I ought to dedicate this blog post to git and rsync: The hard drive on my netbook died this week. I haven’t attempted to recover anything from the disk yet, but of that which is most important I figure I haven’t lost anything at all. And that’s due in no small part to git and rsync.
All of my configuration files, at least those I care about, had been added to a git repository. And most of the binaries I wanted to preserve had been rsynced to my server.
Not all of it though, which is a shame, but it shouldn’t be hard to replace what I’ve lost. Especially if I can get the old hard drive to function just one more time, just long enough to at least make a list of what it is I’m missing. The rest of the disk, well, it’s spring, perhaps a spring cleaning was in order.
So all is not lost, and looking beyond this setback, I did learn some other things this week (except for the fact that I need to become better at performing backups) such as:
- mplayer will work rather well without X:
mplayer -vo fbdev </path/to/movie> - how to revert the uncommitted changes of a single file in a git repository:
git checkout -- <filename>
Also, quite some time ago, I went around thinking about how to automatically track my working time, and while this isn’t exactly like what I had in mind (I would probably just have created a daemon which somehow fetched the window title of the currently active window from X, and did so randomly 6 times per hour (not deterministically enough to be able to cheat the system).
And some assorted links which may or may not be of any particular use for anyone:
- It would seem like A/B testing is not optimal for testing web designs
- Who needs net neutrality anyway, right?
- As you sow, so you shall reap
- Programming is a culture, couldn’t have said it better myself
- Mental note to self
- The Zeitgeist framework seems like a pretty cool idea, although feel that it might operate on too high a level for my tastes. If it just worked on file access and time, and not stuff like email (would it work with any client, or do you need to use “certified” clients?) or what websites have been visited (although that could be useful)
- Funny, I thought people were innocent until proven guilty, and how can you be guilty of something which hasn’t happened?
- Making shit work is everyone’s job
:wq
