Monthly Archive for August, 2007

casualactivist.org

Published
by
John
on 8/19/2007
in general
. 0 Comments

My friend Mary has started a new blog, casualactivist.org.

I think that tackling the great problems of today would be a lot easier if we found a way to make helping accessible to everyone, not just the brave few who are willing/able to throw everything to the wind and devote themselves entirely to a cause. … At casualactivist.org, I write about my attempts at incremental improvement, focusing on the easy, practical things.

Which may or may not pique your interest, but go and read a couple of entries, and you just might get hooked on Mary’s thoughtful, hilarious commentary on her conscious consumer adventures. Like in thoughts on chocolate:

It has been estimated that more than 40% of the world’s chocolate is manufactured using west African cocoa harvested by young boys lured away from their homes to be sold as slaves.

[snip]

I went to Whole Foods this week (ahhh, delicious research) to buy some chocolate from Endangered Species and Rapunzel, two of the companies most celebrated in the industry for their social responsibility. … I will try not to get too enthusiastic about my sweet tooth in the context of child labor, but suffice it to say that I have seen heaven, and it is glorious.

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Backing up my home directory using rdiff-backup

Published
by
John
on 8/7/2007
in general
. 6 Comments

A while back I wrote about my backups scripts I made with rsync. I have since refined my scripts, and am now using rdiff-backup instead, which creates versioned backups. I delete backups older than 6 weeks, so I can roll back to any backup I've made in the last 6 weeks. I would prefer if I could specify the frequency of the versions... for example, make a backup a day for the past 45 days, and hold onto a version per month for every month before 45 days, forever. However, rdiff-backup does not support this. There are several hand-rolled solutions out there using bash scripts and rsync, however I prefer the plug-and-play ease of use offered by rdiff-backup.

My new dailybackup script is below.

[click here for plain text]
BASH:
  1. #!/bin/sh
  2.  
  3. ARCHIVEROOT=/Volumes/backup/backup ;
  4.  
  5. ###########################################
  6. ## Home Directory #########################
  7. ###########################################
  8. SOURCEDIR=/Users/john/ ;
  9. ARCHIVENAME=PowerBookHomeDirectory-rdiff-backup ;
  10.  
  11. rdiff-backup \
  12.     -v4 \
  13.     --print-statistics \
  14.     --exclude-sockets \
  15.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR"tmp/" \
  16.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR"Library/Caches/" \
  17.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR"Library/Safari/Icons" \
  18.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR"Desktop/downloads/" \
  19.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR".Trash/" \
  20.     --exclude $SOURCEDIR"Movies/Democracy/" \
  21.     $SOURCEDIR $ARCHIVEROOT/$ARCHIVENAME ;
  22.  
  23. rdiff-backup --print-statistics --force --remove-older-than 6W $ARCHIVEROOT/$ARCHIVENAME

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In case you thought that society was running out of ways to sell things…

Published
by
John
on 8/1/2007
in general
. 7 Comments

Here is my sister Natalie at a gastroenterology conference, posing with two colleagues, a man in an 8-foot anthropomorphized enema suit (none other than EneMan), and a 4-foot cardboard anthropomorphized colon polyp, in front of a backdrop depicting our nation's capitol.

Natalie with colleagues, enema, polyp, and capitol

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