Years ago, shortly before the turn of the century, I had a pretty good backup solution. I had a 20 Gigabyte tape drive that I used to back up all of my storage.
That was a decade ago. Somewhere along the line, the combined increases in total storage I had to back up plus the slowness/cost/general hassle of maintaining tapes mean that my backup strategy broke down. I tried various things in the interim, including network attached storage in 2006, and the Time Capsule for backing up my Macintoshes. The Time Capsule works great, but even with a terabyte of disk storage I am rapidly running out of room- and it does nothing to back up my Windows or Linux machines.
I needed something expandable, multi-platform, fast, and inexpensive. Well, three out of four isn’t bad, I guess…
I was doing some work on my server today and noticed some errors in my logs of the following form:
Feb 23 16:04:45 kgadams httpd: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function bodyclasses() in /xxx/wpg2header.php on line 848
The problem appears to relate to an upgrade I performed several months ago in the Atahualpa WordPress theme I use. The result was that any attempt to open a gallery page (i.e.: to look at my photos while visiting my blog) would result in a blank page… and the above error appearing in my server logs.
I’ve corrected the problem, but am disappointed that I didn’t even notice an issue that has probably existed since at least January. Ah well, ignorance is bliss I guess…
I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. It plays “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a bit faster than normal. Impressive, but when you realize that it accomplishes this with independent actuators for each note (effectively having dozens of “hammers” where a human would be limited to a couple) it really becomes less amazing.
And then I came across absolutely staggeringly fast rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee by an honest to goodness human being. It is a Guinness book of World Records performance on the guitar by Tiago della Vega, and completely, utterly, and resoundingly trounces the robotic performance. Note that he actually performs the piece three times: at 170, 260, and 320 beats per minute: you have to watch to the end to see the fastest rendition.
Even if a machine ever exceeds this rate, I am left speechless by what the human machine can accomplish.
Technology, computer games, MMOGs, science…and other nerdy stuff
