Brent's Thoughts

So I have been running rsync backups for a bit now, and I have been saved a couple times from deleting something that I really wanted. Unfortunately, some of the stuff that I really want to keep are the things that take up a lot space. This doesn’t work that well since you have to have an extra drive with the same amount of space on it to back it up to. What I realized on the way home today was that I wasn’t really worried about a drive failure. If that happens then I am screwed anyway. What I really needed was a way to recover things if I accidentally deleted them. Unfortunately, that is one of the main things that Linux lacks. If you whack it from the drive it is pretty much gone, but there is an aspect of the rsync backups that will help me out. Hard-Links. You see in Linux, for those of you that don’t know, you can have a single copy of a file on the hard drive, but it appears several places in the filesystem. This saves space on the hard drive and if it is changed one place it is changed everywhere. The best part is that as long as there is one link on the drive the data is still there. Therefore if I do something to delete the directories that contain my movies or mp3s they are still there as long as there is another link. So I built a script that runs every night and and makes a completely hard-linked copy of the directory and rotates yesterdays back one. It then deletes the day before that. That gives me two days to realize that I deleted the shit. Should be enough. Takes up no extra hard drive space and covers my ass. I think it is a decent idea, but I am open to bitching. I am sure there will be some.

On another note, it would be cool to develop a filesystem driver that makes a second hard-linked copy of the complete filesystem, that is hidden. It then watches and when files are changed it breaks the mirror so that you have a backup copy of the file. All under the surface. If you need it you open a utility or run some command to open the hidden filesystem and you can get your shit back.

Yep that is probably what I am doing right now. I picked up a wireless NIC for Gears. Redhat didn’t understand it by default, but one google search and three rpms later I am rolling with the wireless. It is pretty cool to sit in the living room watching Star Trek III, the Search for Spock, while typing on Diablo in my room. X11 forwarding is tres cool as well. Gears lumbers under the weight of OpenOffice Writer a little, but sending Diablo’s screen output here across the wireless works out nicely. For some reason I keep wanting to call the damn thing a wavebird. Don’t know why that is. It is actually a Linksys 802.11a wireless NIC. Should be able to use it at work in some places as well. Might help us test some links and stuff in a perfect world.

If you believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution then, in my opinion, there is some reason to worry about the state of the human race. If survival of the fittest is the way the lifeforms evolve then we have effectively stopped evolution by keeping the weakest alive to reproduce. Now I am not for the death of people deemed “unfit” or with traits deemed undesirable, but I want to talk about a theory.

In a non “learned” society where medicine has not been created or practiced then the creatures that do not have the best survival traits die off and the traits that are the best are passed on. In a situation where medicine has been created people that have less desirable traits, such as the ability to catch AIDs, or the ability to catch any number or disease are helped to survive and to procreate. Thus these genes are allowed to get passed on and are never removed from the gene pool. This keeps us from ever getting around such things as the common cold, and genetic defects. On the same token things that might be an evolutionary step forward are considered oddities and sometimes aren’t passed on, because to us they are freaks.

Evolution and its theories are based in the animal world, but we as a race have removed ourselves from the theories that created us. We no longer allow hunter-prey levels to affect us. Instead we move food from other parts of the world to feed the people that have no food. Thus the population of people on the Earth will never stabilize. It will continue to increase until the planet as a whole can no longer provide food, only then will we start to die back or move on to other planets. Hopefully, then there will still be enough stuff left for the planet to restock itself. We have taken a system that was designed for a small biosphere and adapted it a whole planet. Just like we have removed ourselves from the effects of natural selection. It is hard to tell what the overall effects of these changes will be. It could be that the human race has reached its evolutionary end and that something else will rise to surpass us because of it.

A while ago I talked about how after September 9, 2001 there would be lots of issues develop with personal freedom and our rights as citizens. There is one of the most obvious examples of that in the news right now. First let me say again that I consider myself an American and I have no desire to leave or see the county hurt in any way, but I also must state that what I am about to talk about, in my opinion, hurts the county if it isn’t corrected.

Recently in New York a kid, 17 years old I think, was arrested for posting on a web site that he wanted to attack his school in what Good Morning America called a “Columbine Manner”. After stating this they show first the alleged criminal’s picture, which I think is illegal, and then showed a press conference where some authority figure stated that this kid would face seven years in jail for this crime thanks to New York’s new anti-terror laws. Laws that were inacted after September 11. There are several things here that need to be looked at. First, to the best of my knowledge these laws would have done nothing to stop the terrorist that attacked the World Trade Centers since they were never arrested, nor did they really have anything to do with New York other than to crash planes into it. This means that had these laws been in effect before September 11 they wouldn’t have done anything at all. Second, according this police chief, this kid faces SEVEN years in prison for committing no crime. All he did was express himself. He has a freedom of speech right to say whatever he wants to as long as it doesn’t cause anyone else harm. The old “Yelling fire in a crowded theater” analogy doesn’t apply here. What he said has no bearing on anyone else. It doesn’t hurt them in any way. Therefore there should be no reason to arrest him, let alone attempt to sentence him to seven years in jail.

Now I admit that what he said doesn’t need to be said, and shouldn’t be said. This doesn’t give us the right to arrest him though. Instead he should be watched and monitored to see if he is going to attempt to make good on these threats. If movements where seen that would relate to such an activity then I would have no problem with them arresting him and attempting to prove that he was going to it. The analogy that I came up with earlier is this, if I were to say that I am going to get in my car and drive 100mph to Bowling Green and a cop comes into my house and gives me a ticket for it. In that situation I just got penalized for something that I said I was going to do but not had not done. It is the same thing here.

This is wrong, an injustice and against the American way. I hope the courts see that and drop this case, if for no other reason than the fact that that law violates our constitutional rights.

(sports caster voice)In a not so unexpected win on New Years day the Anderson Highland High School Men’s Swim Team was soundly thumped by the Alumni of said swim team. One of the leading scorers was Brent Norris, with several assists from Goalie Jim Lindzy. Greg Fulaytar also helped with the scoring and Greg’s older brother Mike provided several key defensive plays. I had a chance to talk with Brent after the game and here is what he had to say, “Well you know I would like to thank Coach Renz for starting this tradition and I would also like to thank the swim team for providing the ass to kick in this game.” There you have it folks finals for the games are as follows:

Non-Contact 11-6 Alumni

Contact 10-7 Alumni

Contact 6-5 Alumni

Contact 5-6 Swim Team (Sports Writer note: in both this game and the previous game the swim team had 3+ extra people in the pool)

(/sports caster voice)

There you go. Yet another year of us winning. The whole trip was great and I had a good time at both Jim’s and Grandma’s while I was up there. Unfortunately, it starting snowing and icing on the 2nd and we had to cut the stay at Grandma’s a little short to get back home before it got too bad.