It Rains In Triplicate

I sit in my office listening to music, as I’m prone to do, while working on something or another (in this case, reading a book on Spring programming, because I’ll get to play at being a software engineer and not a scientist for a few days this week) at the end of the day.

Right now, iTunes has decided that shuffle means play lots of R.E.M., or at least it feels that way.

I am struck by how much I liked REM. I have distinct memories of being an angst-ful teenager, listening to tons of REM, and how the lyrics and music identified with me.

And it isn’t that I dislike this music now, I just don’t feel the first order connection with it, anymore.

But I continue to listen to it, because there is a sense of … something. Not nostalgia, because there is no sense of affection for my teenage years, but a vague familiarity, I guess.

Anyway, back to reading.

After some tweaking:

sudo rsync –verbose –progress –stats –recursive –times –exclude “.AppleDouble” –exclude “*DS_Store*” /mnt/media/content /mnt/media-backup/content

I’m impressed. Screen sharing is a hard problem, and can be worked around often through other things (ssh, remote management consoles, etc), but sometimes it is just nice to take control of the whole machine.

Some key pieces that are done especially well:

• changing resolutions, size, etc, leverages the same low-bandwidth unfocused view effect as the iphone. It means that you get immediate feedback over lower bandwidth links, while waiting for the bandwidth to catch up to render the screen in detail
• hitting the zoom button (the green button on the top left) turns the screen into a live thumbnail. Really useful for monitoring more than one screen.
• auto-scale for your screen size. It means that screen sharing my 2 screen imac to my macbook actually works
• the ability to turn off auto-scale, if I want more detail
• intelligent handling of multiple screens. I can choose to view the first or second screen of my imac, or both screens, with appropriate scaling

Windows Remote Desktop should copy these features. Going back to the RDC makes me appreciate the polish even more.

Once upon a time, I had a core duo mac mini hooked up to my keyboard running Logic Express and the like. Since then, I’ve rearranged my office so that my keyboard sits next to my desk, and is hooked up to my iMac. As a side effect, it means I only need one chair in my office, allows me to actual get to the bottom shelf of my bookcase, and moves my table away from my left elbow, making sure the ergonomics police don’t come after me.

The side effect is that I have a spare mac mini, that I will hook up to my living room (SD) TV and use it to access my iTunes audio and video library.

My constraints:

• All media files remain on the networked server
• Should not require another box to run itunes, i.e., we’re not streaming from another machine, the box will run itunes with its own configuration
• While the box’s itunes configuration / library will not be the same as my desktop’s, there should be easy way to refresh it from my desktop

So, my plan:

• install leopard on the mini, screen sharing will be helpful
• mount my itunes drive
• create a directory on the media drive that acts as the itunes directory for the mini
• clone my desktop’s itunes directory for the mini

To update the mini’s itunes directory, I would just copy over the itunes xml documents from the desktop.

So I have a RAID 5 on my network that contains all my accumulated media (music, movies, and tv). At last count, it was about 600G of content, including almost 50 days of music and about 20 days of video.

The drives itself are pretty safe, as a firewire enclosure containing 3 750G drives, attached to a Fedora Linux box, running a software RAID 5. It is a decently well tested and supported configuration.

But, it needs to be backed up. Both locally cloned and off-site copied. To locally clone it, I had been copying it to a Lacie 1GB drive attached to my iMac, which is an expensive and slow network operation. My new approach is to use my Buffalo Terastation, which I had been using for machine backups, as it was way too slow for use as the media drive (its RAID 5 implementation is software based, and a real dog). The Lacie drive will attach to my Mac Mini as the house TARDIS (time machine drive).

So (and partially for my own memory), I’m doing, from my linux server:

	sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.42.20/media-backup /mnt/media-backup/

	sudo rsync --verbose --progress --stats --recursive --times --delete /mnt/media/content /mnt/media-backup/content

… and let it sit for a while. It doesn’t seem to impact using the media drive.

I need to verify that the backup worked and to exclude out a bunch of artifacts in the content, such as .AppleDouble files and the like.

I actually took some vacation time today, since my time off bank has reached the red zone where it would stop accruing within the next couple of weeks.

Of course, a day off means that I only had to call into two meetings, instead of my usual 5 or so.

But, in the time off I did take, I managed to accomplish:

• organizing most of a bookcase in the basement
• organizing (make sure I had ripped, enter into delicious monster) a whole mess of CDs
• putting away a metric buttload of laundry
• re-string (without snapping a string) and tune my guitar
• organizing most of my home office (still need to tackle the closet and bookcase)

that I have 7 full surge protectors and 3 UPSs in my home office?

Is the “job” in last night’s Dirty Jobs really yak shaving?

I’m going to repurpose my Buffalo Terastation (4×250M RAID 0/1/5 network drive) as my house Time Machine drive and rename it “TARDIS”.

I bet I’m not the only one.

Key feature that I failed to do on the latest run, size needs to be set to 592×336 (basically, less than 800×400, I think), or else it won’t play.