Best backup solution?

I've recently set up a new server, and needed a quick backup solution. I made my own shell scripts that do exactly what I need (collect file, dump databases, encrypt file, transfer them), and put them on github in case it can help anyone.

However, there is certainly an easy to configure tool out there to set up backups. Any advice?

How do Amanda, Bacula and other similar tools do these days?

Taking the Erlang plunge

It's decided: I will now learn Erlang. I've kept an eye on it for some time, and things seems to move in interesting ways. Take Vertebra and Github's upcoming git daemon as interesting signs.

I found it great to join the Linux and Ruby communities before their popularity exploded. I feel like this could be the third time, but I'll have a better opinion after reading the book I just ordered.

Potverdekke, it's a shame to be a belgian

An economic crisis is looming, a financial crisis could be coming, more and more people have difficulties to pay for all their daily costs, the petrol price is sky rocketing.

And what happens in Belgium? The government falls on communautaire problems.

Shame on you, belgian politicians!

Updating rubygems on debian

Note to myself:

if you want to update the rubygems package installed by Debian, edit /usr/bin/gem and add those two lines after "require 'rubygems'":

require 'rubygems/gem_runner'
require 'rubygems/open-uri'

then you can update ruby gems with

gem update --system

Here's why Google is the search leader

Today I read an article about Yahoo's BOSS: Build you Own Search System, but it didn't specify a URL for the new Yahoo offering. So I typed in the Firefox search box the words "yahoo boss", and got the links as the first item after the News result displayed at the top. Quite effective!






But then I thought: I'm looking for a Yahoo service, I might also make a search on Yahoo's website. Google is the default search engine for a lot of people, including me. Maybe I should take a look around, for example at Yahoo search!
Honnestly I was surprise to not see a single link about it on the first page. So I looked on the following pages and didn't even see it in the first 5 pages. I abandoned looking further.





This awakened my interest: Would Microsoft do better? Not at all! Nothing in the first 5 pages.




Ask.com maybe? Good try, but no.



Microsoft might be interested in buying Yahoo's search business, but mixing 2 irrelevant search results stays irrelevant. They'd better work hard to deliver better search results. At that time I would possibly change Firefox's search box' default search engine. That time has not come yet though.

version 0.4 of YUI slideshow

I had developed this YUI-based slideshow to use it on the MyOwnDB.com page, and published the code in 2006, already 2 years ago. It's been used by some people, but none had feature requests, until yesterday :-)

So today I added a back button. "Wow, that's a feature!" I hear you say.
Well, the slideshow was meant to be non-interactive in the first place: you give it images, html, divs to rotate and it'll do it for you automatically. So it was not in the normal workflow of the slideshow to have a back button.

Anyway, I added it and that was enough for making a new release: version 0.4 is out!