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Condensed knowledge for 2008-03-11

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How To

A look at hard drives: finding the best deals

Given my recent push to find a feasible solution for my photo library, which resulted in the purchase of a Drobo (three, actually, but that’s beside the point), I’ve gotten to know a bit about hard drive prices. Here are my two cents on the issue.

Keep in mind that this advice is applicable only during the present time, since prices will continue to fluctuate and larger hard drives will become available, driving down the prices for the smaller ones. Let me also say that if you didn’t get your hard drives before, during or after Christmas, you missed out on some great deals.

Right now, the most economical drives (best size to price ratio) are the 500 GB ones. You can get great SATA drives with 16 MB caches (current standard size), 7,200 rpm and 3.0 GB/sec transfer speed at $120 (retail-boxed; OEM drives are cheaper).

If you must get a drive smaller than 500 GB, you can, but it’s not economical. The price per GB starts to go up once you go smaller. It’s about the economics of the thing. Regardless of the actual size of the drive, the price of the components and labor has to be factored in. Even if the drive is smaller in size, and it stands to reason that it should be cheaper, it costs money to put it together, and that cost is fairly inflexible. That’s why you may gasp when you look at the prices of 40 GB or 80 GB drives (if you can still find them) and you wonder why they cost so much when no one uses them anymore.

Back to bigger drives. I remember just 1-2 months ago, the 750 GB hard drives were double the price of the 500 GB ones, but the prices are coming down. In just another few months, or even less than that, they will close the gap and become the most economical drives you’ll find. That time isn’t here yet though. Right now, the least expensive 750 GB drives (retail-boxed) I can find start at $199. If 500 GB can be gotten for $100-120, then, proportionally speaking, 750 GB drives should be $150-180 in order to be as economical as the 500 GB drives. Not yet.

➡ Updated 2/27/08: The 1 TB (1,000 GB) drives have just dropped in price enough to be just as economical as the 500 GB drives. I’m very surprised that it’s happened this fast. The market has leapfrogged the 750 GB drives, as I thought it would. I’ve seen the WD 1 TB SATA drive pictured below for as as low as $230.

The 1 TB (1,000 GB) drivesaren’t economical yet, either. It’s likely that in 6 months or so, they’ll get to be great deals. It’s even possible that market forces will cause the prices to leapfrog over the 750 GB drives and push the 1 TB drives to the forefront. Right now, the least expensive 1 TB drive comes in at $260, which is more expensive than if you were to get two 500 GB drives. Keep in mind I’m talking strictly about the GB to price ratio here, not the convenience of having a single drive instead of two, which trumps the price difference somewhat.

Because I have a Drobo, I’m isolated somewhat from having to worry about whether I have a single drive or two drives. I can still get plenty of space if I stuff my Drobo with four 500 GB drives, then replace them with 750 GB or 1 TB drives later. Or, even better, I can take the wait and see approach. Right now, there’s plenty of space on the Drobo that stores my photo library, even with only two 500 GB drives inside. That means I can wait till the bigger drives get cheaper and buy an extra drive at that point.

Similarly, the Drobo that stores our movies and videos, plus our various other files, is doing just fine with three 500 GB drives. I don’t think I’m going to fill it up in the next month or two, and that means I can wait until the 750 GB drives, or maybe even the 1 TB drives, become economical.

With hardware, it’s about striking the balance between what you must have, and what can wait. Thankfully, even 500 GB is a ton of space for most people, so it’s a buyer’s market, as they say.

Another thing you can look at, once you know the prices of internal hard drives, is the prices of external drives. When you know how much an internal drive costs, you can subtract it from the cost of an external drive and figure out how much you’re paying for the enclosure and design alone, and whether it’s worth it to buy it.

This is why I said that the 500 GB LaCie drive was a bargain, and why I recommended that people buy it. Given that you can get a 500 GB drive for $100, and the drive costs $118 (at one point it cost only $109) you know this is a bargain. You’re paying only $18 to get the drive packaged nicely in a great USB 2.0 enclosure that makes no noise. Having fiddled around with plenty of enclosures in my time, I know a great deal when I see one.

