I recently came across a blogpost that explained one hell of an OpenSolaris feature, and a killer ZFS feature on the desktop : Time Slider. It is basically backup snapshots integrated into Nautilus. By moving a slider, you can browse throughout your snapshot backups. Screencast available !


Now, Glen Brunette developed the glue to combine the Amazon S3 cloud storage , encryption and Time Slider to provide a really neat way to backup your system. With this method, it will be easy (hey, it´s 0.1 ... but works really good at the moment) to have an automated backup at an offsite location.

I upgraded Gundabad (my main workstation) to Jaunty. Smooth upgrade, as usual in the last two years. I'm well over the stage where I get excited about 'new' features in Ubuntu or Gnome, but I must say I'm generally pleased with the fast boot times.


I upgraded my eeePC too. I had to create a separate lvol for the /var/cache/apt directory, as my root filesystem is way too small to keep the new filesets. The fast boot times are more pronounced here, I guess Jaunty boots under 20 secs ! Unfortunately, this fast behaviour didn't extend up to the Gnome desktop. I noticed lots of lag, and it seemed I got hit by this Intel bug. Upgrading to the kernel, located on http://people.ubuntu.com/~apw/lp349314-jaunty/, gives a better performance, but not yet that of Intrepid.

Ik ben al sinds jaar en dag een koffiedrinker. Ik heb er dan toch ook snel 2 à 3 kopjes van nodig om me op kruissnelheid te krijgen. De beste koffie maak je mi nog steeds met een gewone percolator. Nadeel daarvan is dat je tijd daarvoor moet hebben, en 's ochtends is iets te krap om tien minuten te wachten tot je koffie doorgeprutteld is. Vandaar het succes van de Senseo - koffie binnen de minuut - en dus ook hier ten huize binnengebracht. Maar lekkere koffie ? Nee, geef me dan maar een gewoon bakje koffie.
Sinds kort zou ik de overstap willen maken naar een machine dat ook Latte's en Macchiato's aankan. De meest logische stap is natuurlijk de Senseo Latte. Maar 180 euro in de winkel is natuurlijk veel geld voor matige koffie. Plus het feit dat er melk bij te pas komt, dus dat je eigenlijk na ieder kopje koffie een schoonmaakbeurt aan je been hebt.
Nee, dan lijkt me de Lattissima van Delonghi iets beter : gebaseerd op de (wat ik me laten wijsmaken heb) veel betere Nespresso cups, dus meer mogelijke smaken. Ook de kwaliteit van de Machiatto lijkt me stukken beter. Maar de Nespresso cups vind je natuurlijk weer niet in de winkel, en moet je dus via zo'n onhandig webformulier bestellen. Ook een nadeel van de Lattissima, is dat 'em toch een goeie 100 euro duurder is. Daarvoor wil ik dan ook wel echt het verschil in koffie kwaliteit kunnen smaken.
Iemand ervaring met beide koffiemachines ?
Update : Keuze is gemaakt !

It's official : the typical smell of rain after a long period of drought, is C₁₂H₂₂O or also called geosmin, and produced by mass dying bacteria.

Many eeePC installations recommend some precaution while formatting the internal SSD drives with ext3. Most articles warn that the continuous writes of journaled file systems or swap spaces might trash eventually the drive. I too chose a setup with ext2 and no swap partition on my netbook.


Robert Penz tries to dispel some of the prejudices around SSD drives, where he states that with a 2 million cycle at 50MB/sec you'd still get a life cycle of 20 years.


Interesting read, but I don't buy all arguments - he makes some good remarks, though I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle :
- first of all, Robert probably accepts figures from enterprise SSD disks, which are a different quality level than the regular SSD drives found in netbooks.
- I really would like to see results from writing over the same block over again and again, a life cycle of 20 years is imho in those conditions impossible.
- mis-configurations can fill up logfiles pretty quickly, so yes, netbooks can experience heavy writes too.


Does it makes such an overall difference ? Hell, SSD drives are pretty fast, so fsck's are also. My Linux boxes are pretty stable, I still haven't seen my netbook crash, forcing a fsck, despite some moments of heavy usage or sudden battery drains. If I would be forced to reinstall my eeePC, I still would go for the same setup. Maybe a swap partition would be handy, but an additional 1GB disk space on 20GB is a nice tradeoff for some memory gain.

TSM 6.1 was released some weeks ago, but I didn't had any chance yet to test this out. Many things have changed in the backup flagship of IBM, so time for a quick glance. First the bad news :

• TSM isn't available on 32bit Linux, and at this time only for 64bit SLES. No word yet if RHEL will be supported in the future.


• the TSM downloads are hefty, ranging from 2 to 5 GB ! So be prepared for some long download times. Many of the packages are replaced by installation suites. TSM also contains a full blown DB2 9.5, the reporting software comes with ITM. Lots of software integration with different IBM solutions, so your procurement division might have lots of fun figuring out the licensing of these software clusters.


• All installations are performed by software installation wizards, which behave stupidly. I tried the installation on AIX, but it kept failing on AIX prereqs, like the AIX Technology Level, and some APARs. The reporting software behaves in the same moronic way. In despair I turned to a Windows 2003 in VMware, where I had more luck in installing everything.

More info later on TSM itself, but I noticed that data dedup is present, but under the form of a separate housekeeping job. You might provide some extensive testing into your TSM 6.1 environment to see if the performance load of D3 doesn't level out the performance gain of D3 in other housekeeping jobs.


TSM now also contains a default reporting, based on ITM. Reporting alone is a download of 2.2GB, containing ISC, ITM and DB2. You can monitor & report about other TSM instances, even 5.5 versions. The reports are pretty basic, but if you're used to TSM Reporter, this might be a nice addition. Basic reporting contains stuff like backup jobs, schedules, database size and distributions of the number of objects inspected vs backed up. Still no real competitor towards professional TSM reporting suites like EMC Data Protection Advisor or Aptare Backup Manager.

I've spent last Wednesday in Prague, Czechia, to see if we could assist our colleagues from CSOB in moving their myriad of backup solutions towards one global environment. I really liked the technical discussions, and it's always fun to discuss different solutions with enthusiast people.
We didn't had the chance to stay longer in Prague, but it sure looks interesting enough for a longer visit.

If you're a frequent flyer, this might be handy : Luchtzak.be has a nice information page of SN Brussels Airlines & Thomas Cook Airlines, offering seat maps of their different airplane models. That way, you know immediately what seat you got, and if there's need to log in to the website to change seats.
The site also offers other pages, like Airline Meals alike, with some food information & pictures.

USAtoday has a nice flash presentation, showing the growth of the International Space Station (IIS for short), put against a timeline, and showing an explanation for each module that is being used.

Whoever bought some paint, already knows this : every color has a name, and thanks to chir.ag, now you know it too ! Can you find the colors matching names like "Sahara", "Zombie" or "Underage Pink" ?