Linkstew

Benjy: Do you remember what page this AIM icon I'm using came from?
Kevin: hahah. boring3d.com
Kevin: I am Google.
Benjy: Damn you're good. You should be a search ... yeah, what you said.

Contrary to appearances, this was not a conversation about TiVo service plans:

Him (01:51:49): I know, it seems like such a weird world...
Me (01:51:53): Ah, back to the planned obsolescence? ;-)
Him (01:51:59): Yep.
Him (01:52:12): Why buy lifetime service when you can go monthly?

I'm back in Berkeley, thanks to a project due Monday at work. Well, at least I got most of the project done today.

Benjy: Oh heaven help my soul, I have to go log into Windows.
Stealth Josette: oh god no
Benjy: Stupid IE compatability testing. Where are my minions to delegate this sort of thing to?

To be fair, my "delegating" usually only consists of sending a Windows-using co-worker a URL on IM and asking them if it looks alright. It's not like I'm asking them to get up instead of me or anything.

It's an established fact that Linkstew is well indexed by google, and it averages about 200 google hits a day. These hits result in all kinds of irritating things like this (incomprehensible) slashdot comment (I just cite this one because it's the most recent) or linkage of the mockups I did comparing the size of the G4 cube and the gamecube in forums.

I just noticed that my google search hits have gone up by about 30 hits a day in the last couple of days. When I looked at my database, I saw that the increase in hits was due to queries like graduation+speech+ideas (7th) or graduation+speech+topics (1st!) that took the unwitting googlers to my graduation speech of yore.

In the last three days, I've gotten more than 50 hits for some variation of "graduation speech." Of course, my unconventional little speech probably isn't going to do them an ounce of good, so nyah nyah!

Here's Kevin's suggestion for what to do with them:

Kevin (23:21:32 PM): you should replace the target page with "You're fucked. Now go write your own speech and watch out for flying tomatoes."

So, as I mentioned, I worked out a deal with my own worst enemy so that there'd still be content while I'm gone. Well, one thing led to another:

Josi (02:01:17 AM): "my own worst enemy?"
Benjy (02:01:28 AM): yes. as opposed to my evil twin.
Josi (02:01:36 AM): oh no
Josi (02:01:51 AM): i'd pay to see the evil twin guestblog for you

So on top of the 8,000 other things I've been dealing with in the last week, I did some experimenting with rsync for work. I really liked it, and decided that once I got a chance, I wanted to switch to using rsync to upload my sources for my web sites. And so the weekend finally came, and after sleeping straight through Saturday afternoon/evening, I woke up and started playing with rsync, when Kevin messaged me:

Benjy (10:23 PM): Time to play with rsync.
Kevin (10:23 PM): I know it. I'm looking into it.
Benjy (10:24 PM): No, I mean, I'm actually playing with rsync right now.
Kevin (10:24 PM): Oh, did you read my just-finished post?
Benjy (10:24 PM): no...
Kevin (10:24 PM): That's pretty coincidental.

So before, I was using a Makefile + tar --after-date=($TODAY) ... + scp + ssh to copy updates to the web server. This worked okay, but it was pretty messy, and I had to manually specify the directories to include, and I had to manually exclude certain things from being copied every time, and so on. But here's what the new rsync based Makefile looks like:

all: clean put

put:
        rsync -avuz --exclude-from=exclude \
	--delete -e ssh gimli/ bsii@gimli:

get:
        rsync -avuz --exclude-from=exclude \ 
	-e ssh bsii@gimli: gimli/

clean:
        @echo 'Removing those pesky backup files'
        find gimli/ -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "*bak" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "*#" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "#*#" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name ".#*" -exec rm {} \;

The directory ~/gimli/ on my local machine contains everything that goes in my home directory on my web server. The file ~/exclude contains directories that should never be touched on either side -- notably, log files on the server side.

Because I use the `-e ssh` option to rsync, it uses ssh, so all of the communication is encrypted. And the best part is, you can do all of this on a default Mac OS X install, because it comes with rsync and ssh and make and everything you need! Yummy.

And then, as I make changes, I can just periodically type `make`, and it uploads just the bits that are different. And the advantage of this over my old system is that, if I make changes on the server side while I'm away from my own computer, I can type `make get` later and it'll update my local copy with what was changed on server. If you want more details about my setup, please ask.

disclaimer! It would be very easy to blow away your files by just running those commands that are in this post! Before you start playing with rsync, make sure you have a backup of all of your files on both ends! Also, be sure to use the -n option to rsync for a dry run -- it'll tell you exactly what it plans to do. Finally, be really careful with rsync's --delete. And if something does happen to your files, it's not my fault!

Either my brother is either the master of the subtle Instant Messenger tell off, or I read way too much into his enthusiasm for Silence of the Lambs. You be the judge:

Benjy: How do I want to set up my gear ratios in GT3?
Aaron: I'm busy... Ooh, Silence of the Lambs is on!
Benjy: You're saying that, because I'm an aries, which is a ram, which is related to a lamb, that I should shut up, aren't you?
Aaron: *blinks* sure, if ya wanna look at it that way