I am not a teacher, nor a parent of children attempting to learn math in a public school. I did, however, learn math in a public school. In addition (obvious pun), I am a geek who loves numbers and enjoys not needing a calculator for tipping, knowing how much something costs with sales tax, doing my own taxes, etc.

I also annually celebrate π day as well as Almost-Pi day (22/7), which is just about a month away.

I happened upon a youtube video the other day (embedded below) and found its topic irksome [the video itself is great]. The idea that math pedagogy this country is trending toward what’s “easier” and “fun” for “all students” will never create the next generation of engineers, accountants, computer scientists and other nerdy and non-nerdy professions who use even basic math skills on a daily basis. We need kids to struggle a little to find an answer, not learn shortcuts. The result is certainly important, but being able to readily produce results to other similar problems quickly and understand why you got the consequential result is essential.

Being able to quickly do 2- and 3-digit mathematics is a skill that my current generation arguably lost with the plenitude of calculators being produced. (Curse you Texas Instruments!) Some will disagree, but I think math should actually be a challenge that extends beyond simple addition and subtraction. By the end of 5th grade EVERY student should be able to do long division without hesitation or n-digit multiplication on paper of n+3 lines without fear of “OMG the numbers are so big, I’ll never be able to do it!”. True, both of these things still rely on simple operations adding/subtracting to a final value, but you have to know why that’s so, and know that your method will work reliably every time to attack problems with larger and larger numbers without trepidation.

I also don’t think it should be a tough thing to expect a 5th grader to do long division with decimal points, but this is coming from the guy who previously used prime number theory to determine why his php rand() function call was returning the number 24 somewhere around a quarter of the time it was run. Details.

Anyway, I was appalled. The adage of “I’m going to be an X, why would I ever need to know math” is a fallacious argument at best, and at worst, a total cop-out for the lazy. How about grocery shopping? Living securely on a budget? Buying a house and not getting screwed on your mortgage? Planning for retirement? Investing? Do you not need math for those things? [I suppose you can pay someone to advise you, but then how would you know when they are ripping you off?]

Even if you reach for a calculator, you still need to understand what you’re calculating! Do you plan to carry a calculator with you everywhere?

From the video, one of the methods is TERC’s reasoning method, which seems to suggest that if kids feel their way through a math problem, they’ll get smarter. The concept is based on talking out the simpler pieces of a difficult problem which you’ve seen before and using those simpler problems to build a solution to a harder one. That sounds familiar, but it isn’t based on a repetitive set of steps, rather it’s based on the pre-existing experiences and knowledge of the student, which will vary from student to student. “Well, I know that 10 x 20 is 200, so 13 x 19 (247) must be about 200.” (Well, kinda, but what about 13456 x 19344.32? Is that as reason-able? What if you thought, for some reason, that 10 x 20 was 100? What happens to the reliability of your solution then?)

Reasoning is actually a really great technique for troubleshooting, attacking a complicated design issue, breaking out of prison with only a paperclip, duct tape and a screwdriver, etc. It is not, however, a smart way to teach arithmetic. You need to understand the fundamentals before you can use them to attack harder problems like, say, designing the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles, or figuring out how to put a colony on Mars, or Warp Drive. With teaching methods like this, who is going to figure out Warp Drive?!?!

I know that’s not really important as the answer is, as we all know, Zephram Cochrane, and he was probably home-schooled anyway.

Even worse, however, is their attitude about algorithmic techniques (e.g. traditional step-wise multiplication and long division):

The mathematical payoff is not worth the cost, particularly because quotients can be found quickly and accurately with a calculator.

With. A. Calculator.

*throws a chair*

Seriously? A math book that advocates that students should start relying on a calculator in grade school? Are you kidding me??

*throws a second, larger chair*

Way to tell kids their way too d–mn stupid to learn how to divide! They even have entire chapters dedicated to calculator use rather than entire chapters dedicated to, say, learning about how to do the problem yourself. Catering to the lowest common denominator (a concept which you probably won’t learn about from that textbook) is the best way to get smart people to stop trying, to disengage the interested few for the sake of the dumbest one.

