Geeky Notes and Observations

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"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen (Founder) Digital Equipment - 1977

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Facebook has announced the AppCenter, a store for applications that integrate with Facebook.  AppCenter will be available on the web, iOS, and Android.  It will promote Facebook Identity play via requiring apps to support Facebook login.  Facebook will also offer paid apps option for apps that work on Facebook.com.  AppCenter on iOS and Android will redirect to App Store and Google Play for downloads.

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Good overview of several alternatives and compatibility with browsers.

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Easy way for authoring Sequence Diagrams

Nice way to author sequence diagrams: http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

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Amazon is giving this to get people to try out their new music locker / cloud player service.

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Python Tools for Visual Studio

Free from Microsoft, Python Tools for Visual Studio can be found on CodePlex @ http://pytools.codeplex.com/

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Android solving fragmentation using fragments - supported all the way back to Android 1.6.

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Why Android constantly runs out of space?

I currently own the Android Evo phone, which is one of the powerful phones in the Android world.  I'm always out of space since Android is not using all the space available to it.  I have to uninstall an app to install another.  It is possible to use apps like SDMove to move most of the app to the SD card, but they go back on the phone when updates are download, it is just too much hassle.

I hope that there is a solution for this in the near future, or existing workarounds that I'm now aware of. 

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Managing Backups?

I have been using several approaches to manage my backups for photos, documents, videos, and others.  This included some external drives, Windows Home Server, services like Picasa Web Albums, and others.  Even though I had decent backups within home via the Windows Home Server, I didn't have a complete offsite/cloud backup story and I now have to retire the WHS since it is running on a very old machine.

Here are the criteria that I was looking for:

Keep old versions of files, so even if I corrupt a file and discover sometime later, I still can get to old versions.

Unlimited backup capacity.

Multi-platform support - since I tend to have devices for all the operating systems at home.

Have a local backup strategy to external hard drives.

A backup company and not a cloud drive / sync company (i.e. not companies like Dropbox, Jungle Disk, etc).

Affordable.

Based on the research, there were several interesting options like CrashPlan and Mozy.  I've decided to go with a trial of CrashPlan for the following reasons:

Backup to another machine within the home or a friends machine.

Backup to an external hard drive.

Backup to the cloud without throttling when you exceed certain amount of data (read that this is a problem with Carbonite)

Ability to seed backups to cloud, friends, etc.

Backups to external hard drives, friends, other machines within the home can be done using the free version.

Affordable plans for one or multiple computers (family plan).

Never delete my files setting.

Backups for external hard drives will be retained even if they are not online for extended periods of time.

At this point, I've done most of the peer-to-peer backups, but I'm still uploading my cloud backup.  Given that I have the peer-to-peer backup, I don't feel like I'm in a hurry to pay CrashPlan for the seeding option (specially that I'm still within the trial period).

I'll post more when I'm done with my trial.  I'm optimistic so far.  I'm really suprised that most of the backup services don't provide the technology for onsite backups or peer-to-peer backup like CrashPlan.  I hope more do in the future. 

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