RasterWeb!
(consider it cc:by)
I wanted to draw some headphones, but I think they may look like Volkswagen Beetles leaving skid marks… or maybe balloons of Volkswagen Beetles on strings… or something. Do these even look anything like headphones!?
Enjoy!
As I get more and more used to Ubuntu and using apt-get I figured I should start keeping some notes. (btw, did you know that in the old days we had to compile everything!? Sheesh!)
apt-get kept crapping out on me with errors, some failed install I believe. This seemed to fix it:
cd /var/cache/apt/archives sudo rm -rf ./* sudo mkdir partial sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Yes, sudo apt-get update is in there twice. You may only need once, but twice shouldn’t hurt.
You may also have to look for trouble in:
cd /var/cache/debconf sudo rm -rf ./*
Warning: Unless you understand what rm -rf does, don’t type it!. It is a destroyer of files. Make a backup if needed. While these are cache files, and it should be harmless to delete them, remember that rm has no undo command.
Also, I’m running Ubuntu on an old G4 PowerBook as a low-power server (thanks to Dave from Kernel Design.) I’ve only had a few problems with the old “powerpc-linux-gnu” so far, mostly involving finding a BOINC client that will work. The typical LAMP stack is good, and the DAViCal install was painless.
This is what I tend to use for a simple MySQL database backup script… I wanted to post this so I can look it up when I need it. There are probably better ways to do this (tell me about them!) but this works for me.
#!/bin/bash DT=`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"` mysqldump -u [USERNAME] -p[PASSWORD] [DATABASENAME] > /home/backups/[DATABASENAME]-$DT.dump gzip /home/backups/[DATABASENAME]-$DT.dump
Substitute your MySQL user for [USERNAME]. (There should be a space between the ‘-u’ and the [USERNAME])
Substitute your MySQL user’s password for [PASSWORD]. (There should not be a space between the -p and the [PASSWORD])
Substitute your MySQL user’s database for p[DATABASENAME].
Each time you run it, it will get the date with the year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds, and use it in the name. So %Y%m%d%H%M%S would produce something like 20100711090854. If you are running one backup per day, you could shorten it to %Y%m%d.
This would put the files in the /home/backups directory. Set this to wherever you want the files to go.
The gzip command compresses the dumped database file. If you don’t want to compress it (and save disk space) then don’t use it.
(BTW, you don’t type the [ brackets ]. They are just there to highlight the words you need to fill in.)
(consider it cc:by)
Believe it or not, this drawing was inspired by this tweet from jdavid. I like drawing cats, almost as much as I like drawing owls. I’m pretty sure I refined my owl drawing skills back in the 6th grade. Maybe next time I’ll draw an owl.
I’ve had a renewed interest in my data lately, and that’s manifested itself in making sure I’ve got copies of my data. Those bits and pieces we so easily create on other web site? I want them. I want them “here”, where here is under my own control, on my own site, my own server, not just living in the cloud somewhere, at the whim of some 3rd party.
See, I’ve been using Twitter for a long time… since September 2006 supposedly. I’d love to go back and see what my first dozen tweets look like, but Twitter doesn’t allow that. I’ve been kicking myself for not saving all of that data since the beginning, but with micro-content you tend to think that a. It’s tiny, so it doesn’t matter, and b. It’ll always be there. We’ve learned (time and time again) that this isn’t the case.
About 2 years ago I was doing some Drupal work and set up an aggregator to ingest my Twitter feed, which managed to back up a large portion of my tweets, but not all of them. It was more experimenting with Drupal than trying to create a good backup. Still, I was slightly happier knowing I had some sort of archive. I still wanted something that would display my own content (tweets) on my own site.
I then found Tweet Nest. Developed by Andy Graulund (@graulund) it’s a simple open source PHP/MySQL application that does just what I wanted. It grabs your tweets from Twitter using the API, and stores and displays them on your own site. Perfect!
The install was pretty painless, and I actually spent more time customizing the CSS (and I’m still not happy with what I came up with.) Of course two days after I installed it, it appeared to stop working. But alas, no worries, it was just a “rate limit freakout” with the Twitter API. After that, things have been smooth.
Tweet Nest also did a great job of grabbing all of my tweets as far back as October 2009. Not quite back to September 2006, but I’m starting to think that will never happen. But, I did manage to get tweets as far back as March 2008, thanks to another service called Backupify. Now I’ve got to find a good way to load the data into Tweet Nest, and I’ll have most (but not all) of my tweets stored on my own site.
You can find my archived tweets at rasterweb.net/micro, and just like my recent Delicious/Scuttle/bookmarks exploration, I now feel that much better about my data. (But I’m not stopping there. The next project may take quite a bit more hacking on my part, but it’s another one that’s long overdue.)
So go check out Tweet Nest if you want an application on your own server, or Backupify if you just want a nice, secure backup.