By the same token, when you look at the G-Tech Quad Interface 500 GB drive, you know that’s not a bargain. When the drive itself costs only $100 and you pay $270 to get the drive and the enclosure, that means you’re paying $170 for just the enclosure and the quad interface. Is that worth it? You decide.

Don’t think I’m implying your decision has to be guided by price alone. While I dislike paying a premium for a product, I do it if I think it’s worth it. I think the Drobo is overpriced. I still bought three of them and I recommend them to others. I think Apple products are overpriced, but I still buy them and recommend them to others. (You’ll have to excuse my tone in that post — I was seriously irritated with Apple at the time, but what I said was true.)

It’s just that it’s worth knowing what you’re buying. If you’re going to spend your money on something, then you should do the research to back up your purchase decision. This is also why I’m steamed up about Apple’s non-transparency when it comes to their hardware specifications. I don’t know what I’m buying, and it bothers me. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to buy, it’s just that I’d like to know where my money’s going.

I hope this has been helpful to you.

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How To

How I moved all my content from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com

A place in this world

Background info

As midnight approached this past New Year’s Eve, I was busy working on a long-term project. I was about to move all of my content (every article and post I’d written) from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com. There were many reasons for this, but consolidation was the most readily apparent.

As detailed on my About page, I’d already combined my content from other sites of mine onto comeacross.info, but there was one more piece of the puzzle that needed to fall into place. I’d alluded to it already. I was thinking about doing it in 2006, believe it or not. As a matter of fact, when I sat down and thought about whether to start writing at comeacross.info or raoulpop.com, I knew deep down I should choose to start writing on my personal domain, but worried it might be too difficult for people to remember and type the name.

After a year or so at ComeAcross, I realized that the subjects I was writing about were much too varied for a standalone site. I was writing in a personal voice, using a lot of 1st person, and it only made sense to have that sort of content reside on my personal site. Plus, there were so many splogs (spam blogs) on the .info TLD, that I worried whether I would be taken seriously if I stayed on .info. I’d owned raoulpop.com for a long time, I wasn’t really putting it to good use, and it didn’t make sense not to.

I set a deadline of 12/31, and got to work on planning and research. What better time for such a big change as this than New Year’s, right?

I’m documenting this for you because someone else might need to know how to do it. And I figure the thought process that went on behind the scenes is also worth knowing.

Planning and research

My biggest challenge was to figure out how to redirect all of the traffic from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com, reliably and accurately. I needed to make sure that every one of my articles and posts would redirect to my new domain automatically, so that a URL like

http://comeacross.info/2007/12/30/my-photographic-portfolio/

would automatically change to

https://raoulpop.com/2007/12/30/my-photographic-portfolio/

and the redirect would work in such a way that search engines would be properly notified and I wouldn’t lose my page rank.

I knew about 301 redirects, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish them in the Linux/WordPress environment the way that I wanted them to work. I had worked mainly with Microsoft web servers until recent times, and Linux was and still is fairly new to me. I was using John Godley’s Redirection plugin for WP (it’s an awesome plugin btw), and I knew it could do 301 redirects quite nicely. I had been using it heavily when I changed post slugs or deleted/consolidated posts at ComeAcross.

I worked out a line of Regex code that I could use to create a site-wide redirection, I tested it and it worked fine. In case you’re wondering, you can easily test it by creating a 307 (temporary) redirection instead of a 301 (permanent) redirection. Here’s how to do it:

Create a new 301 redirection where the source URL is

/(.*)

and the target URL is

http://www.example.com/$1

Make sure you check the Regex box, add it, and you’re done.

