Anyway. Having lived, studied, worked and socialised in Cambridge for several years now I would like to think I have something of an understanding of etiquette. In particular, the good old fashioned waistcoat. Why we don’t really wear these any more I’m not sure, and the Edwardian in me somewhat laments the loss of this garment of clothing.

Worse however is, I find, the lack of proper waistcoats seemingly anywhere, but worse – in the hive of evening wear etiquette and culture that is Cambridge. Black-tie is formal wear of a seemingly failing age. No one I’ve spoken to seems to know the proper etiquette of Black-tie wear. Cummerbunds are all well and good for friendly formal dinners, but for the most formal of occasions they simply are not done. The correct dress is a waistcoat. Wide open in a sort of u-shape to three, or four if you are feeling sufficiently flamboyant, buttons; to allow the shirt to be properly seen.

The only waistcoats available in Cambridge are morning waistcoats, high-breasted, oft-six buttoned garments which in many cases where lovely items, but not for formal dinner wear. Extensive searching found what I was after on-line, but given the cost I’d much rather just get one tailored.

Of all places, I had expected Cambridge to maintain an observation of proper etiquette, but as most suit shops there now seem to stock American style tuxedos, I suppose I have to concede that perhaps I was born about a hundred years too late.

First, we need to make sure that samba is installed:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Next, we need to make a directory to mount the drive too. As an example, I’ve just reinstalled my Ubuntu (and Fedora) distribution, and so want to map the music drive on my server. I chose /media/ as the logical place to stick my network drives:

sudo mkdir /media/music

Next we need to tell the file system table where the drives are, and where to mount them. We also need to include our login credentials (will cover this later).

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

Scroll to the bottom of the file and add the following:

#Mounting Network Drives
//SERVER/SHARE-NAME /MOUNT-POINT smbfs credentials=/credentials-file-location

To make the above make a bit more sense, here is my configuration:

//192.168.1.50/Music /media/music smbfs credentials=/home/russell/credentials.smbcredentials
//192.168.1.50/Videos /media/videos smbfs credentials=/home/russell/credentials.smbcredentials
//192.168.1.50/Software /media/software smbfs credentials=/home/russell/credentials.smbcredentials

What this will do is to check within the credentials file (more on this at the bottom) your username and password for your server (I am running a Windows Home Server as an example).

Next, we need to make the filesystem mount the drive, which we do simply with:

sudo mount -a

Finally, we need to make that credentials file. Simply navigate to your chosen directory (I stuck it in my /home/russell directory for ease), create a new file with the following information:

username=username
password=password

And save it with the same filename you gave the /fstab/. Thats it.

I was going to write a few things, but this comment on the Times Website succinctly summed it up, so thanks to “I.M. Jolly”.

The difference between “do no Evil..” Google and Microsoft is, MS are a damn sight less hypocritical about their monopoly postion. And abuse thereof.

If the simple fact that “Google is rapidly increasing how much it spends on lobbying in the United States..” doesnt tell you anything, I dont know what else will – ok Google fanboys, you can now go back to your Google searches for everything, Your GMail with targeted ads based on the content of your mails and put your head back under the pillow. For the rest of us, I am sure we can agree that some scrutiny of a company which has basically won control of the internet, while gaining a very, very large amount of personal users data and their surfing habits, is entirely overdue.

Or, maybe, as the Google CEO (Eric Schmidt) himself says, “”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place..” – unless of course, that knowledge is personal details of his, obtained by CNET Journalists only via Google searches. Google blacklisted CNET for about a year over this, then again, they really do have to the power to be both evil and hypocritical, whenever it suits. The public have somewhat less choice in blacklisting which Information Google collects from them.

However, Google only use the info they have collected on YOU to sell ads, dont they? No problem there, then.

The upshot was a nice and fairly sophisticated rsync script to backup some files, which I won’t paste here as it’s Jaspers baby.

However, I did think up a [much] simpler script to enable a quick and dirty backup of any particular folder to any particular media.

#!/bin/bash
sudo rsync -av --progress --delete --log-file=/dir/$(date +%Y%m%d)_rsync.log /dir /media/dirBackup

You can of course exclude certain files from the backup with:

--exclude "/dir/.jpg"

Naturally, no one wants to type it out everytime and so lets make it into an executable script:

sudo chmod +x /path/rsync-backup.sh

So you now have an executable script you can call whenever you want, or you can of course create a cron job and have it run automatically.

#!/bin/sh
# directory to backup
BDIR=/home/$USER

# excludes file
EXCLUDES=$HOME/cron/excludes

# name of the backup machine
BSERVER=server

# password on the backup server
export RSYNC_PASSWORD=

# lets get down to it
BACKUPDIR=`date +%A`
OPTS="--force --ignore-errors --delete-excluded --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES
      --delete --backup --backup-dir=/$BACKUPDIR -a"

export PATH=$PATH:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

# the following line clears the last weeks incremental directory
[ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir
rsync --delete -a $HOME/emptydir/ $BSERVER::$USER/$BACKUPDIR/
rmdir $HOME/emptydir

# now the actual transfer
rsync $OPTS $BDIR $BSERVER::$USER/current

I would like to have the right to die on my lawn with a glass of brandy and Thomas Tallis on my ipod.

Sir Terry Pratchett on the news this morning, regarding his desire for a tribunal to be set up to review “right to die” cases. Such a beautiful little sentiment that it brought a tear to my eye.

Anyway, a few worrying articles to read today. Especially the one with the statistics about Googles private network. 10% of all internet traffic is colossal, much bigger then the nearest competitor to the internet – Internet2. And Google are the only company big enough to realistically challenge the internet, if they decided to do so. And given their track record, who’s to say they won’t?

I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to come into my house and look around, why would I want to disclose any details on the internet? Least alone to an advertising farm powerhouse, which is essentially all Google is good for these days.

Ok, the loss of myself as a customer won’t hurt Google one bit, but if I take 4cents off Schmidt’s pay cheque at the end of the year, it’s good enough for me.

After yesterday, all cookies and urls from Google were blocked on my computers. I wonder how much of the internet this will change for me, given the all reaching nature of the giant virus. We shall see.