Άλλο ένα βιντεάκι... αυτή τη φορά ο Γιώργος Παπανδρέου (μάλλον προεκλογικά) εκφέρει τις θέσεις του για τις μειώσεις μισθών και συντάξεων, ενώ στην οθόνη αναφέρονται τα νέα μέτρα...

Ένα βιντεάκι που έκανα όπου ακούγεται ηχητικό απόσπασμα από την Ελληνοφρένεια στο οποίο ο πρώην καταλληλότερος ανακοινώνει την έξοδο της Ελλάδας από τη διαδικασία του υπερβολικού ελείμματος...

Since I'm hosting this website on my own personal home computer, I have the "opportunity" of worrying about my backup strategy. It won't be the end of the world if something goes wrong, I have other documents that are far more important. But it's nice to feel that you have accomplished something that makes you feel safe.

What to backup

1. I need to backup my subversion repositories. I use subversion as a VCS even for my pet projects. I think that using a VCS even at home is a good idea because you learn to live with it. If you're not doing it already, you should consider it.
2. I need to backup my web sites. Well that goes without saying. It's a web server so the web content should be backed up somewhere. The main web site that runs Cuyahoga also has a MSSQL database. The - up to this moment - two blogs are using BlogEngine and that doesn't need a database at this point.

Where to backup

I bought an external hard drive to use as a backup medium. Unfortunatelly it seems that these days when you buy an external hard drive you also buy the software that "manages" the hard drive. I gave the backup software that came bundled with the hard drive a fair chance but it simply doesn't work for me. Putting aside that it reminds me strongly of the early driver utilities that had to look all multimedia-like, it fails with a lot of pending files when a file is locked for one reason or the other. Also, it had some other lock issues working together with my antivirus. So I decided to keep the drive and lose the software. A clean format solved that.

How to backup

For subversion, I'm doing a dump of the subversion repositories using "svnadmin dump" and I backup the dump files. I could have just backed-up the repositories in-place, if no locking issues would arise. However, I'm relying on the dump files also to overcome possible versioning issues between different versions of subversion itself. I've had this problem in the past when I moved my repositories from a later version of subversion to an earlier and I don't want to go through that again. So I think that the dump files are the safest option.

For the MSSQL database, I created the backup script through Management Studio Express. I think that if I had the full (i.e. non express) version, scheduling the backup would be simpler. But generating the script and setting up a scheduled task with "sqlcmd -i" is also quite simple.

Finally, for the web sites, I'm doing a "xcopy /D /E" into a target folder, which I backup. The "/E" switch handles recursion in directories and the "/D" switch only copies files with newer datetime than the ones in the backup. Of course this has the limitation of not being able to delete files from the backup that were deleted from the source.

All those three steps are set as scheduled tasks in the standard Windows Task Scheduler. I've set them up to run every Monday morning. I don't keep older versions of the backups; data is updated so infrequently that doesn't justify it. However, for an extra step of redundancy, I wrote a script on my Mac that duplicates the backed up files from the web server into the MacBook drive. That eventually gets also backed up via Time Machine, so you could say that I do have some sense of versioning in my backups.

P2P Backup

On something different, I was thinking the other day about the possibility of backing up data on a remote physical location. Doing a little bit of Googling shows that I'm not the first person to think about it, but I didn't find any nice and free solutions for that. With broadband connections and large hard drives being cheap, why aren't we already backing up our family photos across all the computers that a family owns?

Τι άλλο θα δουν τα μάτια μου...

Χτένα και οδοντόβουρτσα δύο σε ένα...

Last March I passed my first exam, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Web-Based Client Development, also known as 070-528. Having worked many years in Athens with ASP.NET web applications, I didn't even study; I just made an appointment with the test center, went there, and passed the exam.

My next goal is to pass 70-536. This way I will get my first certification, which will be MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0, Web Applications. I will actually have to study for that one, because it contains a few topics that I haven't worked with. I got the training kit from my company and I finally have something to do in the one hour I spent going from my place at Rotterdam to the client I'm currently working for at Amsterdam. The training kit so far is a little boring because it even explains what inheritance is, but then again there are those little features that I never used like type forwarding.

A reasonable question is why try to get a certification for .NET 2.0, when .NET 3.5 is already being replaced by .NET 4.0. First of all, there's the personal reason. I want to get that certification in order to prove my experience on that technology that I spent so many years working with in Athens.

Secondly, .NET 4.0 is brand new. Big clients such as banks don't adopt new technologies that fast. It makes sense. In their eyes, a technology is not old, it's proven and stable. My first small assignment when I started working in the Netherlands was actually in .NET 1.1. So I doubt on how soon I'll be using .NET 4.0 for real projects.

Also, I don't want to try to study to pass an exam for a technology I don't have hands on experience with. As far as I'm concerned, certifications and working experience should go hand in hand. Why would a client hire an "all theory, no practice" guy? Also, that way, it requires less study effort to pass the exam.

The question is how to proceed after getting the MCTS. I want to get the same certifications for .NET 3.5. Although I don't have that much web experience with that framework, the differences are not that big and I've been keeping track of them. One option is going for the MCPD .NET 2.0 (one exam) and then upgrading it to MCPD .NET 3.5 (one more exam). That can be further upgraded to MCPD .NET 4.0 with one more exam.

Another possible path is to skip the MCPD. Then I will need one exam to get MCTS .NET 3.5 and one more for MCTS .NET 4.0. The difference is that these exams are not upgrade exams. I don't know if that means that they're more difficult. I'll have to investigate before choosing the correct path. Up to then, it's studying time for MCTS .NET 2.0!

Η παραπάνω γελοιογραφία δημοσιεύτηκε σε Ολλανδική freepress. Το κείμενο έχει ως εξής:

De Rode Kater
Grote bezuinigingen in Griekenland: Vakantietoeslag beperkt, 13e en 14e maand geschrapt
Veertiende maand!?!

Και η μετάφραση:

Ο κόκκινος γάτος
Μεγάλες περικοπές στην Ελλάδα: το επίδομα αδείας περικόπτεται, ο 13ος και 14ος μήνας καταργούνται.
Δέκατος τέταρτος μήνας;!;