The Lair

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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Desktop TD 1.5 was released a couple of days ago. I’ve been obsessed with that game for a while now – it’s taken the place of Tetris and a few other games that I play to switch jobs for short sharp spurts. A bit of background, the creator recently left his real job to focus on online games. As such, I realized that some degree of commercialization was inevitable – but I was optimistic about the gameplay being mostly unaffected.

I think I was wrong. There has been a mini-furore about the over-commercialization of the game. Personally, I don’t care about the tiny Ks floating around the screen or the rather ostentatious kongregate pass on the desktop background. What annoys me the most is that offline play (that is, downloading the swf and playing offline) has now been disabled. I’m going back to 1.2b.

In other news, I’ve written recently about downloading Safari – the browser formerly available only on Apple’s own Mac OSX. I have to say that my experience so far has been surprisingly positive. It’s quick to load and minimalistic; two useful traits for an application which would spend a lot of time on my desktop. Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.2 beta horribly mangles proxy support (again!). So I looked around a little bit and found this nifty Webkit Nightly Download site. Another great reason to run a nightly build instead of the beta – a new web inspector which looks very tasty indeed.

And completely randomly; it was Paul Gallico who spake thusly – “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. (NY Times 14 Jan 1962)”. So why is the British government now deciding on the opposite? Quite apropos, last night’s Balderdash and Piffle featured the earliest sightings of some interesting putdowns and insults (plonker, wassock and tosser among them). This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Seven Sins of England last month.

Yes, I recently hopped on yet another bandwagon as some of you may well know. I decided to check out what the huge fuss was all about – I started poking around the Facebook API and wrote an application.

Is it a big deal? I rather think it is . There are reports of teething troubles aplenty and I discovered some limitations in the documentation – but overall, I really like the concept of being able to wrestle with the innards of a social networking application. It was fairly frustrating to figure things out, but ultimately it is an interesting experience. I’m still coming to grips with the possibilities.

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