One year I'd like to do the same project Skud is doing for 2009, that is: a resolution a week. But this year is a finishing year for me, not a starting year.

A quick wrap-up on 2008 resolutions:

• I dabbled in morning yoga, I am just not good at getting out of bed twenty minutes early for that reason, and Andrew is less good at it (and now has a fixed 9am work start time). I did some morning meditation practice when going through a very stressful period in April (after my DCS hospitalisation).
• Tidiness. We got slightly better, but that one was actually Andrew doing it for me. Which is nice and all, but I have no claim to glory here.
• Clothes shopping. Oh yes I did. The secret turns out, unfortunately, to be buying expensive clothes.
• Reading and watching movies. Not so much.

The first half of 2008 was pretty difficult for me. In retaliation, Andrew and I screamed around the south island of New Zealand in August. I do recommend its recuperative powers.

Major goals for 2009:

• Submit PhD thesis for examination.
• Do PADI's Rescue Diver certification before my CPR qualification expires, that is, before March.

Other plans in 2009:

• A short holiday in January in Tasmania.
• With any luck, an international conference or two, and depending on my PhD timeline, a holiday around one of these.
• A major party to celebrate my PhD submission.
• Something meaningful in August to mark the 10th anniversary of my relationship with Andrew.
• Stretching and strength work. If I can't get it together to do a full yoga routine, I do want at least to be working on contributing skills daily.
• The odd SCUBA dive here and there.

Also, given the PhD submission thing, I will probably be looking for a job towards the end of 2009. I do not know yet if I am going to apply for postdoctoral positions, this will probably depend on achieving a couple of major conference acceptances in 2009. And on deciding whether I want to live in the northern hemisphere. Even if I am I may be looking for programming or similar work in the short-term to wait out my examination process. So, keep in touch, if you want to offer me work, or come to my submission party. Or both.

From RavenBlack:

New Year's Encouragements. Instead of making pressurey resolutions for yourself, make positive uplifting recommendations for other people. No negativity allowed, and try not to even imply something negative (eg. "eat better" implies you were eating poorly, but "make delicious home-cooked meals at least once a week" is pretty cleanly positive, and "make more delicious home-cooked meals because your cooking is great" is better still.)

Anyone with encouragements of this positive type may contact me via my preferred method or my LiveJournal, if you have access. (I am beginning, finally, to think about allowing comments on puzzling.org directly, but it's not likely to happen very soon.)

You are hereby invited to do this in your own weblog.

Via slashdot.org (yes really, I still pull in the headlines, although the miracle of feed readers has allowed me to confirm that yes, Ars Technica is a better read), a site called Journal Space, which hosted weblogs, lost all their data. They only had a RAID setup as backup, that is, a system that mirrors content between two disks and is designed to protect against disk failure. If you've heard of RAID, you hopefully already know that it is not the same as a backup: if software error or an accident or a malicious act deletes data from one disk, the RAID setup faithfully mirrors it to the other disk. If not, imagine that you have two magical whiteboards. One is copied exactly to the other. If one magical whiteboard totally breaks down, excellent, you have a full copy of your meeting notes and doodles on the other. (Note for accuracy, not all RAID configurations produce a full mirror and sometimes the mirror is spread over more than one spare disk. But you get the idea.) However, if someone rubs something off the whiteboard, or falls over while holding a can of solvent and splashes it on the first whiteboard, everything on it is immediately deleted from the other.

Instead, for home machines you want, most likely, an incremental backup, that is, a separate disk/machine with several copies of your data going back in time. Your data as it was an hour ago. Your data as it was a day ago. Your data as it was a month ago. And so on. I have snapshots of my data for every three hours over the last two months. (Sensible backup programs will notice when data is the same across two or more time periods and only store it once, so your backup disk does not need to be so very much larger than your normal disk.)

For business systems you want both: the quick recovery from disk failure that mirroring systems such as RAID offer, and incremental backups. (I don't maintain business grade systems, ask someone else for best practices if you need them. Internally consistent database backups are something you want to pay particular attention to.)

