Category: Technology
Research on deduplicating disk-based and cloud backups
January 20th, 2011, 18 Comments
Yesterday, I wrote about backing up to the cloud. I specifically was looking at cloud backup services. I’ve been looking into various options there, but also various options for disk-based backups. I’d like to have both onsite and offsite backups, so both types of backup are needed. Also, it is useful to think about how [...]
Wikis, Amateur Radio, and Debian
January 3rd, 2011, 10 Comments
As I have been getting involved with amateur radio this year, I’ve been taking notes on what I’m learning about certain things: tips from people on rigging up a bicycle antenna to achieve a 40-mile range, setting up packet radio in Linux, etc. I have long run a personal, private wiki where I put such [...]
Jacob: 4 Years Old, and Troubleshooting PCs
December 12th, 2010, 2 Comments
Back in April, I wrote about Jacob and I building his first computer together and how it’s running just the Linux command-line interface — no graphics at all. And he loves it. Well, as is often the case with him, his interest in various things waxes and wanes over time. He hadn’t spent much time [...]
Debconf10
August 16th, 2010, No Comments
Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I’m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes. Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a [...]
A Debconf Thanks
August 11th, 2010, No Comments
There was something at Debconf10 in NYC that I owe a huge thank-you to the entire community for. I was completely surprised at how many people made a point to say hi to me, comment that they liked reading about my blog, and encouraged me to keep posting. It was dozens for sure. I had [...]
The Best Place of Ever
August 1st, 2010, 5 Comments
Jacob and Oliver have enjoyed our recent train trip, and our stay, from Kansas to New York City for Debconf. All told, that’s a 40-hour trip, including the layover in Chicago. When we got on the train, in the middle of the night as usual, Jacob couldn’t stop chattering about how “great”, “fun”, and “exciting” [...]
Time to learn a new language
May 18th, 2010, 53 Comments
I have something of an informal goal of learning a new programming language every few years. It’s not so much a goal as it is something of a discomfort. There are so many programming languages out there, with so many niches and approaches to problems, that I get uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge of [...]
Download A Piece of Internet History
April 28th, 2010, 45 Comments
Back in the early 1990s, before there was a World Wide Web, there was the Internet Gopher. It was a distributed information system in the same sense as the web, but didn’t use hypertext and was text-based. Gopher was popular back then, as it made it easy to hop from one server to the next [...]
Jacob has a new computer — and a favorite shell
April 9th, 2010, 38 Comments
Earlier today, I wrote about building a computer with Jacob, our 3.5-year-old, and setting him up with a Linux shell. We did that this evening, and wow — he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for [...]
Introducing the Command Line at 3 years
April 9th, 2010, 28 Comments
Jacob is very interested in how things work. He’s 3.5 years old, and into everything. He loves to look at propane tanks, as the pressure meter, and open the lids on top to see the vent underneath. Last night, I showed him our electric meter and the spinning disc inside it. And, more importantly, last [...]