Just to make sure, I contacted John Godley to confirm whether it was the best way to do things. He said that would certainly do the job, but there was a MUCH easier and faster way to do it, one that saves a lot of the overhead that comes into play when WP gets used. It works through the .htaccess file. He was kind enough to provide me with the code, which is reproduced below.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Just paste that into your .htaccess file (remove all other code but make sure you back it up somewhere in case you need it), save it, upload it, and you’re done.

Don’t do anything yet though! Not before you’ve thoroughly backed up everything! Let me outline the steps for you, and keep in mind that I wanted to mirror all of my content from two separate WP sites using the same WP version, and to redirect from the first to the second. These two conditions have to be met in order for my advice to apply to your situation.

  1. Make sure both sites are on the latest and greatest version of WP, or at least they’re on the SAME version of WP
  2. Back up the database from the old domain
  3. Download all site files from the old domain
  4. Upload site files to new domain
  5. Restore database to new domain
  6. Make changes to .htaccess file as shown above
  7. Log into your new domain’s WP admin panel and change the site and blog URLs. Now you’re done! Check to make sure the redirection works properly and all of your content is there.

Upgrade your WP installs

The two sites have to be on the same version, or else things might not work as expected. Upgrade both sites to the latest and greatest, or at least make sure they’re on the SAME version before you do anything else. Go to WordPress, download and install the latest versions. There’s also an Automatic Upgrade plugin, but I haven’t tried it yet, so I can’t vouch for it.

BEFORE you do any sort of upgrade, you need to back up. Yes, you can’t get away from this… You’ll need to do two backups, one before you upgrade, and one after you upgrade, before you transfer the content.

Back up your content

This combines steps 2 and 3 listed above. Backing up your site files is easy. Use an FTP client to access the files on the web server and download them to your hard drive. I always keep a local copy of my site files. It just makes sense.

Backing up your database is a little more involved. Your database contains all of your site content (posts, links, comments, tags, categories, etc.) so you definitely don’t want to lose it. There are detailed instructions on backing up the database on the WordPress site. You can follow those, or you can go to your site’s Admin Panel >> Manage >> Export and download the WordPress WXR file, which you can import into your new site afterwards.

While this is great for backups, restores are another matter. I tried it and found that the import operation kept timing out at my web host. Given that I have thousands of posts, I didn’t want to sit there re-restoring the WXR file only to get a few posts done with every operation. I needed something quicker.

There is a plugin called WordPress Database Backup which lets you download a zipped SQL file of the database. You can use this to restore the database through the MySQL Admin Panel, if your webhost provides you access to it.

What I did was to simply point my new site install to my old database. This is a very handy and easy solution if you plan to host both sites with the same web host. But this still doesn’t excuse you from backing up the DB before you upgrade the WP install! 🙂

Restore your content to the new site

This is a two-step process (see #4 and #5 above) and involves reversing the steps you took during the backups. You will now upload your site files to the new domain, and you will restore the database to the new domain as well. If you’re in my situation, where you’re using the same web host, you can simply point the wpconfig.php file on your new domain to the old database.

Make sure all your content is properly restored before going on to the next step!

Make changes to the .htaccess file

You will need to make sure you don’t touch the .htaccess file before you transfer it to your new domain. Only the .htaccess file on your old domain needs to change. Remember this, or you’ll be wondering what’s going on with the redirects afterwards…

Use the code I’ve given you above, in the Planning and Research section, to make changes to the .htaccess file on your old domain, after you’ve made absolutely sure that all of your content is now mirrored on the new domain. Once this is done, the redirects will occur automatically and seamlessly.

Final checks and tweaks

This is very important. Surf to your old URL. You should get re-directed to your new URL. Do a search in the search engines for content of yours that you know is easily found. Click on the search results and make sure the links get redirected to your new site. Because you’re using 301 redirects, the search engines will automatically change their search results to reflect the URL changes without affecting your page rank, so you shouldn’t lose any search engine traffic if you execute the content move correctly.

