Today being Valentines Day, I stopped by the store on my way home to
buy Shauna a card and a small gift. Back when we were dating by mail many
years ago (more than one decade, but less than two when I was working at First Interstate Bank in Las Vegas) I once sent Shauna a card that said:
You are the twinkie in my brown bag lunch of life
She thought that was a very sweet thing for me to have said. So from
time to time I'll buy her a twinkie as a reminder that she still is the
twinkie in my brown bag lunch of life. (Tonight I bought a twinkie and
a card! And even asked for a paper bag at checkout instead of a plastic one.
I'm such a romantic...)
So this evening as we were getting read to have dinner Meghan and Caleb
saw that I'd given her something and they asked "what did Dad get you?"
"A card and a box of twinkies—you can have one after dinner." "A twinkie?
What's that? What's a twinkie?"
I guess Hostess would probably
be very disappointed with our parenting skills. Me, I'll just attribute
our children's ignorance to a profound lack
of TV watching.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, February 14,
2006
at 20:02
98 comments
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A friend of mine was called in to a small architectural firm that he'd
done some consulting work for in the past because of a delicate situation.
It seems one of their employees had been clicking & dragging in Windows
and had mistakingly trashed a lot of the companies project files that were
shared via Samba from a Linux server. Oops.
Turns out the company doesn't have any recent backups because the
employee who had been responsible for making backups had died
(unexpectedly) of a heart-attack last year. Double oops. :-(
My friend was able to recover a lot of their data by using
The Coroner's
Toolkit, but it was a fairly tedious process. One would have hoped
this company had learned their lesson...
But a few days later someone else accidentally deleted other files.
Triple oops.
When I heard this story I asked "gee, what's it going to take to keep
these guys from repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot?" My consultant
friend could stand to make a pretty penny undeleting files for them, but
obviously all parties involved could make better use of their time.
So I said "hey, you know... in Unix a file isn't deleted until it's
hard link count goes to zero." Suddenly an obvious solution materialized
in my mind. Write a program that monitors a particular set of directories.
For each unique file it finds make a hard link to it in another location.
(The only caveat being that hard links cannot span partitions or file
systems.) If you built up a database of known files you could easily
determine which files had been deleted and easily restore them by making
a hard link back.
This solution seemed particularly elegant in that you could also track
when a file had last been seen and then, if it hadn't been restored in
a certain time period, delete the "backup" hard link, thus freeing the
disk space. If this architectural firm had this type of system then
my friend could quickly restore files for them in a matter of seconds as
long as they noticed their mistake within (say) a month.
So at this point it was pure vaporware. (There may well be utilities
out there, commercial or OSS that do this, but I've never actually looked
for them.) I was just thinking outloud.
Next thing I knew a day or two later I got a call: "the company wants to
buy this software. They'd be willing to pay $495 for it if you can create
it quickly." I said OK as long as I got to keep the copyright.
Wow. My first contract for pure vaporware!
So last Saturday I wrote fguard (short for file guard). It
was a 500-or so line Tcl script that uses the
Unix find and ln (for a lot of the heavy lifting) and keeps a
database of known files in sqlite. Two
cron jobs later (one to do daily scans, and another to expire deleted files
after they've gone thirty days without being restored) and the company should
feel less pain next time they shoot themselves in the foot.
At this point I should probably write take the time to write documentation and
release it (if there's interest; it's really such a basic idea...)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, February 27,
2006
at 19:47
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Last night Shauna & I discovered a page of notes that Meghan had
written for herself last Wednesday when we'd gone to the
Utah
Sports Hall of Fame award dinner to see Shauna's father receive that
organizations Distinguished Service Award.
Meghan signed her name at the bottom and dated it "Wed. 2-23-06 [sic]
@ Grandfather Cleverly's house." A postscript reads "Note: use while writing"
and another "I was doing this while Grandpa wrote the book
`Dorothy'."
I'm probably just a proud parent, but this seems like good advice to
remember regardless of age. What follows is Meghan's advice retaining
her original spelling and punctuation but presenting it in a numbered HTML
list:
- Think about what you know.
- Take your time as you write.
- (Don't hurry through it. :-)
- From time to time review what you have written.
- Make sure you spell words correctly, your sentences make sense.
- Make sure you use the right punctuation.
- Beginning of setence should start with a capital, your proper nouns are
capitalized.
- Make sure there are spaces in between words and make sure you can read your writing.
- What you would usaly do is when you are finished with your book read
through it and think what it is about then name your book. (You don't have to
do it this way, but it is easier to do.)
- Let someone else read your work before you send it to the publisher.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, February 27,
2006
at 20:33
110 comments
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