Daily Archive for June 4th, 2006

Oggling is good for you

Unfortunately it looks like it is not true

Who am I?

George Bush is visiting the Queen and he asks her, ‘Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give me?’
Well,’ says the Queen, ‘the most important thing is to surround your self with intelligent people.’

Bush frowns, ‘But how do I know the people around me are really intelligent?’ The Queen takes a sip of tea. Oh, that’s easy. You just ask them to answer an intelligence riddle. ‘The Queen pushes a button on her intercom. ‘Please send The Prime Minister in here, would you?’

Tony Blair walks into the room. ‘Your Majesty…’” The Queen smiles” Answer me this, please, Tony. Your mother and father have a child. It is not your brother and it is not your sister. Who is it?’
‘Without pausing for a moment, Blair answers, ‘That would be me!’ ‘Yes! Very good!’ says the Queen.

Back at the White House, Bush calls in his vice president, Dick Cheney. ‘Dick, answer this for me. Your mother and your father have a child. It’s not your brother and it’s not your sister. Who is it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ says the vice president.’Let me get back to you on that one.’

Dick Cheney goes to his advisers and asks every one, but none can give him an answer.
Finally, he ends up in the men’s room and recognises Colin Powell’s shoes in the next stall. Dick shouts, ‘Colin! Can you answer this for me? Your mother and father have a child and it’s not your brother or your sister. Who is it?’ Colin Powell yells back,

‘That’s easy. It’s me!’ Dick Cheney smiles,
‘Thanks!’ Cheney goes back to the Oval Office and asks to speak with Bush.

‘Say, I did some research and I have the answer to that riddle. It’s Colin Powell.’

Bush gets up, stomps over to Dick Cheney, and angrily yells into his face, ‘No, you idiot! It’s Tony Blair!’

Automated Backups

I recently wrote about Backup Options but never mentioned how I actually kicked off the backups.

I use a crontab to start my backups, it looks like this:

@daily unison -times -batch /home/anton/Documents ssh://MyServer/Documents -servercmd /home/anton/bin/unison >> $HOME/cron.unison.log 2>&1
@weekly rsync –stats -auv –delete –exclude “*.db” –exclude “*/.pics/” “/home/anton/My Photos/” home:”~/My Photos/” >> $HOME/cron.rsync.log 2>&1

I am sure you can achieve this under windows with either cywin (which you will probably want for a good command line ssh client/unison anyway) or with the scheduled tasks and a batch file.

The commands are fairly simple, and redirect all output to cron..log (the “>>” redirect means it will append to the file and “2>&1″ will redirect all errors as well)

Rsync lets me exclude certain files. In this case I am excluding windows .db files (windows explorer thumbnails) and .pics directories (Digikam thumbnails), though I could copy them too.

The reason my photos are weekly as opposed to daily is because I might change/add enough photos for the upload to take more than 24 hours on a slow broadband connection (I do not want two scripts running at once, though there are defenitely better ways of achieving this i.e. writing a script to do the backup that checks for a lockfile)