The narrator’s notes on the major problems of today’s high school graduates’ math skills from her personal experience of going back to college are telling:

1. An inability to work alone to solve problems without checking in with other people. (Apparently TERC’s method suggests you discuss your thought process with others… what if they ALL think 10 x 20 = 100 ???)
2. A lack of fluency in the symbolic language of math or an ability to think logically.
3. Lack of mastery and confidence with basic math skills (trig, algebra and arithmetic)
4. Complete dependence on a calculator

All of these are frightening, but to me, someone who considers himself to be a somewhat critical thinker, the scariest is “an ability to think logically”. How on earth are we supposed to expect a person to make a difficult decision on their own without a simple understanding of logic? Not even “if a and b then c”, but just the basic concept of causality which is utterly crucial to critical thought.

Why should these people vote??? (Ok… that’s a different post entirely.)

Every high school math teacher I had would be appalled that dependence on a calculator is now a common ailment of college students. Almost never was I allowed to use, let alone bring, a calculator to math class in high school. The only exception to that was that we used TI-8x calculators for some graphing examples in pre-calculus and calculus for a month or so. (Those of us who learned TI’s version of BASIC to write neat procedural programs were also given some lenience, but that’s because we already understood the math needed to write said programs. Admittedly, we were writing games…)

The TERC method also fails to introduce the simple concept of an algorithm at an early age. There is no concept of “finite steps” in a method requiring you to break a problem down into simpler pieces that you have to reason. Algorithm-based arithmetic is simple, straight-forward, and it always works.

So here’s the crux of what’s bothering me: By teaching someone the basic fundamentals and then the easier/more creative techniques, a few things happen:

1. A person appreciates the techniques
2. A person might see other better/faster/more productive techniques (read: innovate)
3. A person can master a subject and can teach others
4. Goto 1

Every single sports coach will tell you the same thing - master the fundamentals and you can be good. If you asked an athlete to go out onto the field and reason their way through the game, what would happen? Imagine tennis. Not so bad. Now imagine football. Rugby.

And, for the sake of further argument - Any student who wants to be a professional athlete and says they don’t need to know math has never seen the contracts those athletes sign. I passed Differential Equations (admittedly by the skin of my teeth) and I don’t understand how a modern baseball player gets paid. Seriously, professional athletes should be forced to have math degrees.

Well, from a school that’s actually going to teach math, anyway. My kids certainly won’t go to a school that teaches them how to “feel their numbers”.

*puts both chairs back*

0. Install apache2 (if it’s not already installed):

sudo apt-get install apache2

1. Create a WebDAV directory in your DocumentRoot with the proper permissions:

mkdir -p /var/www/webdav
chmod -R 777 /var/www/webdav

2. Edit Apache2’s dav_fs.conf file:

cd /etc/apache2/mods-available
sudo vi dav_fs.conf

DAVLockDB /var/lock/apache2/DAVLock

<Directory “/var/www/webdav”>
DAV On
DAVMinTimeout 600
DAVDepthInfinity On

AllowOverride AuthConfig
AuthName “DAV Restricted”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/.htaccess

Require valid-user
</Directory>

3. Create symlinks to the proper DAV module files:
(Some of these will already exist. Leave them alone.)

cd ../mods-enabled
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/dav.load
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/dav_fs.conf
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/dav_fs.load

4. Create the ‘AuthUserFile’ indicated in step 2:

sudo htpasswd -m -c /etc/httpd/.htaccess webcal

5. Restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

6. Publish your iCal!

Your url for publishing should now look like http://mywebhost/webdav/iCal/. Enjoy!

Based on a guide for Fedora at millan.info.

Lucky for me, someone else thought that automating this would be a good idea. Enter iTunes Export, which does exactly what it says it does, quickly and to several useful formats. As great single-purpose software does, it just plain works.

