans or short friends lists may recall my remark that it was time to find a new backup drive, and that I'd "see if 500's go on sale at Fry's this week."

Well, they did, though in the end I went for a 400GB Seagate SATA drive at $89, rather than the 500GB IDE drive for $109 that got me into the store. The SATA will go in my nice new USB/eSATA case, and should give me higher bandwidth and a lower error rate.

It seems to be a sweet little thing -- noticably quieter than the Maxtor 160 it's replacing. Because this is a backup drive that I intend to keep for a while, it's getting the slow, read/write test on formatting. Probably take all night. (20070615T0607 it flipped over from the first pattern (aa) to the second(55) at about 5:30 this morning. After that there are ff and finally 00. So we're looking at finishing up somewhere tomorrow morning.)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking seriously about how I do backups. With a little cleverness I should be able to simplify things considerably, not to mention save space and speed things up. The biggest problem with my current backup scheme is that it involves keeping a lot of history around, but my audio workflow involves making lots of fairly volatile 32-bit wave files as intermediates. Oops.

So my current thinking is to not make a monthly archive and keep it forever, but to keep only a handful of backups and rely on version control for long-term history. Perhaps make long-term copies on a quarterly basis, and do it more selectively by having per-subtree exclude lists. I'll also be pruning out some defunct users, and shifting some working directories to make a cleaner distinction between private stuff in /home, and "semi-public" stuff elsewhere.

The main motivation for that, in turn, is the fact that I now have an offsite storage location with lots of bandwidth. Separating public and private tells me what I can safely upload in plaintext, and what I'll have to encrypt. (Some of the "semi-public" stuff -- for example, work in progress and lyrics to other peoples' songs -- won't be accessible to the general public, but it's still safe for it not to be encrypted.)