I know that about every other iPhone owner has posted to their blog about this and almost a month ago already, but I’ll throw my own take into the mix.

I originally planned on waiting a while before installing the second major revision of the iPhone software, but Sharvil tried it almost immediately and told me that I needed to give it a shot. So, I finally upgraded it, and have not been disappointed. Some highlights:

Some more ways Acronis fails, just for the record:

1. Completely useless log files. Error messages are crucial in applications. Acronis says ‘Error creating file’. This could mean:
2. I couldn’t resolve the FTP server’s hostname
3. I could resolve the hostname, but could not connect to the FTP port
4. I could resolve the hostname and connect, but I could not authenticate.
5. I could resolve, connect, authenticate, but I could not create a new file.
6. Any number of other things. I could not create a temporary file(Why? No permissions in Acronis’s temporary folder?  No hard drive space? It already exists? The folder that should be the temporary folder doesn’t exist?)

Another error we’ve gotten a few times is ‘Failed to process pair script (some hash).’ While it might be useful to someone, it’s not really any help. A lot of the same stuff applies: Is the file corrupt? What’s wrong with it? Improper syntax? The configuration files are XML, they should be editable as such. Point being: Acronis, get your stuff together and write some real, honest error checking code. It’s boring code to write, but it’s boilerplate stuff, and basic. This is what you hire interns for. Please do so. 2. The GUI stinks. Everything is wizard based. This in itself isn’t so much of a problem, but it becomes one with their absolute awful support of stuff like, oh, say, remembering passwords. To see how this is an issue: Say I realize that I want maximum encryption on my backup archives. So, I load up the tasks list, click the one I want to change, click the ‘changed settings’ button. It asks me what I want to backup(2-3 screens), then where I want to back it up to. I tell it the FTP site, and it asks me for my login for that site, then allows me to navigate(keep in mind this is already stored in the configuration file I’m trying to edit, in some encrypted form(hopefully, though I would not bet 2bits on it)). Then, it asks me if I want to sign in to the FTP anonymously or use a username and password. Upon selecting non-anonymously, it asks me for the same username and password. Every single time you try to change any part of the configuration. 3. The command line stinks. There are just a couple of commands, including trueimagecmd and trueimagemnt, but both of them are completely inconsistant on file argument parsing: trueimagemnt uses the more standard UNIX conventions of [-(shortopt)|–(longopt)] (arg) while trueimagecmd uses the completely zany –(longopt):(arg). The command trueimagecmd allows a –verify command, but doesn’t include it in the runtime help or the manual page. None of this seems like too big of a deal, but Acronis is basically the only program that we actual require any GUI at all for on 2 of our 4 main servers. It’d be very nice to have backups and not need a GUI.

I have been meaning to write for almost two weeks that I’ve got my Visa back from the Brazilian Consulate in San Francisco, which is pretty cool. I saw a picture of it and it looks really sweet. I’m slowly turning into a world traveler! It took about a week inside the consulate, then they FedEx Next Day Air’d it to Memphis, then Spokane, then the Tri-Cities, then Prosser. They dropped it off with Mom.

The story goes something like this: Originally, we used external hard drives plugged in via USB to our servers to back up our servers. This worked well, except that we had two external drives and 7 servers. About this time I started working this job and immediately set up a MediaWiki website for storing documentation and a Mantis Bug Tracker website for storing information about ongoing projects–I think I’ll try to write a post about that at some point as well. Anyways, these two websites originally ran on my personal webserver in Prosser, but we decided to run them on a company-owned server instead, and that this new machine could act as both a backup server and a webserver for those two websites.

The week before my sister’s wedding, I was tasked with writing a paper on Dijkstra’s Algorithm for my Discrete Mathematical Modeling class. I think I might have missed the mark a little bit, but I had so much fun writing it that I’m posting it here.

I’m almost considering writing some more stuff in this style… anything anyone would like to see written about?

Here’s a link: Dijkstra’s Algorithm

This past weekend I had the honor of being the Best Man at my sister Crystal’s wedding. It was a beautiful wedding at Silverlake Winery in Zillah, WA. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a pretty spot like that, and it was definitely adequate for our relatively small 120 person party. Also, the wine was excellent. I enjoyed their Chenin Blanc most of the night, though I tried everything about twice, and ended up going home with some of their Reserve Chardonnay.

Ray(the boss) and I were chatting about how we should implement our secure upload page. The way it should work is, an IP is added to the genhosts database, it sets up a 5 minute wait, and at the end of five minutes, redirects to the data upload page, at which point the computer is allowed to connect, since the new IP has propogated into /etc/hosts.allow(via a cronjob that takes MySQL entries and parses them(via HTTP and XML) into the standard /etc/hosts.allow format). It’s basically working, but we’re having a bunch of trouble getting IE and Firefox to redirect, since IE apparently detects my window.location.href and location.replace calls as popups, and blocks them.

One of my tasks at work is to write up a security checklist of sorts, and from one of Ryan’s notes, I happened across the NSA’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 guide. It’s pretty cool and covers basically everything. Have a look

This is going to be sortof a short post with not much worldwide applicability, but I just learned a couple of weeks ago that Odegaard’s Copy Center will bind a packet of papers for fairly cheap, it turns out. They do it with a clear front cover and a back cover of your choice, plus binding you pick out from their samples. They do it while you wait and have good hours. I had no idea they offered this service, and was very impressed with their output.

June 3 was a fantastic day, though I didn’t know it at the time. The reason? My biggest bitch about Firefox has finally been fixed. The big problem is that Firefox’s OSX program has the default behavior of saving PDFs to Desktop and starting Preview with it. Which isn’t a huge problem, except that if you download the file several times, it just downloads a file with -N appended. This is sortof a pain because in college a lot of teachers call files hw5.pdf, which means that I pretty much have to go to the website each time, or look through about 5 files each time.