Kev's Development Toolbox

If you’re read my posts recently, you’ll have read that my home Linux server died when it’s hard drive decided to not play anymore. Luckily I had a complete image of the machine so I could restore it, but the image was 1 year old, and subsequent database backups had not been successfully copied onto the Zip drive, meaning I lost 1 year of database changes.

Starting with new drives, I decided to investigate a RAID 1 setup with duplicate drives, which appears to be working well so far, although I haven’t deliberately removed a drive to test for sure that the mirroring is working, but I will test this shortly. To avoid losing backup files in the future, I purchased the Online file Folder service from GoDaddy and have mounted the drive using WebDAV over HTTPS. Incredibly, the mounted drive just appears as it is a local drive, and through my weekly cron backup script I can copy the back up files directly to this mounted drive. Very cool.

Instructions on setting up davfs2 for the WebDAV support on Ubuntu is here. The instructions are for box.net, but they work with GoDaddy’s Online File Folder service too.

After one of the craziest mergers of the dot com era, Time Warner are cutting their losses with AOL and are going to spin it off as a separate standalone company. This can only mean the end for AOL at this point, unless it manages to reinvent itself overnight.

A-ha! So it’s not psychological – wiggling your mouse on Windows does help Windows ‘do its thing’, as confirmed by this Microsoft support article for when retrieving data from Oracle with Excel: KB168702.

Here’s the all important quote:

If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to
Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data
has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

Awesome. If you jiggle it around harder does the query execute faster?

Ballmer is currently presenting at the All Things D conference this morning and has just started talking about the re-branding of Live Search as ‘Bing’. news.com have a live blog as it happens, here.

I’ve never really understood rebranding. You take the same product that no-one is interested in, give it a new name, and now you have… the same product that no-one is interested in with a different name? Surely Ballmer with the billions of Microsoft cash he has at hand can come up with something better than that?