There are four screens, each of which are, as you can see, pretty straightforward. Screen 3 is where all of the fun options are. I didn’t need to re-copy all of my music to a new location, but I can see how that would be useful if you wanted to, say, burn a DVD of a large playlist for someone who doesn’t have iTunes. For me, the M3U export without copy was perfect, and I haven’t opened iTunes in days.

Here are the posts sitting in my drafts folder that I’ll likely never get to finishing / cleaning / etc.:

• Email Link at Right (tags: how-to )
• 5 Geek Decisions I Wish I’d Made Differently (tags: uncategorized )

*delete*

1,000,003 is the smallest seven-digit prime number I could think of, which, being completely impossible to wholly divide from, should take care of the repetitive quotes.

Backstory: I used to have a random quote generator made up of stupid phrases I’d collected over time. Some were output from fortune, some from movies or tv shows, and others were stupid inside jokes. There were far too many Family Guy references, IIRC. It played well to the quasi-personal, friends-oriented content I was producing at the time. Each quote was an entry in a MySQL table with a primary key which I used for retrieval based on this code:

srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
$tq_query = mysql_query("select count(qid) from quotes")
   or die ('Invalid Query: ' . mysql_error());
$getQuote = sprintf("select quote from quotes where qid='%s';",
   addslashes(rand(1, mysql_result($tq_query,0)-1)));
$gq_result = mysql_query($getQuote)
   or die ('Invalid Query: ' . mysql_error());
echo mysql_result($gq_result,0);

Aside: As I copy and paste this now, I wonder why I didn’t just do something like “SELECT quote FROM quotes ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 1″, putting the responsibility for randomness on MySQL’s already set up random seed? I may have been over-prioritizing database robustness on a site that never got more than a few hundred hits per day.

My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) noticed that the quotes didn’t actually seem that random and, in fact, the same few kept repeating themselves over and over again. I had noticed the same thing, but never felt that motivated to investigate. [She was, I think, between classes and it bothered her… so who am I to argue?]

After reading a bunch of threads on the PHP website, I reasoned that the problem was that I was seeding the random stack with an even number. Due to silly rounding and a padding value, the number most commonly returned out of this function was 24, which is incredibly un-prime. [Even cooler to the numbers nerd inside of me, 24 is the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root.] So.. following good number theory, I changed the seed value to 1000003, which is prime, and in few other ways special.

In additional retrospect, saying “that I could think of” was quite silly… The list of smallest n-digit primes is readily available, so this shouldn’t require much thought at all. If memory serves, I don’t believe I looked this up, and really, how hard should it be for someone who finds math fun to know that 100001 and 100002 aren’t prime [11 and 2 are lowest divisors, respectively]?

Because of my Cygwin-love, I’ve found myself using the Command Prompt Here context-menu item, and then immediately entering tcsh and doing what needs to be done. I can’, then, double Ctrl-D my way out of the window since cmd has no clue what Ctrl-D is. It’s annoying, but it means I have to take the extra two seconds to type ‘exit’. So, throwing any concept of cost/benefit out the window [though, those four seconds probably add up to like... 30 minutes of lost productivity a year], I investigated how to do the same thing for Cygwin.

Somebody done figured this out already, so all that was left was for me to have it run tcsh instead of bash, and I was all set. This was painfully simple. Here’s the registry script I’m using:

Then, I thought it might be fun to see if my svn box in the basement would survive a command-line upgrade again (it worked for 7.04 to 7.10), so why not?

The process is fairly straightforward. As root (or via sudo):

1. sed -e 's/\gutsy/hardy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get dist-upgrade
4. … wait …
5. shutdown -r now

During my install this morning, and the corresponding install of several packages not included by default, I found that the default repository [us.archive.ubuntu.com] is really slow right now. Synaptic Package Manager has this nifty “find the best mirror” tool, and lo and behold, the best option for me is in Switzerland [mirror.switch.ch], so rather than just replace ‘gutsy’ with ‘hardy’, I updated my sources.list to match the fresh one at work.

