Things I have learnt this week.

• Backups are good.
  • If for instance your colo box breaks.
• Tested backups are better.
  • Best to test them before your box breaks.
• Automated backups are better still.
  • Humans forget to do things. Machines rarely do. So your backup may not be as recent as yo u think.
• How to backup svn
  • svnadmin dump $repo | bzip2 > svndump.bz2
• Checking which disk you are replacing in a degraded mirrored pair is a good thing
  • Your filesystem dieing or going back in time is not fun. See previous points

Having learnt these things I have made my backup regime better and have made sure its croned and does backup the stuff I need. I s hould also start putting more stuff in my svn repo.

This clusterfuck did annoyingly lead to losing about a weeks worth of data on the Randomness Guide to London which was particularly galling since one of the reason for doing it was I trusted myself more with the data. bah

So recently Kake and I have been adding Public Domain Geodata to our Guide to London using a Garmin Etrex she has been borrowing from a friend. However, it possibly has one of the one most annoying interfaces i've used for a while and we only have one.

So, I succumbed and bought the Nokia LD-3W which works with my phone. I can get location data with applications which came as standard and indeed save landmarks which I can then export as an xml file. I cant get any routes though. However, I did find an application from nokia research which almost gives me what i want. It can export trip data as kml. So for your viewing pleasure My trip to the butchers this morning. It jumps around quite a bit.

One problem is that I can only get Lat/Long out when we are using OSGB for the guide. Thankfully, the windows program the Ordnance Survey provide to convert between them can run under Wine. This will make mass conversions easier.