I suffered this week, for the first time in 23 years “in the business,” a hard drive crash on my desktop computer, rendering it useless, and in need of repair. That’s a pretty good record.

So, for now, I’m working on my laptop, which normally gets pulled into use only when I travel.

What’s amazed me is how much less dire a circumstance this is than I expected.

My email’s all stored on an IMAP server in the basement.

My address book, calendar, and bookmarks are stored in my .Mac account.

The Mac software I’ve purchased is mostly delivered electronically, and is easy to re-download and re-install if required.

The stuff of my work — scripts, programs, web pages, and the like — is all stored elsewhere, on servers that are backed up by others.

My desktop is obviously, in the end, really just a slightly souped terminal, and the data — which is what we used to think of as the reason for having a computer in the first place, is scattered around everywhere from my basement to Boston to New Hampshire to California.

If my desktop had crashed 10 years ago, I would have been out of commission for at least a week, if not longer. This week, after spending a frustrating 5 or 6 hours trying to diagnose and solve my desktop problem, I dropped it off at little mac shoppe, plugged in my laptop, and picked up where I left off.

Decentralization good. The network really is the computer.

Buttons aren’t what they used to be. Back in the day, any political campaign, radio station or pop culture phenomenon worth its salt would have a collection of buttons associated with it. No more. I don’t think, short of Family Literacy Day, a late holdout, I’ve seen a new button in years. If the Internet has killed a medium, I think it’s this one.

Pictured here are the remnants of my button collection, started in the mid-1970s and last added to in a serious way in 1984 when I covered the Liberal leadership convention for my local newspaper (this was the one where Chretien lost and Turner won — see the left side of the montage for Don Johnston, Mark MacGuigan, Eugene Whelan, John Munro and Chretien buttons, along with a runaway Rosemary Brown button from the NDP.)

Click on the image to order a Biggie Size version.

Other things you’ll notice: in the lower left corner there are some radio station buttons — CJJD (Hamilton), CHUM and CJRT (Toronto) and FM108 (Burlington); some technology buttons in the upper centre — I Adore My 64 was an ad slogan for the Commodore 64 computer; a good collection of pro-library and pro-water buttons, reflecting my parents’ vocations; several YMCA buttons in the lower-right; the Cardinal Tours buttons from the trip my grandmother and my brother Mike and I took to New York City in 1978; in the top-right a Ben Fernandez for President button (who was he?).

My favourite, and the reason for digging out the old button box, us is the button lower-centre, which is printed with only “This is my ZAP button” for reasons only know to history. I’m going to see if I can get copies of this made for the big Zap conference next month.

It is my secret love of button and badge culture that has to date prevented me from writing a snide, vitriolic piece about our DVA workers and their identification tags, worn morning, noon and night (seemingly) both in and out of DVA. But I’m not being snide nor vitriolic. So, goofy-looking tag-bearers, in the name of the Fonz, I salute you.

We’ve all done it: written an email that references “the attached file” and then forgotten to attach the attachment. Sometimes we realize this and send a second message, usually titled something like “I am an idiot!” with the attachment. Sometimes we don’t realize this, and get back a flurry of messages from our correspendents with subject lines like “You are an idiot!”.

When I was young and footloose and working at the Royal Ontario Museum translating FORTRAN programs into BASIC, and working, on the side, in Turbo Pascal, Gene Wilburn, the director of IT at the Museum, gave me a very useful programming trick: when you’re writing a program and have occasion (as one often does in Pascal) to use a curly bracket ({) which will later need to be closed, simply type, in advance, the closing bracket at the same time, and fill in the “middle” afterwards.

I’ve used this technique ever since, and it’s saved me a lot of hunting around trying to figure out where my mis-matched brackets are.

So in the spirit of Gene’s sage advice, I offer the following similar suggestion: when you are composing an email with an attachment, and you type the word “attached,” as you inevitably will, at that very second you should actually attach the file.

So the progression would go something like this:

Dear Bob,

I have attached

…and here you break and actually attach the file to the message, after which you continue…

the spreadsheet you requested.