I note this because in November I gave a talk on home backups for Linux at SLUG and there is one other point of interest: do not trust third party providers to have good backups. It is getting increasingly common to have a lot of your most interesting data on someone else's servers: your email on Google's, your blog over at wordpress.com, contact details for all your friends on Facebook, and so on. But your provider can make both their own catastrophically bad decisions, like Journal Space, and have their creditors suddenly sell their hard disks off in a fire sale, as happened to Digital Railroad.

Which is a big problem, because a lot of third party providers do not provide an easy way to get your data ('easy' would be both a documented API accessible from common programming languages and an installable application), and lots don't provide any way at all. (There's also a whole batch of interesting issues to do with your comments or Wall postings or whatever: you don't necessarily have the right to reproduce them and there would be privacy implications when allowing you to back them up and reproduce them on some other side. LiveJournal, for one, solves this problem by not allowing easy backups of comments left on your journal.)

If your email host, blog host, calendar host, documents host or social networking host failed or deleted your account, how would you fare?

linux.conf.au 2009 was held in Hobart from January 19 to 24.

After two years (co-)running the LinuxChix miniconf I was glad to not be tied to the room the whole day on Monday. My talk was first up though, so into the room I went. The talk was a failure as far as my primary aim with it went: the idea was to inspire newcomers with stories of existing contributors (all women, given the context) stories of getting involved. The reason this failed is that only the hardcore faithful attending: it wasn't a talk intended to preach to the choir in that way. I came up with the idea after hearing about the FOSSCoach event at OSCON 2008: I even thought about proposing a whole FOSSCoach miniconference before I remembered that I wanted to have less major timesinks.

There is no video recording of my talk either unfortunately, I will make audio available fairly shortly assuming that the audio that comes off Andrew's mobile phone is at all passable.

I went to the panel on geek parenting after morning tea: this was very popular and perhaps deserves a better forum in future. I'm hoping to get some audience write-ups of this. I then went to half of Matthew Garrett's talk How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love ACPI, partly because I'd recommended him as a good speaker to Sara and then ran into Matthew very shortly before his talk, and he casually mentioned something about how he was about to write the slides. So I had to check that I had not led Sara astray: luckily not, if only because the structure of the talk was along the lines of ask Matthew a question about something that makes him angry and wait and learn..

The afternoon of the LinuxChix miniconf was sunny and informal: there was a wrap-up session about evangelising IT to girls and then Robyn had a short piece advertising the existence of ChixBits and hoping to get some contributors.

Tuesday's programme was generally more exciting for me. I went to much of Brianna Laugher's Free as in Freedom miniconf. Matthew Landauer repeated his OSDC talk on Open Australia (our version of They Work For You). It's a cool project and approachable from my point of view: screenscraping and such. If I was taking on new projects I'd probably send patches.

Over at sysadmin for once in my life, I went to Gus Lees' talk on Google and ipv6. Essentially from Google's point of view ipv6 will arrive sooner or later and they want to make sure their (quite strict) internal SLAs are met when they start serving AAAA records for www.google.com. So they have some analysis of how many people will use AAAA records (about 0.7% of web users if I recall) and how many of them then have broken routing somehow (about one-third of the aforementioned 0.7% of web users). Then there's the folks with crazily long routes for no good reason and so on. The upshot is similar to Google's blog: ipv6 is moving inside Google. If you (as a network admin) are interested in testing, see here. Gus is at the other end of that email address and his home was the first DNS server to get access to AAAA records for www.google.com.

Jeff Waugh did a historical analogy between printing presses as revolution and Free as in revolution. Rusty Russell gave a talk which he hated on principle — it wasn't about code —  but which was beneficial to his audience, if not to any actual code. Its main point was that those arguing against stronger intellectual property is not an argument for strong property rights of the type that are important to capitalism, it's arguing against them. People who own a copy of a book, movie, or computer programme under strong intellectual property own less of that copy. This is dear to Rusty's heart: property rights are important. If it wasn't that he disclaimed all intent to ever do a 'soft' talk (ie no code) again, I'd recommend hearing it from the man with the passion.

Rusty's talk ended in his intellectual property interpretive dance, of which, like many linux.conf.au shenanigans, there is surprisingly little evidence on the Web.

We have finally come up with a system for playing Mario Kart semi-regularly online. So, if you own a copy of Mario Kart (for the Wii) and want to play now would be a good time to send me your codes and let me know to tell you when the game is being played.