Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

We just finished up the rest of our tasks for the next release of my project at work on Friday, and it feels great to be done right before getting a couple days off for the holidays.

I recently got my Amazon S3 account setup so that I can use S3 to backup my computers at home. I initially was trying to use a combination of JungleDisk, WebDrive, and robocopy to manage the backups. JungleDisk is the interface between S3 and windows, WebDrive allows you to map your S3 account to a network drive in windows, and robocopy is what I use to mirror my local directory structure on S3.

This solution was “ok”, not great cause it was complicated, but it got the job done. WebDrive also is not free, so it would cost money after the trial period ran up (~$50 I think).

Then, JungleDisk released a version that included built-in drive mapping support, which was great because that made the solution free beceause WebDrive was now out of the picture.

I was having some trouble though, because while I was testing my backups, I noticed that files were being uploaded each time I would backup, even though the files hadn’t changed. I came across this post by Scott Bellware about his switch from JungleDisk to S3Drive and I think I found the cause of my issues, the JungleDisk cache.

So I’ve now switched to S3Drive which also has built-in drive mapping support and no cache so its really a “WYSIWYG” way to manage your S3 account; you can be sure that what you see is actually whats on Amazon’s servers. While I liked the encryption feature in JungleDisk, I agree with Scott that I like having a simple mirror of my directory structure rather than encrypted files that need JungleDisk to function.
I’ve got my new laptop backed up on S3 as well as the server in the basement, all thats left is the desktop in the office, which is going to be ~25 GB when you put in all the pictures that Erin’s got on there. I’m still debating whether or not to backup all of our mp3’s since that will add a lot of space, but its so cheap its tempting.

We’re leaving for my parent’s house in about an hour, so I’m going to start the backup when we leave, so hopefully its done by the time we get back tomorrow night.

The project that I’m on has a biannual release schedule, so we’re in crunch mode to hit the next release thats coming up in the next couple weeks. I’ve been working late, but some other guys have been working even later; I’ve gotten build emails at midnight this week.

I just wanted to relay a funny thing that happened this week. I was working on a file that someone else was working on too, so I just manually made the file writable (we use source safe) and made my modifications. After I got his changes, I used WinMerge to merge our changes together and checked the result in.

Of course, I screwed up the merge and overwrote his changes. He emailed me later and said “Hey! You overwrote my code!”, so I apologized and merged the code correctly and got it all squared away.

After explaining to him what had happened, that I thought I had merged it correctly, he replied with this email:

“The best WinMerge is in your head ”

That’s so true.

Since I’ve been reading Just for Fun, about Linus Torvalds, I’ve gotten more and more interested in using Linux as a desktop OS. I’ve tried Linux before, but I usually grabbed some old, shitty computer to install it on, and I never really forced myself to use it.

This time, I’ve taken a leap though. I have a second hard drive on my computer that has (had) Vista RC1 installed on it that I never used ’cause Vista wouldn’t recognize my wireless card and without the internet a computer is pretty much worthless.

So today I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on the second hard drive and I’m writing this post from my new linux install
The only downside so far is that it’s a pain in the ass for Erin to be using the computer and then having to restart the machine to use linux, I wish there was a way to have both OS’s running so I could switch out quickly. As it stands, I have to restart and press F11 when I boot up to manually change the boot order to boot from the linux hard drive when I want to log in.

I’ll spend some more time tomorrow getting all the necessary stuff installed (Apache, MySql, etc.), and I’ve already got MonoDevelop but I’m still looking for a good PHP IDE, one that has intellisense preferably, but for now I’m going out to try out one of Surly’s newer beers, the Darkness.