I just finished reading Clay Shirky’s post, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. It’s a bit long, but well worth the read. He gives excellent insight into what’s happening with the newspapers today and how technology will change journalism forever. He explains how what we’re going through now is the same thing we went through 500 years ago!
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The Importance of Offline Backups
WebHostingTalk.com, a very popular community used by both consumers and business owners to review and advertise web hosting services, was hacked recently. The cracker deleted all database backups (including the remote backups). The earliest offline backup appears to have been from October 2008, and if you’ve ever had to run a forum you can probably understand how frustrating losing even a few days worth of posts can be for the members.
This got me thinking about how important offline backups are and why we should all be using them. Never assume your online backups are safe and be sure to take extra precautions when setting up a remote backup system. For example, your server shouldn’t be able to connect to the remote backup server. Instead, the remote backup server should connect to the server to retrieve backups. This way, if your server is compromised, the cracker can’t gain access to the remote backups!
I’ve had my fair share of experience with data loss over the past 15 years and I make it a point to backup everything. But I’ll admit that I’m not doing enough to keep my offline backups up-to-date. This event at WebHostingTalk.com has reminded me just how important they are to a well-rounded disaster recovery plan.
Installed Subscribe to Comments Plugin
I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin by Mark Jaquith, a plugin that WordPress.com chose to enable on the millions of blogs hosted there (congrats Mark!). I’ve always liked being able to subscribe to follow-up comments on posts that I comment on, so perhaps my visitors will appreciate having the same option on this blog.
Playing Tetris and Pong with Emacs
I’m vi user, but I’m slowly trying to pick up Emacs too. I discovered today that Emacs has a built-in Tetris game. Simply launch Emacs, press Esc and then the letter x, and then type tetris and press Enter (or simply start emacs with emacs -q --no-splash -f tetris). You can also play Pong using the same method!
BigDog: The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
Boston Dynamics, a Waltham, MA-based robotics company with funding from DARPA, has created what they’re calling “the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth”. The robot, named BigDog, weighs 170lbs and can carry loads of 340lbs. A recent video of BigDog in action shows it operating in several different terrain conditions, including an icy surface. Do you think you can kick this bad boy over if he comes to attack you? Think again! The video shows a guy trying to kick him over with full-force and it doesn’t even knock him down! (When you’re finished watching that, check out this video for a funny spoof.)
