Archive for the ‘Technology’ tag
Time Machine over a Network Drive
This post describes the steps involved when setting up Time Machine to backup to a Network Drive. These steps are only required if you want to back up to a device other than a Time Capsule. It is pretty quick and easy, so without further due, lets get started.
Step 1: Enable network backups in Time Machine
In a terminal window cut/paste the following command:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Step 2: Create Timemachine backup volume
In a terminal window cut/paste the following command:
hdiutil create -fs HFS+J -volname "Backup of computer-name" computer-name_[mac address without':'].sparsebundle
The simplest way to obtain your mac address is to open a terminal window and type the command: ifconfig -a, and look for the section of the output where it says: ether 00:33:44:55:66:77
The simplest way to obtain your computer name is to open a terminal window and type the command: hostname, it will return the name of your computer, example, my-hostname.
Putting it all together, based on the above examples, you would run the following command:
hdiutil create -fs HFS+J -volname "Backup of my-hostname" my-hostname_003344556677.sparsebundle
Step 3: Copy file created in step 2 to network Time Machine backup destination
Using finder or terminal, copy the newly created .sparsebundle file to the place you want your Time Machine backup to reside.
Step 4: Open Timemachine preferences, and the network drive should show up as a backup target
If for some reason it doesn’t, try opening and closing the Time Machine preferences, as it may take a moment for it to detect the newly available network drive.
Step 5: Rest easy knowing your mac is now backed up to a network storage volume.
Upgraded Site To WordPress 2.6
It took all of 15 minutes, and that included upgrading TinyMCE to version 3.1 as well. WordPress is one of my favorite open source packages.
Recently they have out done even them selves with the introduction of WordPress for iPhone. After using it for a while it is clear that it is a really nice app! If you are lucky enough to own an iPhone and happen to have a WordPress blog as well, then it is a no brainer. You need to download and install it right away.
Amazon’s EC2 and You
The purpose of this post is to give you a “high” level overview of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), and how you can benefit from it. Amazon defines the EC2 as
A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
From a high level, EC2 is nothing more than a huge server farm. If you are an end user who needs computing resources they can allocate “servers” to you. Only, when you get a “server” allocated to you, it is not a real physical server. It is a virtual server which is part of a huge farm of commodity based machines. The concept is very similar to that of VMWare (or any product that provides virtualization), except they do not use an off the shelf product, they have their own notion of virtualization which relies on their proprietary AMI’s (Amazon Machine Images). The coolest feature is it is quite inexpensive. It costs somewhere around $70 a month to maintain “small” server 24/7 for one month. The actual rate is .10/hr of up time. A “small” server by Amazon’s standards is equivalent to a box equipped with “1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform”.
If your needs require a more powerful box, you can get spring for their most powerful configuration. They refer to it as “Large” box, and it is equivalent to box equipped with “15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform” This will set you back ~$575/month for 24/7 up time. The actual rate of this configuration is $.80/hr.
There is an additional charge that one would need to consider, namely, bandwidth consumed, both uploads and downloads (unless its to or from Amazon’s S3 service, in this case there is no charge). It is based on the amount and the location of each upload or download.
As you can see, Amazon’s EC2 is a very cost effective expandable server infrastructure. The next post will cover the important technical features of EC2 and how you can leverage them on your current project.
A Few Site Improvement
In case you haven’t noticed, this site is finally looking a bit more, dare I say, “professional”. All it took was a little bit of time, and some minor *nix commands. Since this site is based on the latest version of Wordpress (2.5.1) , it provides a lot of usefulness out of the box when dealing with the overall layout of the site, the layout of the widgets, and ease of plugin configuration. Wordpress is a brilliant piece of software.
The first and most obvious thing to tackle first is the look and feel of the site. The original theme that was used wasn’t really cutting it any more. A cleaner and more professional looking theme needed to be found. After quite a bit of searching through the theme repositories, found a theme called spotlight, which definitely meets the requirements of looking professional and clean.
The next improvements were made with the addition of some nice plugins. This plugins are:
- Configurable Tag Cloud – Cool plugin/widget that allows you to really customize the look and feel of the Tag Cloud. Tons better than the default Tag Cloud widget that comes with Wordpress.
- MyTwitter – Nice plugin that displays your current Twitter updates, and allows you to post updates as well via the configuration page.
- SyntaxHighlighter – A plugin that allows you to post code for nearly every programming language, and renders it in a very clean and usable fashion. Originally noticed the nice looking code on DZone.
These are the few plugins installed on this site. There are tons more out there. If you have any personal favorites, please let me know.