There are a few more things you’ll need to check:

If you’d like to make changes to your site feed (and I did), you’ll need to handle that properly. I use FeedBurner, and there are people that subscribe to my content via RSS or via email. I needed to transfer both groups of subscribers to my new feed seamlessly. The FeedBurner folks helped me do just that, and I didn’t lose a single subscriber during the move. I detailed that process in this post.

What about internal links? If you’ve blogged for a while, you’ll have linked to older posts of yours. Those link URLs now contain the old domain, and you’ll need to change all of them at some point, or you’ll risk making those links invalid if you should ever stop renewing your old domain. Fortunately, there’s a Search and Replace plugin for WP that lets you do just that. It works directly with the database, it’s very powerful, and it’s very fast. That means you have to be VERY careful when you use it, because there’s no undo button. You can easily mess up all of your content if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What I did was to replace all instances of “.raoulpop.com/” with “.raoulpop.com/“. That did the trick nicely. I then did a regular site search for all instances of ComeAcross and manually made any needed changes to those posts. (Here’s a thought: back up the DB before you start replacing anything. This way you can restore if something should go wrong.)

Finally, if you’re using the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin, you’ll want to make sure you manually rebuild your site map. You don’t want to have your old site information in the site map as Google and the other search engines start to crawl your new domain.

That’s about all I did for the site content transfer. It occupied half my New Year’s Eve night, but it was worth it. It’s quite a bit of work, but if you plan it out, it should only take you 4-5 hours or less to execute the transfer, depending on your familiarity with this sort of thing, and the speed of your internet connection (keep in mind that upload speeds are a LOT slower than download speeds on most broadband connections).

Given how much work is involved, I was a bit surprised to see Matthew Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress) talk about doing his own switch to a new domain in “2 seconds“. I think what he referred to is the changes to the .htaccess file and the blog URLs, which are the fastest parts of the process. There is, however, quite a bit of work that needs to take place behind the scenes before those switches can get flipped. And I also believe (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that he pointed both domains to the same web files — in other words, re-used his existing WP install — so he bypassed a lot of the steps that are otherwise required.

Hope this proves helpful to someone!

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How To

How to backup and restore your Mac and PC

I had a conversation yesterday about this very topic that made me realize it’d make a great article. So here’s how to backup — and if needed, restore — both your Mac and PC in a pretty much foolproof sort of way.

Before I start, let me clarify three things.

First, using backup software does not necessarily mean you can restore your entire computer in case it crashes, gets infected with a virus, or the hard drive dies. Keep that in mind! Backing up your files means just that: you’re backing up your files and can restore them, not your computer. The question you need to ask yourselves is: “Does my backup software let me restore my entire computer (operating system + my files) or just my files?”

Second, you’ll need a good backup device. It won’t do to have both your computer and your backup device fail at about the same time, or you’ll be nowhere. So make sure to get a good external drive with plenty of space (I use these) or to use a device that’s built to secure your data against hardware failures (like a Drobo, which I also use). Apple has just released a wireless backup drive called Time Capsule, which should work nicely with Macs.

Third, I’d rather not get into arguments about how some piece of software is better than that piece of software. The point is to make things easy for those of you that are confused by all the pieces of software out there. In the end, you use whatever software works for you, but remember that this is what I recommend. I don’t want to bog people down with doing their virus checks with Whodalala and their spyware checks with Whodalulu, and… I think you get my point. An all-in-one solution works best, especially something that you install and then runs automatically. I believe strongly in automating these sorts of tasks and making it easy for the average person to use the software, and I’ve written about this in the past as well.

How to backup and restore a Mac

Mac OS X Leopard’s Time MachineThis one’s really easy. Get Mac OS X Leopard and use Time Machine. It’ll do both file-level restores and full restores. It backs up your computer automatically every hour, and the first time you run it, it’ll do a full backup of everything on your computer. It’s great, I use it too, it works. In case your Mac should go kaput, you can restore it in its entirety after it gets fixed by booting up to the Leopard DVD and choosing “Restore System from Time Machine” from the Utilities menu. Should you only need to restore files, you’ve probably already seen the cool demo video and you know all about that.

