The Lair

Been busy and bored in alternate spurts. I keep my idle hands busy with various amusements. The thesis work itself isn’t that interesting; I’m fast losing the will to live in the face of a wordcount to satisfy. The amusements, on the other hand, are worth documenting.

Everyone should know of Desktop TD by now. It’s addictive like crack, might be one of the few non-annoying uses of Flash on the web that I’ve seen (excluding Youtube, of course) and well, it is personally responsible for a lot of time wasted. A while ago, I was sent an email asking me to reserve my username for The Casual Collective; a new venture by the maker of DesktopTD. The Casual Collective offers (among other things, I’m sure) a chance to play a multiplayer version of DesktopTD. What’s not to like? I registered. A couple of days ago (after I had forgotten all about it), I got an email inviting me to login. Today, I played my first multiplayer DesktopTD.

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YSlow is an extension to Firefox. Actually, that’s not quite right. YSlow is actually an extension to Firebug, an awesome extension which runs on Firefox. Its purpose is to find out why your site is slow. YSlow. Geddit? Geddit? Never mind then.

Despite being just a tiny bit suspicious of cookie-cutter recommendation tools, I gave it a whirl. I like it. YSlow gives a useful overview and is certainly a great introductory tool to profile a site. There are some recommendations made that can be safely ignored; but that takes nothing away from the tool itself. As always though, the application/site developer (ie:, you) should know best about what might work and what won’t. In my personal opinion, rules are ok to break so long as you know why you’re breaking them.

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I’ve just backed up my backups. I never want to do that again.

My backup strategy for various odds and ends used to be so simple, really. Throw random things onto a special folder on my hard disk. Check the size of the folder from time to time. When the size of the folder reaches 650mb or so; break out a blank CD, burn contents, add contents to catalog and store CD securely in the case. Delete folder. Whenever I need something, I search the catalog; find the file(s) I need, flip through the alphanumerically sorted CDs till I find the one I want, grab the files I need off the CD and I’m done.

Simple, right? Just needs a bit of organization upfront, but it pays off. I’ve been using this system for years - mostly with some homegrown cataloging software that works across both Unix and Windows.

Unfortunately, my download habit didn’t allow this happy state of affairs to continue. I realized this when I went down to my last 10 CDs from a 100 CD pack. So, a new backup approach was required. Bought a portable hard disk and thought, hey - I’ll just transfer all the CDs contents onto the hard disk and I’m done.

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