Carl Hutzler's Blog

When you set-up a new RSYNC job on a readynas you typically want it to do a FULL backup initially and then incrementals on each subsequent backup. And you get the option of having it do another FULL backup weekly or every two weeks, etc, if you like.

But what if you don’t want it to ever do a full backup? Why you ask? Well in my case I just switched from a ReadyNAS 1100 to a 2100 as my primary machine. My off-site backup server has not changed (an old freenas box). So my backups have been running for a year and I have no need to do a full backup. Nor do I have the time as it would take about 3 months to finish a full backup over the internet! And why bother with a full backup as the data on the new 2100 is the same data as was on the old 1100. And certainly the off-site freenas server still has the current backup data. I just want to continue on doing incrementals… that’s all. But there is no option in FrontView to skip ever doing a FULL. But there is a way:

Install Toggle SSH and SSH Root add-ons and shell into the box

cd /var/log/frontview/backup
vi status_backup_XXX (where XXX is the your backup job #)

Remove whatever is in the file (likely somthing like CANCELLED!!Wed Aug 26 21:49!!warn) and replace with this:

COMPLETED!!Wed Aug 26 08:44!!OK

This tells the readynas that the job ran at some point in the past and to just do an incremental. Feel free to replace the day/date/time with something closer to the current date (once this blog post becomes dated).

I was trying to set-up some shared calendars using Google Calendar on a client’s domain yesterday. The client’s domain is hosted using Google Apps “Standard Edition”.

Anyway, I had previously set-up some calendars for them as an experiment but we never used it because a year or two ago, the ability to sync the calendar to an iPhone and Mac desktop was iffy. Fast forward to now and we were going to try it again.

The issue I found was that I could not get the calendars set-up the way I wanted. I wanted a WORK calendar on each employee’s google calendar. And I also wanted a PERSONAL calendar. I set these up and then went to share the calendars.

I wanted to share the WORK calendar with everyone in the domain so that everyone could see what everyone else was doing. But the PERSONAL one, I wanted to share within the domain but only let other employees see whether someone was free or busy (not what they were doing). No matter what I tried – removing the old calendars, renaming them, changing sharing privledges to PUBLIC and back to what I really wanted – nothing seemed to give me the configuration I wanted. I was always left with calendars showing more or less than the desired config (e.g., personal calendar would show what someone was doing instead of just busy/free).

I eventually fixed it and learned a couple of things which I thought would be useful to share:

1) Changes to permissions in Google Calendar can take anywhere from 10 seconds to 24 hours to actually take effect! While most changes do take effect quickly, the amount of time is not zero. And permission changes like sharing settings do NOT always take effect when you press the save button. There is a delay.

2) If a user has permission to be a domain ADMINISTRATOR, they will be able to see everyone elses calendars even if the sharing setting on that calendar is set to only allow other people to see free/busy. I do not understand why this is so, but it is noted on a google help page somewhere (or a forum page). Basically if someone has admin rights, they can see every calendar in the system! Not good, but it is the way it is.

3) Once I removed admin privledges from one of the users, I had to wait more than an hour for the change to take effect. I am not sure how long it took, but the priveledge change was complete the next morning. After the change took effect, I was able to share the PERSONAL calendar for other users to the user who was an admin person without that former admin person being able to see exactly what was on everyone’s personal calendar. Now it just shows busy/free.

Last night, under the stars at Reston Town Center, one of the greatest guitarists ever, played for free! for a few hundred of us.

Stanley Jordan and his Trio (Will Calhoun on drums and Rael Grant on bass) were amazing. They all seemed to really be into the beautiful summer night and the attentive and appreciative audience. They played a number of songs from his new album “State of Nature” (iTunes link)

Of course I had my camera with me. Security was fairly relaxed so I had free reign. Enjoy.

We were swimming at our neighbor’s pool last week and somehow got talking about bugs. I think there was a big one in the pool and the kids were all scared of it, etc. So I told them about the Cicadas and my neighbor’s 5 year old, Arthur, was fascinated. He just could not believe my stories. So I told him I would find a picture of one that I took in the backyard and send it to him.

Below is the image along with some video I dug up. The most amazing thing in the video is the sound. It was deafening!
(click on the image below to play the movie)

Shot with an iPhone 3GS and editted with iMovie HD. I wish I had had shot more of the cutting of the shape of the wood, but this will have to wait till the next time. Click below for the video.

Something for the holiday list me thinks. Big beautiful portraits. The site is worth a visit for sure. I love the Henry Kissinger image on page 12 (at the site…book link). Excellent.

Now and again I need to get rid of something as opposed to re-purposing it.  I wonder if I can recycle it instead of trashing it. Maybe an old CRT computer monitor or the last bit of latex or oil paint or maybe a battery or cell phone. You get the idea. And while I know a lot more today than I used to in terms of where to recycle this and that, I still like to know the closest place and/or the cheapest place to go. Enter earth911.com

The site has a very nice search (with suggestions for terms) along with your zip or address. And the results are very good. Not perfect, but very good for my area anyway. But the best part is that when you click on a result (e.g. Office Depot), they have the details of the recycling program along with how many items you can bring per day, any restrictions (broken vs working) and costs. This is very useful.

PS: And the best part of the site is it is done in Wordpress, Kenny ;-)

I downloaded Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 about a month ago and have been VERY impressed with the fixed things and added new features. Specifically these huge wins:

• Integration with Mac OS X Spotlight search. I can now search for anything in my mail really quickly. This is huge for me especially when I am looking for an ecommerce receipt during my business billing/accounting efforts.
• Fixed the issue with the inability to drag and drop images from a a web page directly into an email. It used to work with 2.0 a while back but it somehow stopped working and would only drop in the URL of the image in plain text. But with 3.0 it works again. Small victories, I know.
• They also fixed the “format mail as plain text” option. What is this? Well I belong to a mailing list and they ONLY ALLOW plain text emails. Of course all of my other accounts I want normal html email. Thunderbird always had an option in the account config to denote certain email addresses or domains as plain text. But it never worked properly. It would always apply to every email and all accounts. Now I can set it for that one account to be plain text and all others are normal html. Saves me a lot of bounces back from freecycle.org

The one thing I don’t like a lot is that when I highlight a bunch of emails just before I mark them as read, Thunderbird tries to give me short summaries of the emails. Sort of like gmail conversations. This is not a bad thing, but it seems to slow down the client. I wish I knew how to just disable this function which I do not use. Maybe there is a hidden option in the about:config?

I have had a few clients complain of not being able to attach with Wifi networks which they have been using for months and months. I usually fix it by deleting the password for that wifi network from their keychain. My hope is that the 10.5.8 release that was posted today from Apple will solve that issue.

See this Techcrunch article for more details.

Oh, and this is pretty funny at the bottom of the article talking about the upcoming upgrade process we will all enjoy going to Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard)….it gave me a chuckle. (click to enlarge)