Carbon Copy ClonerDon’t have Leopard? Still on Mac OS X Tiger? It’s okay. Use Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s wonderful, it’s free (you should donate if you find it useful though), and it can do full and incremental backups and restores. (Incremental means it’ll only backup or restore the files that have changed since the last backup or restore.) It works with both Tiger and Leopard, so you’re fully covered.

How to backup and restore a PC

This one’s a little trickier, but you just have to remember two names: OneCare Live and Norton Ghost.

Microsoft OneCare LiveOneCare Live is made by Microsoft and will do most everything PCs need: defragmentation, virus checks, spyware checks, firewall, and backups. What’s more, the software will remind you if you haven’t backed up or ran scans lately. It’s an all-in-one piece of software that I’ve used for over a year, and I like it.

A nice thing about its pricing is that it lets you use one license on up to three computers and manage the OneCare settings from a single machine. This means you can install it on your children’s PC and your wife’s PC and manage their security settings from your own machine. You can even schedule all three to back up to a central location like a network drive or a Windows Home Server.

The thing to keep in mind about it is that it does NOT do full backups and restores. It will only look for your files (documents, spreadsheets, movies, photos, etc.) and back those up to an external device. That means that unless you want to be stuck re-installing the operating system and applications every time your computer crashes, you’d better have something else to work alongside OneCare.

That certain something else is Norton Ghost. I’ve used it as well, and it sure works as advertised. Many system admins swear by it, because it makes their jobs a lot easier. The way to use it is to get your computer all set up and ready to go (with the OS, apps and latest patches and updates all installed), and BEFORE you start using it, ghost it. You can either boot up from the Ghost CD and clone your entire hard drive to an external device like a USB drive or to DVDs, or you can run the Ghost application right from the operating system, with your computer functioning normally while it’s getting cloned.

Once you’ve ghosted your machine, keep that ghost image safely somewhere and do regular backups with OneCare Live. If your PC should ever crash, you can boot up with the Ghost CD and restore it from its ghost image, then do file-level restores with the OneCare application.

Just remember, it’s important to ghost your PC at that critical point after you’ve gotten everything you need installed, but BEFORE you get it infected with something or installed stuff you’ll want to uninstall later, otherwise the ghost image will understandably be pretty useless to you.

Hope this helps!

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Thoughts

When animation trash gets called art

Last year, I stumbled over the blog of one of the directors for the Ren & Stimpy cartoons, by the name of Vincent Waller. I subscribed, curious to see what one of the people who’d worked on that horrible cartoon was doing nowadays. It didn’t take long for me to find out…

A few days later, he blogged about a cartoon made by one of his fans. He lavished so much praise on it that I watched it. It was an utter bunch of filth, filled with suggestive sex, curse words, violence and bestiality. It was done in the style of the Ren & Stimpy cartoons — same sort of animation, similar character movement, similar colors, etc.

I left a comment on his post, telling him that I couldn’t believe he’d posted that garbage to his blog. I honestly thought the guy knew better than that, but I was wrong. He deleted my comment. I left a subsequent comment. He deleted that as well. I contacted him via email. He answered back and seemed somewhat rational. I thought I might have a decent conversation with him, and I asked him out of sheer curiosity why the Ren & Stimpy cartoons ever got made. What was the rationale behind them? I told him I found them depressing altogether, and I found the subject matter crude and filthy. I said that as a child, I wanted to see cartoons on TV, and very often, only Ren & Stimpy were on in the evenings, so I had to watch them if I wanted to watch any cartoons at all.

He told me to go away and not bother him again. He said that there was something wrong with me, that I should have watched something else, and that he and the series creator happened to like them, and that’s why they got made. That was the end of that conversation.

But, it got me thinking about the people behind Ren & Stimpy and the other horrible cartoons that our children can watch on TV nowadays, or were able to watch until not long ago — stuff like Beavis and Butt-head, for example.

