Core Dump

It’s a classic tale – a computer person who knows better, knows he (or she) should have a backup, but doesn’t. The results are often quite tragic. Until recently, I was one of those people. I knew I needed a backup system, but I just didn’t get around to making one. And really, without a backup, you’re just counting the time until a disaster occurs.

Part of the problem with setting up a backup system is, frankly, laziness. Backups have traditionally been somewhat labor intensive (or, alternatively, expensive). Generally speaking, my (realistic) options were:

Do a weekly (!!!) backup to DVDs. Not practical because, frankly, I’ve got a shitload of data and it would take dozens of DVDs to hold it all. And even though they’re cheap, DVDs are not free. And really, who has the time to sit and burn dozens of 4 GB DVDs on a weekly (or even monthly) basis? Not me!

Buy an external hard drive (or two). Not practical because hard drives still cost money and aside from a bit of redundancy, I’d really like to have my data be “safe.” Which means off-site. Which means using the trick of buying 2 (or more!) of the exact same type of hard drive and swapping them out on a regular basis, with one stored off-site somewhere safe. This is also not practical because… where am I going to store it? And who has the time to swap disks out all the time, then drive somewhere to keep them safe? (The “classic” alternative, the tape backup, has the same pitfalls as this hard drive solution, and is even more expensive.)

Backup data online. Until very recently, this was not practical because of 2 reasons: #1 – the Internet was too slow and #2 – you couldn’t buy storage space online at a reasonable cost. Thankfully, that has now changed, thanks to – you guessed it – Mozy.

Basically, I chose Mozy for 3 reasons:

1. Secure backup
2. Fair price
3. Runs as a background process

So far, I’m pretty impressed. The setup is easy and the configuration is simple as well – but there are options if you want them (as I do). I like the fact that I can set Mozy up to run at a reduced speed during the day, and to stop backing up if my CPU usage goes above a certain threshold. And it just keeps running in the background, pretty much no matter what I’m doing, which is nice. And so far, I haven’t noticed any performance hit because of it – it’s like it’s not even there.

Of course, my backup is estimated to take about 7 days to complete – but then again, I am backing up a rather large amount of data! (Mozy puts it at about 26 GB – that’s 26 GB of photos, videos, music, documents, 10 years of email, programming projects, game data, and a few other things I can’t quite remember.)

Still, there’s something strangely comforting about knowing my data will be backed up soon. Even if my house burns to the ground, I’ll be able to recover pretty much everything – and that’s what a good backup is supposed to provide.

So, for $4.99/month (which gives you unlimited storage space to back up as much or as little as you like), if you’ve got a fast Internet connection and a lot of data you don’t want to lose, I’d highly recommend Mozy. Because not having a backup can be a lot more expensive – and believe me when I say you’ll really only appreciate that after you’ve lost years of irreplaceable data.

Don’t wait – backup today!

Techdirt: On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents:

This short series of posts starts out really well – by quoting (of all people) Thomas Jefferson:

“Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

The implication of course being that the founders did see the problems with giving exclusive control (ownership) of ideas to people (or companies) willy-nilly, and the need for balance.

A really good examination of the subject, and well worth the read, IMHO.

Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance

A brilliant post, one that points out something that we (as programmers) often miss. I mean, seriously, of course we’d measure performance objectively – but our users don’t see it that way.

And as an aside, I always wondered why the file copy in Vista seemed so slow, and it turns out (for me, at least), that it’s because “the copy dialog is not dismissed until the write-behind thread has committed the data to disk.”

The question now (at least for Vista) is “where do we go from here?” And I don’t know if something like Service Pack 1 is going to be able to address it all. Still, that doesn’t make the lessons any less valuable to the rest of us.

From Painless Bug Tracking @ Joel on Software:

If you don’t specify what you expected to see, I may not understand why this is a bug. The splash screen has blood on it. So what? I cut my fingers when I was coding it. What did you expect? Ah, you say that the spec required no blood! Now I understand why you consider this a bug.

This sort of stuff cracks me up, but you may need to be a software developer for it to be funny.

You may have heard of this new-fangled thing from Microsoft called Silverlight. Well, I decided to take a look at it the other day, and when I tried to install it, I was greeted with this unfriendly screen:

Well, actually it’s not very unfriendly, but it certainly was unhelpful. Why did the install fail? Why couldn’t Microsoft Silverlight be installed on my computer?

I had to click on “More information” to find out that the reason the install failed was because I already had Silverlight installed.

Fair enough, but why couldn’t it just tell me that? Isn’t detecting that the software you’re installing is already installed a basic function of installation programs?

It turns out that I had gotten Silverlight somehow when I was browsing Microsoft’s website in Internet Explorer – which of course lets you install Silverlight right then and there. When I later went back to the site in Firefox (my browser of choice after all), it prompted me to install Silverlight again – I guess Silverlight doesn’t work in Firefox? So I downloaded the setup file, and the result was the screen you just saw.

In this day and age, there really is no excuse for this sort of thing. The installer clearly knew that Silverlight was already installed on my computer – the “More information” link took me directly to a page that told me so, so the information was there. Why it didn’t just tell me is beyond me. As far as a user experience goes, it would be better to get a screen that says “You’ve already installed Silverlight” instead of a scary screen that says “Installation failed.”  I mean, “failed” is such a strong word… a scary word.

Microsoft should know better – it does know better – and I can only hope that someone over there will think twice about the user experience they’ve created.

On the other hand, if this sort of behavior looks familiar – like, maybe, it is something your installer does – you might want to think twice about your user experience, too!