Archive for February, 2008

Yesterday all of us went over to the mall to get my daughter’s Easter pictures done. Afterwards, we went to lunch, and then my wife wanted some new shoes.  So I drove back through the lot and dropped her off while I went to look for a spot in the overcrowded parking lot.  I turned up a row and saw that a car was about to pull out, but a truck was waiting for the spot.  I had to stop and wait because of them.  As I watched, the truck pulled forward a little bit to back in and right behind him, some jerk in his little red sports car pulled into the spot.  He swerved around the truck and parked.  The guy in the truck rolled down his window as said he was gonna park there, and although I didn’t catch what the other guy said, he showed him “the bird” and got out of his car, locked it, and began to walk away.

I couldn’t believe that someone that rude existed.  I looked at the truck driver and we both were kind of in shock.  I almost keyed his car just out of spite for doing what he did, but though better of it. I never did get a spot to park.

This is an interesting video. It was done by a guy named Kafir Alalazoo, who’s pseudonym in his own words is “derived from the Arabic word ‘kafir’, which means ‘infidel’, and the word ‘alalazoo’, which is an ancient Greek military term, meaning ‘to raise a war cry’. “ The video itself is well done, albeit a bit paranoid from time to time, but it will definitely make you think about the current state of affairs in this country and what the hell we are thinking.

Thanks to Blackfive for once again finding an interesting counterpoint to the mainstream media.

As usual, the video is after the jump…

You may think of sunsets as something nice to look at, but if you have an older cell phone or a home alarm system, there’s one coming up on Monday that may not be so pretty.

That day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will let mobile operators shut down their analog networks. It’s called the “analog sunset” because those AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) networks, which were first deployed in the 1980s and brought cellular service to millions of Americans, will finally disappear behind the digital networks that serve almost all mobile phones in use today.

The biggest U.S. mobile operators, AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, will close down their analog networks that day. At the same time, AT&T will turn off its first digital network, which uses TDMA (Time-Division Multiple Access) technology. (Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA don’t have analog networks.) Calls to some small, rural mobile operators indicated that most of them plan to shut down AMPS, too.
Washington Post

I figured this was kind of important, even though almost no one uses AMPS or TDMA anymore. Come February 18, 2008 there will be no more analog cellphone coverage in the U.S. for all intents and purposes.  However, since I kept an analog cellphone in my car for emergencies (because you could always hit an AMPS tower anywhere), I figured someone else out there might be in the same boat and want to know it won’t work, even for 911 come Monday.  Lucky for me, I have some old prepaid phones lying around to replace my venerable Nokia in my roadside emergency kit.

Yes, more Geekness, but this time hopefully useful to someone.  In my boredom, I decided to create a backup script for my important Linux directories.  This way hopefully next time I upgrade my OS or experiment a little too wildly, I will have backups of all the stuff I trashed.  I figured it would be easy enough to do.  I mean all I really had to do was copy the directories with all the attributes and permissions to my external drive.  In Linux its as easy as cp -a

.  So I generated a simple little script that copied my home directory to the backup drive.  Then I discovered I need to test for whether or not the external drive was mounted.  Turned out that was pretty easy to do with test -d.

Then things got complicated.  Mind you, I know diddly about BASH scripting.  I wanted it to be interactive when ran manually so that I would know exactly what was happening at what point.  So I researched and discover read.  So I had a great little backup script, but I wanted to add directories that had root access.  So I had to test for root access and abort if not root (later I will just run it as root). So I had to research how to test for uid. Finally, and as it turned out the most frustrating part, was determining backups older than Xdays and deleting them.  I tried a bunch of complicated find commands, but in the end all I needed was a simple date -d “7 days ago” string since the directories are structured by date in the backup.

Anyway, in the end, the script turned into a bunch of if:then loops, but it seems to work well.  So I figured I’d post it up here in case anyone was looking for such a thing.  I also created an automatic running version of the script that requires no user-input and logs output to a file so I could run it in a cron easily.  Anyone know how to test for whether or not the script is running from a cron or not? 

Backup script version 0.000000001 after the jump (hopefully not eaten by the CMS) .  I’ll put the automatic one in the discussion forum.  Feel free to edit and improve upon these as you see fit, and if you have any suggestions – suggest!