Cheers,
Peter

Get into the habit of doing this, and you will never be called (or be forced to call yourself) an idiot again!

Apple’s Backup utility, which receives a lot of flack for requiring a .mac account to allow you to use it, even if you’re backing up to a local CD or DVD, is actually quite a useful and powerful tool.

I’m in the midst of recovering from a hard disk failure on my iMac, and I was able to back up everything important to a couple of DVDs before I lost total control of the beast.

Rather than backup up to some complicated, proprietary, compressed backup format that requires the original software to restore from, opening the DVD on my iBook reveals the files I backed up, in the original directory structure, ready for use.

Wonderful.

I have two machines, one connected to one ISP, the other connected to another ISP. Both machines have two Ethernet cards (aka NIC cards). I want to connect the two machines directly together so that traffic back and forth between them can go direct, rather than from one ISP to the other. How? Easy!

First, connect the second Ethernet card in each machine with a crossover cable. This is a regular Ethernet cable but for the fact that its “send” and “receive” wires are crossed over (this is an over-simplication, but it helps). When you go to the store to buy this cable, make sure you buy a crossover cable rather than a regular patch cable. As an alternative, you can plug both machines, using regular patch cables, into the same hub; the effect is the same.

Next, set up the network connection on the first machine’s second Ethernet card:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

This assigns an IP address of 192.168.1.1 to the second Ethernet connection. This IP is of a special collection set aside for this “private” purpose; just don’t pick one at random!.

Next, do the same on the second machine:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

Same deal here, but this machine gets an IP address of 192.168.1.2.

That’s it! At this point you should be able to ping 192.168.1.1 from 192.168.1.2 and vice versa.

I’ve just set up a couple of machines like this for polling day here on Prince Edward Island; both of them have gigabit Ethernet cards. You wouldn’t believe how fast files fly from one to the other!

I’m posting this here because most of what you’ll Google when searching for how to do this is instructions for connecting one machine to the Internet using a second machine’s existing Internet connection, and that’s not what this is about.

I’m assuming, by the way, that you’ve already handled getting the second Ethernet cards in each machine recognized and configured as eth1.

I have two webservers, on separate machines, on separate networks. They are identical. I want them to respond, in round-robin fashion, to the same domain name — host.domain.com. How do I set this up in DNS? Turns out it’s actually very easy:

host.domain.com  IN  A  192.168.1.1
host.domain.com  IN  A  10.1.10.1

The DNS server (BIND, in my case) will serve up the “next” IP address for host.domain.com every time it’s queried.

Takes 10 seconds to configure.

Brian Bauld graciously provided the following photo of the big Catherine Hennessey shindig on Saturday. You can shop Brian’s B-Line Books store as a measure of saying thanks.

Clockwise from the top-left, the photos are as follows:

• Brian’s wife Valerie (far-left), Susan Mackenzie talking with Paul and Jane Michael and Kim Devine.
• Valerie, Catherine Hennessey (in the hat), Karen Mair showing off her fantastic deal of a purse from the 70-mile Coastal Yard Sale, me.
• Catherine’s sister Betty, Catherine holding her shoes, purchased in Florence.
• Ivan Dowling singing up a storm (two onlookers unidentified).
• Ivan moves from singing to dancing while Catherine’s brother-in-law Claude (white golf shirt), several Orfords, and several anonymous guests look on.
• The Cake. Courtesy of the chefs at the Delta Hotel. Notice the flowing fruit river.
• An anonymous arm talking to Don Stewart, me, Gary Carroll (looking every inch like Cary Grant), Valerie, Susan Mackenzie, Jane Michael.

I have no problem whatsoever with the Governor General taking an entourage through Russia and environs and spending $1 million of our money to do so. However I do take exception to her comment, quoted in the Globe and Mail:

“I think the visit is important to the people who are coming… to show Canada as it really is,” Ms. Clarkson said.

I have no idea what Canada as it really is actually is, if fact I’m not sure such a concept could be done justice to. However I’m fairly confident that the Governor General’s entourage of intelligensia is not Canada as it really is, at least not in any way approaching a broad, honest reflection.