Then I saw this:

947 upgraded, 194 newly installed, 67 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 763MB of archives.
After unpacking 473MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Well, yeah, of course… but wow, that’s some update! Undaunted, I pressed on. Sure enough, it really was that simple. The upgrade on my Dual-PIII 667 (yeah, that’s right, PIII baby!) workstation took just over 4 hours to complete, according to my history, so not too shabby.

Grab ubuntu 8.04 directly from the ubuntu.com web site, or from one of many mirrors.

For your money [technically none], there are few better products than those from NewsGator. Both FeedDemon [Windows] and NetNewsWire [MacOS] are excellent readers, and if you happen to read in multiple locations, you have ability to sync your feeds and clippings folders, keeping yourself from re-reading everything. For sure, web-based readers work well for this also [FeedDemon has an online reader which also synchronizes with the other clients] and many folks also like to use Google Reader and Bloglines.

Retaining a high level of personal productivity whilst reading ~200 RSS feeds is nearly impossible, however. To stay on top of the news and not waste both time and focus, I rely heavily on clippings folders within FeedDemon. I don’t find them all that useful when I’m at home using NetNewsWire, but at work they’re crucial.

My tactic is to take about 15 minutes when I get to work to go through the overnight news feeds. [This is generally the same time that I'm also whittling down my Inbox, making sure I know my tasks for the day and so forth, so it's a good time to process everything I've collected before getting started with my day.] I have six clippings folders so that I can properly prioritize my reading later in the day:

• blog: Posts about which I’d like to post, not items I want to link to
• do - next 10 days: Reminding me to do something or install something soon
• do - next 6 weeks: Reminding me to do something or install something in the near future, but not right away (e.g. I know I want to split up this huge DJ Tiësto concert track, but know I don’t have time right now, so the link reminding me how to do this in iTunes would sit here.)
• do - someday: Reminding me to do something or install something, but I know I can’t any time soon (e.g. if I know I want to put non-standard firmware on my wireless router, but not until after I switch ISPs, and I know that’s 1-2 months away, I would put that post here.)
• read: Default folder for posts I should read
• tag: Items I want to tag on del.icio.us for future, long-term reference
• watch or listen: Basically the same as “read”, except that I’ll need headphones.

I’d say I come in to anywhere between 100 and 400 posts to filter through in a morning, (most of which are from the digg.com feed. I can knock them out easily in those 15 minutes by refraining from reading anything substantively, reading the title and skimming the post body to see if it might be worth my time later. This works pretty well as I’ll end up with about 30-50 new posts to read/watch, some of which will migrate to the one of the do/blog clippings folders at some point.

Next, of course, is actually reading said news.

On days not like today, I tend to read through the “read” stack on my lunch break [I had a conference call today, so... bad example] or when I need a mental break between particularly intense tasks or meetings. I make a consistent habit of closing NewsGator right after my morning feed processing [NOT a farming term, mind you] so as not to be tempted to start the day on an unfocused foot. All of my feeds and clippings sort in reverse chronological order so that I don’t lose track of things I wanted to read last week (the week before… month before… year before…) I find that lunch is also a good time to watch whatever posts included video, which mostly consist of clips from The Daily Show and other commentary.

Not sneaking feed views throughout the day takes a level of distraction-relevant self-control that I have not always had. It’s very important, however, to maintain a professional level of focus without killing ones’s self. For reading the news, this means that I only read what’s important, and that do not waste much, if any, time in the office. I had thought that by only giving myself a set amount of time to read, I’d never get caught up, but that screen grab above shows only a half-dozen items in my “read” folder. It’s never quite empty, and only a few times (e.g. after vacation or a long weekend) has it stayed above 20 for long periods of time.

The downside is, of course, that if my daily habit is to read at lunch then this means I’m sitting at my desk instead of socializing or being outside. In the winter, or on meeting-heavy days when I need a moment away from people, this isn’t a big deal… but it’s Spring, so now I find myself taking a walk at lunch instead, and leaving my reading for another day. All of those posts are retained in the client (even if the blog goes poof, they’re still there), so I can come back and read them on rainy or cold day instead.

