The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Importance of back-ups

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I had a bit of a scare last night with my computer last night.

I have spent the past several days doing some work for a client and am travelling out to their office today to deploy the work on their servers.  The plan was to download the release from Subversion onto a workstation and upload to their server (and updates configs and all that). 

Last night at 9pm, my main pc wouldn’t start.  I could hear the fan humming and disks spinning, but nothing showing up on the monitor—not even bios set-up screens. It’s a four-year-old Dell Dimension 9150, so the pc isn’t new and I expect there to be problems from time-to-time, but this kind of problem couldn’t happen at all those times I don’t have any clients?

My main development PC gets backed up once a week to an external hard drive using Acronis True Image.  My PC also wakes from hibernate every morning at 2am and takes a local backup from all my websites and databases hosted on different web servers.  I have a Subversion repository hosted off-site where I keep all my code.  I’ve thought a lot about disaster recovery.  But it wasn’t enough.

I wasn’t concerned about the PC as much as I was concerned about the code.  But, as much as I tell my developers to check-in every day, I was a bit lazy here and didn’t do it myself for two days. 

After Googling the problem for a while (on my laptop) I found the issue was some RAM had gone bad.  I took memory out one by one until the computer would start again.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  Eventually removed two RAM modules (bringing my pc from 4gb down to 2gb)—and the first thing I did was check my code into Subversion.  So after a few hours of panic, everything was fine.

Here’s the problem with my backup strategy—it’s not regular enough.  It’s geared for a hard-drive failure more than anything else.  If my pc completely packs it in, I can restore my operating system, hard drives and everything else onto a new box—but my backup only runs once a week.  I could be 6 days out of date.  I need to increase it.  Besides, I live in Oxfordshire.  It’s not like I’m in San Diego where you can swing down to Fries at 9pm on a Sunday night and pick up a hard drive.

If you’ve ever had a hard drive fail, you know how important back-ups are—but they got to be automated or they won’t happen.  When you get paid for the work you do on your computer, it’s even more important. 

Attending a Tweetup tomorrow

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Tomorrow night, I’m going to attend an Oxfordshire Tweetup at the Fallowfields Country House near Abingdon.  I’m not sure what to expect, but I saw it was coming up and thought I would check it out.  A tweetup, as I understand it, is just a bunch of Twitterers getting together to meet each other.  I follow a few people in the Oxfordshire area (they actually help me by letting me know when the roads are bad or if there is anything interesting going on in the area) and it would be nice to meet them.  I’m not sure what to expect really, but it will be nice to meet some new people.

A few years ago, when ECademy was at it’s prime, I attended a local networking evening.  It was okay, but it was really a room full of people trying to sell themselves and their companies.  I never met so many life coaches as I did that night.  But it wasn’t awful—and i met some nice people who I spoke with afterwards.  I’m hoping that the tweetup is not so business-focused.

I’m looking forward to it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  If you live in Oxfordshire and want to attend, the url to register for the event is here: http://twtvite.com/mkp8da

The Virtual Revolution

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BBC started airing a very good documentary about the internet a few weeks ago called The Virtual Revolution.  I finally watched the first episode just the other night.  It’s amazing how much has happened in such a small time.

Google was incorporated in 1998 (went public in 2004).  Youtube started in 2005.  Twitter in 2006.  The World Wide Web was created in 1990 with the first web server being created by Tim Berners-Lee in that year.

It was a fantastic documentary and it really makes you think. 

We are still very much in the beginning of all of this.  There are still things to be done that no one has thought of yet.  We still haven’t reaped much of the benefits that the improvements in communication channels will have lent to science and medicine and as much as the internet has changed all of our lives, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what’s to come.

I routinely chat with people in China and India (and back home in the States) while visiting offices here in the UK. In high school, these places all seemed so far away.

This twenty years of the internet will one-day seem like just a blip to us.  One day years in the future, people will talk about how the newspapers and music industries cried foul before they found their own way.  We will talk about the quaint days of waiting for our favourite TV programs to be aired.  Soon, we will look back on Twitter and Facebook the same way we look back on the old newsgroups (it was all so crude!).

The other day I found myself falling into the trap of thinking that everything had been invented already.  Surely, there are no new opportunities out there because they’ve all been invented.  Or, someone is already working on them.  But the truth is that we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

There are still things that aren’t quite right in technology.  Still loads to do.  For example, as much as webcam chat is fantastic and a nice novelty, it’s still too complicated to get “ordinary” people to use it. 

As much as things change, we still think in old terms.  Artists still come out with Albums, even though we can buy and download only the tracks we want.  Why do we need the album grouping?  We still have business people who think they need to fly thousands of miles to have a meeting in another office, because we haven’t found a method of communication that is better an 8 hour flight.  Too many of us still get up in the morning and drive or take a train to an office building to do work that could easily be done at home.  When we get to grips with some of these new realities, we will start thinking differently and even more innovation will come.

I was reading the xkcd comic strip (if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out—http://xkcd.com), and saw this this strip:

Xkcd strip

2003 wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe my age is just catching up with me.