Megatheriums for Breakfast

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Again, although I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I have completed very little in the period, in fact, only one book.

Last time I also complained about a change Lexcycle had made to their e-book reader Stanza. They’ve now fixed it; or at least, made it possible to adjust the delay before bringing up their new Dictionary feature. The problem for them is that in the interval I explored the Palm eReader app from Fictionwise and have decided that I like it more. I may do a comparative review of the two pieces of software shortly here or on www.Teleread.org, a great site I recently discovered which deals with news and opinion about e-books.

I’m also uneasy that Lexcycle have now been bought out by Amazon, producers of the Kindle and also owners of Audible. What this means for the future of e-books, I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s good and I am rather concerned. More on this another time.

In what follows and in all my writings about audiobooks, the word ‘read’ also includes the sense ‘listened to’. Pity there’s no English word which covers both.

Trunk Music  by Michael Connelly.

Audiobook from Audible.

I’ve been reading and enjoying the series of novels based around Connelly’s hard-boiled L.A. cop Harry (Hieronymous) Bosch for several years now. The problem is that, what with getting hold of them erratically either from the local library or as they are made available via Audible (or not, see my post Divide and Conquer), I’ve read them completely out of sequence, which has made my understanding of the life-story of Bosch a backwards-and-forwards kind of thing, making me feel a bit like Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim who ‘had come unstuck in time’.

However you piece together Harry Bosch’s story, he’s a fascinating character who seems generally on the side of the good guys, but has an occasional unpleasantly violent streak and a strong tendency to break the rules and go his own way.

Connelly’s stories about Bosch are full of lots of local L.A. detail which I can only presume to be authentic (never having been to that city). And he certainly knows how to spin a yarn.

This one starts with the discovery of an abandoned Rolls Royce with a body in the boot, and the trail leads to organised crime figures in Los Vegas. Typically, however, that’s not where the story ends, as Bosch both tries to unravel the details and to cope with his re-encounter with an old flame.

It’s this relationship which threw me into Billy Pilgrim territory, because I’ve read later novels in the series where this relationship has developed in an unexpected direction, and I feel I’m still missing several pieces of the jigsaw.

I highly recommend “Trunk Music” and the rest of the Bosch series, though with a warning that you have to have to occasionally have a strong stomach for violence and descriptions of gore.

Here’s a great presentation by Lawrence Lessig about the changes we desperately need to have in copyright law. It’s beautifully done as a presentation (I’m guessing in Apple’s Keynote) and, though 45 minutes long, worth watching every minute of. It’s extremely entertaining and frequently very funny.

By the way, this video is not on YouTube because Warner Brothers issued a DCMA “take down” notice – though there doesn’t seem much doubt that this was unwarranted under standard fair use provisions of the existing copyright law.

The irony is that I would never have stumbled upon this if Ray Beckerman hadn’t linked to a site linking to it; and that site only linked to it because of the takedown notice. Go figure.

When it comes to preserving your valuable data, it pays to be paranoid.

Assume the worst, think of all the possible ways things could go wrong. Be paranoid. The question is not whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

These days, everyone has valuable data, and it’s taking up more and more room. Documents, spreadsheets and databases; emails, photographs and even video. Game players have many save files capturing their progress in various games. In my case and that of most programmers I also have many files and folders comprising highly valuable program source code. We’re all working hard generating digital files of one form or another, almost every day.

So, think about how you would feel if you lost that data. Bad? It could be worse than bad.

About ten years ago the young programmers in my office were having fun replaying an audio file garnered off the Internet, from some computer company’s help-line. It was a call from some guy who had been writing a book on his computer, maybe a novel. Something went wrong with the machine and he sent it in for repair. The computer company had (for whatever reason) wiped the hard disk. The young guys in my office thought it was hugely amusing to hear this guy raging in despair about the loss of all of his data, almost literally foaming at the mouth. Personally, I found it very painful to listen to. I could feel his pain.

Losing data, particularly creative work you have labored over, is tragic. This is why I am paranoid about backups.

Here are my paranoid rules:

• If there’s only one copy of something, it might as well not exist at all, you’re going to lose it. Make an immediate copy of any irreplaceable item (such as photographs of a wedding, which can’t be replaced at all).
   
• If you only have two copies of something, each copy must be kept in a different physical location. The house or office could burn down (or, as happened to my daughter and her husband, the backup drive can be stolen along with the laptop it was backing up).
   
• Two copies is not enough. Your hard drive could crash AND the backup copy could be lost or prove corrupt. I’ve had it happen.
   
• How do you know your backup files aren’t corrupt? Check them regularly.
   
• Are you backing up everything you might want? I regularly (say once very 18 months) reformat my desktop computer. That’s when I remember all the things I should have backed up but could easily forget to: fonts, passwords, email archives, application settings.
   
• What about backups of material not on your desktop computer? Like on-line blogs, forum posts, etc. A colleague of mine forgot to renew his domain name and hosting package and lost a valuable travel blog and photographs.
   
• Think about how much time you would be prepared to put in to re-create your work if it was lost. In other words, how much work could you bear to lose? A day’s worth? A week’s worth? Backup more often than that.
   
• There’s no such thing as too many copies if the data is really valuable.

So here’s my backup strategy. Personally, I don’t yet think it’s paranoid enough.

• For program source code, I use a version control system (Subversion) to save progressive versions, each time I do significant work on any programming project. The commit happens via a VPN, to a server in a different physical location to my desktop – in fact, to an office some 20 km away. This generally happens once or twice a day on a current project. As Jeff Attwood says, source control is the absolute bedrock of software engineering.
   
• I have an external network drive (a 500GB LaCie Ethernet Mini). I use Acronis to schedule weekly backups of ‘My Documents’ and source code folders, on an incremental basis (this means I can backtrack, à la Mac Time Machine, to previous versions of things).
   
• I copy the Acronis backup files from the LaCie to one of two identical external USB drives (Western Digital MyBooks). Only one of these is kept at my house. On an approximately weekly basis, I take the current MyBook drive with me to another physical location, and swap it with the identical drive already there. Even in my house, the MyBook drive doesn’t live on my desk, but somewhere else in the house where a thief won’t find it.
   
• When I’m feeling particularly vulnerable, I burn DVD-ROMs of really critical files and keep them somewhere else.

You might quite reasonably ask why I don’t use ‘cloud storage’ to backup files to a location on the Internet, like Amazon’s S3. The answer is that in Australia our broadband upload speeds are still so feeble that it would take weeks to backup any significant volume of data this way.

So am I paranoid enough? I guess I’ll only find out when things go wrong.

“Even paranoids have enemies”
— Golda Meir to Henry Kissinger