Yesterday at the Faire

[mdlbear]

The Maker Faire, that is. Went up with selkit and the chaoswolf; the flower_cat wanted to go but wasn't feeling up to that much walking. This was my first faire; it won't be the last.

Lots of fun things to see. The Wolfling was bored -- not my problem, though I'm still puzzled about where we went wrong in her upbringing. I mean, flamethrowers, battle bots, weird funky vehicles, weird funky music-making robots... what's not to like?

Microsoft had a whole hall to themselves, the featured product was the upcoming "home server". Had a nice discussion about backup, which is its main new feature. They can apparently make an incremental, compressed, "cluster-level" image of a live filesystem. Of course, that means it's tied to their proprietary filesystem, it's hard to get individual files out of the backup, and it's sensitive to errors. I'll stick to rsync and cp -p, thanks.

Took more pictures than I usually do, but they're still on the camera and I haven't been maintaining any kind of web-accessible gallery in any case. Have to work on that. After the album is done.

(Geeky side-note: Trantor has been up all night with X running, so I'm reasonably certain the too-fast memory was the problem.)

Comments

The Wolfling

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

Assuming that The Wolfling is your daughter (a big assumption, but I'm deeply steeped in the family-and-kids lifestyle), I the 'I'm bored' reaction is familiar.

A short list of my pre-marriage life interests that one or more of my kids have little interest:

language and vocabulary
classical music
reading
aircraft & spacecraft

Oh, well. Two of them have personalities a lot like mine: which is a mixed blessing.

Re: The Wolfling

[mdlbear]

The Wolfling is indeed my (older) daughter, chaoswolf (real name Kat). selkit is her fiancé. The flower_cat is my wife; we've been married 31 years now.

Re: The Wolfling

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

Kudos! And, thanks for the introductions.

Re: The Wolfling

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

And irish-brigid is my oldest daughter.

Upcoming home server

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

The backup function of home server had a familiar feature: "hard to get individual files out of the backup, and it's sensitive to errors." The last time I tried using a commercial back-up package (about seven years ago), file recovery seemed to be a foreign concept for whoever programmed the things.

Since then, I've been using a more brute-force approach: copying files to different drives by hand.

Re: Upcoming home server

[mdlbear]

Linux has several useful tools for copying large numbers of files; the most popular are rsync (which synchronizes two copies of a directory tree either locally or across a network) and tar (which makes a single huge archive file, optionally compressed -- the name stands for "tape archiver").

Re: Upcoming home server

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Linux is a favorite of some of my inlaws. I can see why.