All in all, this method keeps me on top of the news, and also on top of my work, which is the point to the exercise of adding more *stuff* whilst retaining productivity.

Unfortunately for me, this particular workflow only works in OS X 10.5, and I have yet to upgrade my iMac past 10.4.11.

Undaunted, I replicated the same thing in perl. It turns out that the “Combine PDF Pages” automator action is a simple Python script. It looked semi-useful on its own, so I copied it from its normal home (/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/) to my personal bin directory for good measure. Perl source follows… please note that the >’s are rendering as literal &gt;’s. Silly Code Highlighter!

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use locale;
use strict;
use warnings;

#############################
#  [01-31]      [yyyy-mm-dd]
my ($day,       $date,      $tmpdir,              $tojoin) =
   (`date +%d`, `date +%F`, ‘/Users/shelton/tmp’, ”);
chomp($day); chomp($date);

my ($join) =
   (”python /Users/shelton/bin/join.py -o ‘/Users/shelton/Desktop/$date.pdf’”);

########################
# Define PDF Links Here
#
my (%papers) = (
    # Boston Globe
    0=>”http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/MA_BG.pdf”,
    # Chicago Tribune
    1=>”http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/IL_CT.pdf”,
    # Buffalo News
    2=>”http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/NY_BN.pdf”,
    # NY Times
    3=>”http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/NY_NYT.pdf”,
    # Wall Street Journal
    4=>”http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/WSJ.pdf”
    );

######################################
# Loop through %papers
#  -> Determine tmp output file
#  -> Download the File
#  -> Add file to string for join cmd
#
foreach my $page (sort(keys %papers)) {
    my $output = “” . $tmpdir . “/” . $page . “.pdf”;
    `wget -q -O $output $papers{$page}`;
    $tojoin .= “‘” . $output . “‘ “;
}

##################
# Join The Files!
#
`$join $tojoin`;

#############################
# Delete All Downloaded PDFs
#
foreach my $file (sort(keys %papers)) {
    my $rm = “” . $tmpdir . “/” . $file . “.pdf”;
        `rm -f $rm`;
}

I suppose I could have picked more interesting papers (like, for instance, the Amazônia Hoje from Belém, Brazil). I stuck to papers from my current and previous home towns (and the NYC area, because they have interesting papers). Boring? I know…

I run this daily from cron at about 7am. Of note, I also redirect all output of the script to /dev/null because the python script throws a ton of meaningless errors that don’t mar the output.

Consider rewarding yourself with a blog post about the upgrade, reading that book or article you’ve been putting off, or simply sitting back for a few moments and let the world pass you by.

So, a post, then. I must say that the interface is going to take a bit of getting used to. In addition, the color scheme choices are… kinda muted. I liked the darker blue from previous 2.x versions, and high glare situations, I’m noticing that I can’t always see the logical separation of the menu section.

Oh hey! I can switch back the old color scheme! Excellent.

The UI changes made to the post editor are excellent. I like the understated “Add media” buttons, and the additional AJAX functionality is useful and not overbearing, exactly how said technology should be used. The UI and font selections system-wide are great.

I don’t like that they still haven’t fixed the DST time zone thing.

Beyond that, not bad. The upgrade process went smoothly, and here I am.

I do, however, get a real kick out of what folks on the internets come up with.

For instance, QWANTZ (Dinosaur Comics), XKCD and Questionable Content are all currently redirecting their current comics’ pages to each others’ sites in a revolving “OMG WHAT HAPPEND TO TEH WORLDZ!!” sort of way that makes you seriously wonder “Did I click on the right link?”.

ThinkGeek, who has done does this every year since 2001, has come up with an excellent set of not-actually-real-but-you-want-them-to-be-real goods for your perusal. I’m digging the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock, myself.

Last year, they featured an 8-bit tie which was so popular, they actually made one.

Slashdot usually posts some funny, totally untrue, stories. I’m not saying they necessarily forgot it was April 1st, but they do seem to be taking their sweet time.

