travis' brain dump

accidently delete your entire photo gallery instead of individual albums photos.

Indeed… I became one of those morons I rant about in the tech world on a daily basis. yay for me! I seriously forgot my helmet. Backups? lol yeah funny thing about those… so lets tell the story. 🙂

You see my server, being FreeBSD and having no real money for a good solid backup solution for such an operating system did what any good admin would do. at least make regular tarballs, gzip them and ship them offsite. While this does suffice as a good backup strategy for the most part, it does not however save even myself from a failure spot. So Sunday, I was doing some cleanup and wiped out my backups from over a month ago. Keep in mind a month ago is when I installed NextGen Gallery for my wordpress blogsite software and decided to discontinue use of my previous Gallery for personal reasons. (security mainly) When I did so, I also changed my backup selections to include the new paths for the new gallery and left off the old gallery since I fully intended on porting over my gallery as quickly as possible. (can you smell the failure here?) so, Sunday I go about maintenance and cleared out all my old backups from over a month ago not even thinking for a second that later in the day I would need them.

I logged into my old gallery sometime in the afternoon and decided to clean out the albums I had already ported to get a better view of what I still needed to port. Instead of deleted selected galleries, I deleted the entire thing. Before I had realized what I had done, it was …. GONE. Now when I say GONE, I mean it. Anyone who knows UFS2 file systems (freebsd) knows that there is no recycle bin unless you make one for yourself and script it, blah blah… when you delete a file, the pointer is wiped and the open space becomes territory for destructive over-write. 😉

I’d say that 95% of my pictures I have a backup for already on my server at home, but it was those 5% that I didn’t have anymore (but do now) that sent me a feeling I never want again.

Did I panic? no. Did I lose control of my bodily functions? Almost. Did I find a new hero on the internet? YES.

Christophe Grenier at cgsecurity.org, you are my new hero. LOL

He’s got a handy little tool out there called photorec which I have to say is probably the biggest life saver should you ever shoot yourself in the foot. It scours the entire drive for whatever you wiped out from top to bottom and leaves no stone (or block) unturned. 6 hours of running on the /home partition (it’s pretty darn big) and it recovered every one of my lost photos. (as well as everyone elses… BAD BAD BAD ARTIFICIAL!!)

Moral of the story? Make sure you have a good recent backup before you click delete on ANYTHING and don’t be a complete tard. IT people will laugh at you as I laugh even at myself. 🙂

soooo yeah… http://www.ihatemykereinhold.com/ — i’m not gonna say anything more.

So, I’m not sure if any of you have run into this (if I were a betting man I’d say yes) but the latest round of malware distribution is taking the net by storm in the form of fake CNN news items. You may notice some items in your inbox that have the following subject line:

“CNN.com Daily Top 10” & “CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert”

 While opening the mail doesn’t actually do anything to your system, following the links can set you up for disaster. Once clicked the link will take you to a fake cnn.com page that will prompt you for an install of a viewer. Typically flashupdate.exe; get_flash_update.exe and watchmovie.mpg.exe. Once installed it leaves your systems open to a variety of issues.

 Be on the lookout people. As usual, don’t install things you don’t know about, don’t install stuff you think you’ve already installed and if you’re in any way confused. Click cancel and email or call your IT support.

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Also something to be aware of. There has been a rash of similar type installations being prompted on social networking sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com. The same rules as above apply. Be smart, be safe!

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 post mirrored on: techtalk.homerun-networks.com

You know what I find disgusting? When we use less and less of a resource in our house and yet it  costs more and more each month. Pretty lame huh?

I’m just irritated that they keep bringing these rates up in exponential percentages and then electing to cut off electricity for people who are 30 days late on the nose. While I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to worry about such things, I can’t help but think about people who are really struggling. What a pain in the rear end. Luckily for some of those people we have programs here in Colorado which help out people who are unable to afford these hikes. The sad part is, it’s those who can afford it which are also helping programs like this out through donations and other things so in the grand scheme of things if you’re helping out and donating then you’re paying not only the hikes you’re incurring but helping others to pay theirs as well.

Just as an example of these hikes, we were paying $0.02506 per kWh at the beginning of this year. From April to June they bumped it up to $0.03849 and in July they slammed it up again to $0.04824. Now to put that into perspective for you since I know you’re seeing it as “only a penny” lets explain what’s going on here. For say, 1000 kWh’s of electricity used, which is a pretty low average for a hot summer and a small house, you have to not only pay your electricity usage fee of $0.040 per kWh but you have to pay the ECA (as wells as other fees) on top of that. Broken down, the following usage+ECA is what you get:

Electric Bill 1st Quarter 2008: $40.11 in usage + $25.06 ECA -> $65.17

Electric Bill 2st Quarter 2008: $40.11 in usage + $38.49 ECA -> $78.60

Electric Bill 3rd Quarter 2008: $40.11 in usage + $48.24 ECA -> $88.35

So what you’re seeing is in the span of 7 months the cost of the same amount of electricity has gone up $23.18 in fees. For some that’s not a real big issue. For others it’s a huge issue. I realize, again, that we’re talking about a matter of pennies here but for someone who are already struggling to pay a $65.00 electric bill along with outrageous amounts for gasoline in order to get to work in the first place to pay that bill, it’s creating some serious hurt.

Now, I realize that the ECA is used to offset some costs, but you’d figure for a company who has a net income of around $105 million in the second quarter this year alone could cut some people a little slack as this goes well beyond ‘ passing the cost along to the customer ‘.

*shrug* but what do I know? i’m just the customer so I have no way of comprehending the “actual reasons” behind such hikes.