rsync is your friend!

With compression, efficiency, and resume-able, it took only several minutes to shrink-send 700MB.

Background: a website running on a dual-core Atom server all the way over in the US needs to be migrated over to a faster host elsewhere. My several attempts at compressing the files with tar -zcf failed with ‘Process killed’ – presumably too much processing time was being allocated to this one task. Rsync, as well as being a synchronising superstar, is fantastic at transferring large number of files. I also use rsync to pull manual updates over to live sites (leaving bazaar for the test site).

Caveat: both sides need access to the rsync command with SSH access (or a running rsync daemon). The more files needed, the more free RAM needed – approximately 100MB for every million files

Install/update greasemonkey, install/update the iplayer script, browse to iPlayer, choose a film, toggle it on, and press F11 to set your browser to full screen

I have only tested this in FF3.6 but assuming xPath support is consistant among Firefox versions it should work as long as you have greasemonkey installed.

@See the original post.

It seems whilst TortoiseSVN accepts the usual svn+ssh://myhost/repository/path URI (and even the svn+ssh://name@myhost/repository/path variation), this assumes that SSH is running on the usual port 22. I have tried (using port 333 as an example) svn+ssh://myhost:333/repository/path and svn+ssh+333://myhost/repository/path, however these will cause a host not found error.

It turns out that TortoiseSVN accepts a session name in place of ‘myhost‘, and the session name can include characters such as “:” so this would be one way of making the innocent looking svn+ssh://myhost:333/ work!

i.e. create a PuTTY session named ‘new-sess:ion2′ using the SSH protocol connecting to port 333 – and this should work in TortoiseSVN:

svn+ssh://new-sess:ion2/repository/path

– or a session named mysession:333 –

svn+ssh://mysession:333/repository/path

Now thankfully I do not have to be at home to view log information!

Reference: http://svn.haxx.se/tsvnusers/archive-2007-01/0272.shtml

psmisc Posted Jan 20th 2010 1:39AM

@Abe

I was in China a few years back, and I was surprised at how well people dressed. In fact, demand for name brand clothes were so high that they cost more in China than in North America, even though a lot of them were made there. It was a cliche for a secretary to spend many months of salary on a designer bag.

I always thought culturally the Chinese are the Italians of Asia. They are picky on clothes and food, like saving faces, and are loud in restaurants. Japanese are the Germans, punctual, precise, and kinky. Koreans are the Russians, melancholic, serious, and dramatic. Indians are the Greeks. Lively, passionate, and along with China, one of the remaining civilizations of the classical era.

Cultural observations are rather intriguing…

“Home is never far from our thoughts, though. How many times have you looked forward for months to a holiday, only to find that on day three you’re already dreaming of your own bed? But when you return, the process starts all over again.”

Mark Mason in The Times, July 20th

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxi6QDwQyLU

Credits to Cassetteboy.

“According to the German national socio-economic database, vengeful people are more likely to be unemployed, have fewer friends and are less satisfied with their lives than those who occasionally let a bad turn go unpunished.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/27/german_revenge_inefficient/

“After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.”

Why TV lost: http://www.paulgraham.com/convergence.html

I thought about connecting online through the phone in the past, but there was a need to carry around a USB cable plus the needing to install a CD full of software to do so – kind of uselss if you don’t have the CD on you when you need it.

There is a way however; I found this sometime back whilst searching for a way to connect wirelessly online on my laptop without needing to install the 100-odd MB of software that Sony Ericsson seems to demand. Without access to a decent WiFi connection, the alternative was the phone browser – but who wants to browse the full web via a phone browser?! Opera Mini does the job for short runs, but a computer screen wins hands down if I have the choice.

I will tell you how.

I’ve managed to get this working successfully on my sister’s Lenovo, and my Vaio laptop – both had bluetooth built in (YMMV), with three different phones – a SE P1i, SE C905, and a Nokia 6500 slide, so it is definitely not an isolated ability – AFAIK it is part of some GSM standard. Don’t count on iPhones being able to do this though (correct me if I am wrong though).

Now, first thing to do is to pair up the phone with your computer. The Dial-up networking service will have to be enabled for that bluetooth connection; again YMMV – in my case, I just checked a few boxes.

Once that’s sorted, this is where the magic lies: you create a new Dial-Up Connection:

• With XP, this is achieved by going to the Network Connections, and clicking on Create a new connection in the task panel. The New Connection dialog pops up – follow this with “Connect to the Internet”, “Set up my connection manually”, “Connect using a dial-up modem”
• on Vista, open up the Network and Sharing Center window, then click on ‘Set up a connection or network’ in the Task panel. Again, a dialog should appear with the ‘Set up a dial-up connection’ in the list somewhere. Select this.

A list of possible dial-up devices should appear. If the bluetooth pairing was setup properly, you should see a ‘Standard Modem over Bluetooth link’ or some variation of this. If you’ve paired multiple phones, then there might be more entries. Once you’ve got the right connection for your phone, proceed through the wizard.

The only detail you need to enter here is the phone number for this connection. Username and password does not matter AFAIK – I personally leave it blank – but the connection name should be meaningful.

This is the important part: the telephone number should be in this format: *99***x#  where x is the number that corresponds to the data account ID. Normally I try *99***2# first, then *99***3#  as these seem to correspond to Orange’s GPRS  / Internet accounts – *99***1# is usually the MMS account on my phones, but it might be the internet on yours.

This is a special number that the phone would recognise as a command to connect to the data accounts.

Once that’s set up, test dial it – Windows should confirm with you if it was successfully or not. Quick google test should confirm everything afterwards.

Obviously, running with 3G enabled is much nicer, but old phones or tariffs with 2.5G GPRS only can still do it, albeit at speeds harking back to the days of actual dial up modems. Pair this up with a Three £5/month phone internet add on, and that’s a new mobile road warrior in the making!

*unfortunately for me, I don’t have a spare unlocked 3G-enabled phone since my P1 was stolen. Such is life when you find a good thing, and it slaps you back in the face with a taunt.