I thought I had a pretty good data backup strategy for my home network. I have several PC’s that all access a central NAS as a fileserver (a 250GB La Cie Etherdisk Mini), which is a nice little Linux-based device that has been running like clockwork for years. This was manually backed up, along with… Continue reading Adventures in home data backups: Part 1 – FreeNAS to the rescue!
Using Robocopy to mirror directories
I had to copy the contents of a drive on an XP box to another network drive (which was actually a FreeNAS box) on my LAN yesterday (part of a longer story involving a crashed backup disk – but that’s a tale for another time). It was over my LAN network and involved a zillion… Continue reading Using Robocopy to mirror directories
Firebug extension for benchmarking website performance
We all want sites to load faster. For a developer, Apache’s ab only gets you so far, and frankly the server latency is only part of what defines the perceived speed of a site (and for Web 2.0+ sites that do a lot of work via Javascript, it may be a relatively small part). In… Continue reading Firebug extension for benchmarking website performance
Simple example of using a subquery in CakePHP
I hunted for awhile but never could find a simple example online showing how to do a subquery. For example suppose you have the usual Posts and Comments models, but for whatever reason could not bind them on the usual “id” foreign keys. So if you wanted to query for all the Posts that have… Continue reading Simple example of using a subquery in CakePHP
Getting Firefox 3.X to update successfully on Vista
For some time now (months, if not years), my Firefox has been unable to update automatically. It keeps erroring out every time it tries to apply the update. Turns out I’m not the only one reporting it, and it’s been around since 2007 at least. You can blame this on Mozilla, or on Microsoft (since… Continue reading Getting Firefox 3.X to update successfully on Vista