Backup failures on small servers

In light of a catastrophic data loss @ T-Mobile, I went to verify backup setups I am responsible of and found out that one of them wasn't working as expected. Damn it. That's what happens when you have very little resources for a custom solution.

Online (free) issue trackers

I've been trying and using various issue trackers in the past months, in particular task2gather and pivotal tracker. This for very small projects (1-3 developers).

Synchronize firefox and chrome profiles passwords

I have been using chromium more and more on Linux. But all my passwords are saved in Firefox profile. So I wrote 2 tools to help me deal with my use of both chromium and firefox. One to dump firefox passwords, one to merge the dump into chromium's profile. Seems to work in my very limited test...

[ANNOUNCE] nosyd 0.0.5

Changes since last announced version:

0.0.5 (2009-10-09)
==================

- Nosyd should now run on Mac OS X
- Mac OS X / Growl notifier support (http://growl.info/)
- new Django builder
- new CLI options (--stop)
- be smarter at identifying the monitored project files
- some performance improvements (cache some of the monitored files resolution to lower CPU usage)
- auto-rebuild project when .nosy file is changed

0.0.4 (2009-10-06)
==================

- setuptools support. Project split into multiple files

More info here. Code still on github.

(Thanks to Sergio for testing on Mac OX X)

Python Oslo Group

Today we hold our first meeting of the new Oslo Python/Django discussion group. Feel free to join! We will try to meet once a month.

Skype ramblings

For years Skype has been a second class citizen on my desktop of choice, Linux.

Consider using application level checksums

From this 1999 document titled When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree, analysing abnormous rates of errors in network transfers.

Our conclusion is that vital applications should strongly consider augmenting the TCP checksum with an application sum.

Even if you're not concerned with security, it maybe wise to implement an MD5 check (or like) at the application level for your multi-gigs file transfer before you start processing them.

Source: slashdot.