*does a little dance*

The amazon affiliate boxy thing on the right doesn’t look nearly as cool as it could with the actual front cover image, but I don’t believe one has yet been released, so for now.. empty box. I don’t actually care about the 2 cents I’d get if someone clicked on that link and pre-ordered the book. Really, I just wanted a straightforward way to embed some amazon content, and the affiliate account was the fastest way to go.

Hey, it’s late.

The back-panel text or, more correctly, “catalog copy” is as follows:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

According to a Q&A published six months or so ago, the book is primarily about Platonic mathematics. I am, therefore, bound to read it in about e working days. Count me pre-ordered!

Hat tip to Nerd World.

Nevertheless, I’ve been finding it very interesting. Two recent posts about the troubles that passengers have recently had with the new MacBook Air was very enlightening. It was also the perfectly appropriate response to the complaint. The average MBA user is probably the same demographic as the average reader of blogs, so it stands to reason that the most appropriate marketing channel is the TSA Blog. Kudos to that. I’m also curious to see how/if they’ll post about the article which hit the wires today about a Texas woman being forced to remove a body piercing with a pair of pliers to be able to board a flight. The article was somewhat sensationalist, but that’s the mainstream media for you.

Edit at 8:10pm: And it looks like they did.

I leave you with italic kittens, which is both entirely irrelevant to this post, and quite geeky at the same time:

If you have ever used G-Archiver to back up your GMail, immediately change your GMail password and uninstall G-Archiver.

G-Archiver e-mails your GMail username and password to the program’s author. The program’s source code contains the author’s GMail login credentials — an abnormal ocurrance [sic] that led a curious reader of Coding Horror to discover the dark side of G-Archiver.

Coding Horror reader Dustin Brooks took a peak at the author’s GMail account, and discovered that John Terry, creator of G-Archiver, is in possession of the usernames and passwords of thousands of people who have used G-Archiver.

I’ve not tried G-Archiver, and for certain I won’t knowing it’s going to up and steal my account password! There are safer backup ideas out there for GMail.

My productivity has noticeably improved since making this my desktop wallpaper. As soon as Outlook gets minimized I see this… and it’s back to work!

Via InterfaceLIFT, by Spargett.

I must admit that this is an almost perfect re-purposing of “things I was going to throw away some day”. I’ve seen nifty uses for discarded recordable CDs and DVDs, as well as spindle containers. I usually recycle the latter and shred the former, but were I to ever actually require a bagel carrier, I know where I’d get one!

Speaking of re-use, I think I have five more floppies lying around somewhere, and should be able to construct a third pen cup at some point. It would have to be a gift since I have, at this point, max’d out my ratio of floppy-disk-pen-cups to desks.

This is helpful for all of those Linux users out there, but for those of us who have a Windows desktop with the same needs, the solution is a bit different. If you use PuTTY (or PuTTY Tray, like me), there’s a field for Seconds between keepalives on the Connection configuration pane. Check out the image at right for the rockin’ detail.

• Rebooting After Tough Crititcism (tags: management)
• Using Outlook to Get Things Done (tags: lifehacks, productivity, software notes, windows)
• Managing Burnout (tags: management)

Each one seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe I’ll come back to the idea some day when the mood strikes or the topic is more fresh in my mind.

*delete*

• I subscribed to JungleDisk using Amazon S3 storage. It backed up about 30Gb of data (in about 10 days! ouch!) and then ran in the early morning to keep itself in sync.
• I set up an rdiff-backup script to mirror the important stuff to an external USB drive.
• I created a subversion repository for all of my installers, tools, installation CD iso images (which I created using MagicISO)
• I copied my entire media library onto a cheap, huge external SATA drive and brought it to work, which is a more secure location that my house.
• I mirrored my svn repository onto that external drive as well and set up a batch script to update it weekly.

