Sat, 10 Mar 2007
Old Versions of Real Player
Real Player 10 has a nicer interface than version 8, but the video quality sucks. It's very choppy. So I recommend sticking with RealPlayer 8 for now. Real doesn't make it very easy to find old versions of their software, but there they do make them available in their Legacy Software Archive. For some reason, the link to RealPlayer 8 for Linux isn't the latest version. The Debian realplayer installer package expects rp8_linux20_libc6_i386_cs2_rpm. Also available is a tarball of the RealVideo 9 Codecs for use with RealPlayer 8. These are needed to play some videos.
Retrieving Old Messages on Blackberry
Looking at my web stats, I saw a few visitors from Google who were looking for information on how to get old messages onto a Blackberry. Since I didn't actually have that information, I'll add it here.
Suppose you have some old messages in your IMAP inbox which have been purged from your Blackberry because they are too old, and you would like to get them back so you can reply while on the subway. Just copy them from your inbox back to your inbox. You can do this in a single action with mutt--using save will copy the messages and delete the originals. But Thunderbird doesn't seem to allow you to create a copy of messages within a folder so you will have to move (copy and delete original) the messages to another folder, and then copy them back to your inbox.
The copies will then look like new messages to the Blackberry service, and your Blackberry will download them. If, within your non-mobile MUA, your sort your inbox by date or date-then-thread (mutt's threaded mode), your inbox should appear the same as before making the copies, but if you sort your messages in the order they exist in the IMAP store (including Thunderbird's threaded mode), the copies will appear at the end (or beginning, depending on your sorting direction) of your inbox.
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Use Separate State Directory for Burp
I recently bought a RAID
enclosure for my backup drives. One of the nice features is that it powers
down the drives and fans when there is no activity for five minutes.
I use burp for backing up my laptops. Burp has a timed backup mode, in which a client can connect to the server, and start a backup if it's been too long since its last backup. This allows, for example, wife to suspend her laptop whenever she wants. When it is running, burp will check with the server every 20 minutes whether it needs to be backed up. If she suspends it in the middle of a backup, it will resume during the next check.
I've configured burp to only allow backups outside of my normal working hours so I don't need to hear the drives grinding away while I'm at my desk. (Pulling myself away from my desk at night is the next challenge.)
The only problem with this configuration is that when a client connects, the backup directory is accessed to figure out whether to start a backup, causing the drives in my RAID enclosure to spin up. The solution was to not have burp touch the backup directory until it's starting a backup.
When a client connects, burp creates a lockfile. By default, this lockfile is
created in the backup directory, but there is an option to use a different
directory, client_lockdir. Set this in the server's burp.conf.
client_lockdir=/var/run/burp
The next change required is to have the timer script, which checks whether the
server should start a backup when the client asks, use a separate directory to
check the state of existing backups. First, enough data from the backup
directory needs to be copied to a separate directory each time a backup is
completed. To do this, I use the server_script_post option, which
runs a script each time a backup completes.
server_script_post=/etc/burp/update_state_dir
My update_state_dir
script copies the current symlinks and timestamp
files from the backup directory to a separate state directory. I updated
the timer script to check this state directory. Review all of the changes at
github.