These people make this horrible crap that appeals to their sick and twisted minds, filled with all sorts of suggestive behavior and language meant for adults, and they put it on TV, where it gets shoved by the cartload into the minds of our children. Do they take any responsibility for their actions? No, they do not. They blame the viewer for watching their stuff if he or she complains.

What they also do not want to recognize is that stuff that’s on TV carries weight with people (yes, it still does, in spite of widespread cynicism). If it gets shown on the air, people assume it’s been vetted and there’s some merit to it. It’s a false assumption, I know, but most adults don’t know this, much less the children. They don’t know the stuff is crap. If it’s on Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network, it must be good, right? Wrong.

Generally speaking, crap cartoon shows get made because the creator is friends with a network exec, or he’s worked on a successful series and can now pitch his idea with some leverage. But that doesn’t mean that these shows are any good or that they’ve been vetted responsibly. It only means they got into the channel through the back door, and yes, they smell like it, too. What’s more, series creators and directors often get “artistic freedom” once a show has been approved. Execs don’t dare censor stuff, because that would stifle the series’ “creativity” — and I use that word very loosely in this context. So a bunch of weirdos with no self-control get to put together shows that get shown to children. What’s more, they absolve themselves of any blame whatsoever if children are influenced negatively by their work, and call people who protest “legless, armless lumps” (that’s the term used on me by that director I mentioned in the first paragraph), because they should know better than to watch their stuff.

They do not want to acknowledge, however, that children do not yet have the power to filter things properly. They don’t have a fully developed moral compass, and more often than not, choose to sit in front of the TV and hope that something good is on. Or, these thoughtless, immature “artists” also pull out the parent argument. They say that parents ought to monitor what their kids watch. Well, it’s a bit difficult to do that when you’re at work and your child is at home. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are supposed to be fairly safe channels, so you can’t just disallow them altogether. If you can’t even allow them, what can you allow?

But does any of this register with them? No. All they care about is making their crap, expressing themselves “artistically”, and getting paid for making their crap.

The sad thing is that the creator of Ren & Stimpy (whose name is not worth mentioning here) is now enjoying some sort of fame, since he was one of the few people who still adhered to the old animation methods (storyboards, character development, hand drawings, etc.) when he made Ren & Stimpy. He’s getting praised on various animation sites for that, and for contributing heavily to the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

I think ALL of that praise is misplaced… You can follow all of the right methods, you can make all the storyboards you want, you can draw painstakingly well, but if your original vision is horrible, the end result will be horrible as well. Ren & Stimpy should have never made it to TV. It should have been released to tape, and I bet if that had happened, we’d have it archived in obscure, seldom-seen videos on YouTube, uploaded and viewed by a few animation geeks, because no one else would have liked it.

In spite of the fact that this man is doing his part to preserve a somewhat lost art in animation, he’s a poor example of putting that art to work. Judging by the stuff he’s created so far, he’s not fit to hold a candle to Preston Blair or any other of the Golden Age animators he is aping. There’s a LOT to be said about censorship in animation, and Disney, in spite of all his shortcomings, had a very, very bright idea when he kept an iron grip on what got made and put out at his company. He made sure it was okay to show to children. The man was a genius.

I’ve done a lot of talking about bad cartoons in this post. What about good cartoons? What cartoons do I think are appropriate for children? Well, it just so happens that I wrote a post on how to find cartoons for children last year. It’s a good read, so have a look at that. I encourage parents out there, and the younger folks as well, if you’re looking for good cartoons, don’t stop looking, and don’t settle for garbage. Go looking for better stuff. If you have to buy DVDs, buy them. You can also rent from Netflix.

Make sure the stuff you watch is good stuff. You’ll know it’s good stuff because it’s the stuff that makes you feel warm, fuzzy and comfortable when you watch it. When you get up after watching it, you feel happier and better. Look for the good stuff, and let the bad stuff go to waste, because that’s where it belongs.

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