All in all, this was a really good first effort. I was happy and felt secure, though I haven’t once had the need to use this wonderful system. I have, however, found some parts of it to be annoying. First of all, JungleDisk is SLOW. Really, really slow. Well, ok, it’s only slow to upload. It took TEN days to upload about 30Gb of data, which is about 34kb/sec. As a test, I did some uploads to servers around the country (I have friends in fun places), and averaged about 100kb/sec, so in my opinion either Amazon throttles their incoming bandwidth, which I can understand, or my route to S3 stinks. In addition, it slows my computer down when it runs. I feel like that’s really out of the question for a modern application.

These things are annoying, but they aren’t a hill to die on. What was really bothering me was the cost. I had estimated that it would cost about the same each month to use S3 as it does to use mozy.com or other similar options. I was wrong! It costs $4.95 each month for mozy, and about $7 each month for S3 with my usage. It’s not a huge difference, but it is annoying.

Back when I was looking at online storage, I tried mozy seriously and found the biggest weakness to be their Mac client, which I failed to note at the time was just freshly out of private beta. On a whim, I tried it again, still in beta but a tad newer. It still does that thing every time you start it up where it tries to scan your probable backup sets even though I don’t want it to. It does not, however, keep crashing and it is, to my delight, a LOT faster. I got my averaged upload speed when I let it run untethered. And, even when I did that, my mac barely noticed it was doing anything major with its network connection. The client lets you throttle the bandwidth use during a specific time range, so I turned it down to about 48kb/sec when home in the evenings so that the wife doesn’t notice that it’s chugging away. (She definitely noticed with JungleDisk.. low WAF to be sure!) It, therefore, uploaded the same 30Gb of data in under FOUR days. I even got to tail its log file and watch it upload each file. Exciting stuff, I tell you.

BUT, to complicate matters in the mean time, I had started using svn to store my digital images as well, so all of those lovely .svn directories were lying around, and there was no smart way to tell mozy to leave them alone. So, I devised a fairly straightforward workaround: I modified my rdiff-backup job to ignore these files and populated my mozy backup set with the rdiff’d backup set instead. I stagger the cron and mozy jobs to keep everything in sync, up to date and backed up. It works quite well, and I never have to look at it. Ever.

I do, of course, look at it every single day because I’m paranoid. I’d love to say I’ll start trusting it to just keep working, but to be honest, I like knowing for certain that my data are safe in the event of a flood, fire, EMP, etc.

I also installed the windows client at work under a different e-mail account (I only want the 2Gb free service and you can’t use both with the same account) and use it to back up my work documents. We use Acronis at work, but also use PGP whole-disk encryption and I just don’t trust that my drive won’t some day get itself all corrupted in a tizzy. Acronis fails semi-randomly and so far mozy doesn’t, so I’m not going to take any chances with stuff that’s important because, well, that’s the whole point. Besides, mozy’s windows client includes an awesome mapped drive that lets me browse right into my recent backup and grab files as needed. Seriously, when they add that feature to the mac client my backup life will be complete. That was, actually, one of the only things I really liked about JungleDisk.

So, in the end, I only changed direction slightly. I have yet to do any of the other things I needed to do for extra security, though I did lock my mac to my radiator pipes when I went away for two weeks. It made prudent sense at the time, though when I think about it now, it seems silly.

This image got me thinking about how this is allegory for bringing new ideas to old organizations. In a thankfully distant past job, I found myself in exactly this situation, trying to innovate where it was nearly impossible to do so. It’s hard when you come up against a camel - they’re hard to move when they don’t want to, but when they want to, they do, and good luck stopping them. It doesn’t matter at all how shiny the car is that you happen to be driving.

My advice to those driving cars in this post’s allegorical world is simple - find a different road. You’re not going to get the camel to leave or move on your own. If there happens to be a camel-wrangler around, you may be in luck, but they have to agree with the direction in which you want to go.

Save that sadly rare scenario, if innovation and newness is important to you, go find some newness somewhere else. I wish I had followed that advice sooner!

First, a couple of independent images.

Then, a series of three images.

I did have to modify lightbox.js a tad to give it absolute url paths for its included image files. Other than that, it’s a drop-in enhancement for image viewing.