Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really.

June 16, 2004

Disappearing Web

Blimey, did no one notice that weblogs.com disappeared? I would have expected some sort of comment from Mark Pilgrim at the very least.

If there is any lesson to be learnt from this it is (to paraphrase Steve Ballmer) backups, backups, backups.

I've now got a Mac a Linux desktop and a web site or two. Prompted by Danny O'Brien at Notcon the other week I now have a three way backup system set up using shell scripts and rsync. If any of my repositories of nik naks go boom then I should have the important items backed up in at least one other place.

Touch wood.

Posted by Andy Todd at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2004

Going Wireless

Just my luck. As I was taking delivery of my new wireless access point Steve Jobs was on stage announcing a newer, and slightly different model. Hey ho. I'll just have to get one of those as well.

Meanwhile, I'm toying with turning the security access off so that anyone in the neighbourhood can "borrow" some bandwidth. I'm rather loathe to do that until I've got a way of monitoring who is connected and how much traffic they are generating. Has anyone got any suggestions?

Posted by Andy Todd at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2004

Notcon Part 3

A small roundup of other people blogging Notcon much more comprehensively than me;

I had a thoroughly good time, it's just a shame I had to leave early.

Posted by Andy Todd at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2004

Notcon Part 2

It's now lunch time and I'm in search of beer. The morning sessions I attended were Danny O'Briens life hacks talk (site available at http://www.lifehacks.com/) and the panel discussion on the politics of the internet. All good, nothing bad.

The conclusions I got from Danny's talk, which may or may not be the ones he was trying to get across, were;

  1. When faced with a task use the simplest possible tool to perform it.
  2. Big, bloated applications will bite you on the bum, over time people migrate away from them to simpler tools.
  3. The wise geek stores their data in text format. Mainly because of point 2 above, but also because it is easier to index and search.
  4. Incremental search is good.

The discussion on the politics of the internet was interesting. Each panellist had slightly different viewpoints, but they were all agreed that there is no politics of the internet. This is because politics is about everything and everything is about politics.

Interesting points though, were that technology makes law making more difficult and this has got the lawmakers slightly worried, and neither the technology of the internet or governments are going away and that sooner or later they will have to learn to love each other.

I'm now sitting in the ground floor listening to Brewster Kahle talk about the Internet Archive. His tag line is "Give us your content and we will give you unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, for ever." Best. Use. Of. Technology. Ever.

Posted by Andy Todd at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)

Notcon Part 1

I'm at Notcon '04 and so far it's looking good. The wi-fi is working and I believe the coffee bar is open. No beer yet though.

There is an irc channel (#notcon) and the sessions are being SubEthaEdit'ed. Which if nothing else has spawned a new verb.

More later.

Posted by Andy Todd at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)