It took a while, but my movie pages are finally online. Let me know if they work for you. I’ll be editing the movie posts to point to the right pages.
By the way, I realised that the smaller sized mp4’s are the perfect size for the new iPod “video”. You should be able to download them and put them straight onto your iPod. See, there’s a reason to be standards compliant :-)
On an unrelated note, I noticed last week that the backups on my old linux file, mail and printserver were failing. To give you an idea how old this machine is: it’s a Pentium II 350 MHz with 128 MB RAM running RedHat 7.3. The machine runs rdiff-backup (recommended!) on a RAID 5 array. The backups had failed somewhere in the last month, causing rdiff-backup to revert the backup-area to the previous known good backup state. Trouble is, among the things being backed up is my home directory with my mailbox in Maildir format. In my mailbox there’s a spam folder containing about 14000 spam mails at the moment – I get about 100 spam mails a day. Reverting these 14000 mails caused my ancient 0.11 version of rdiff-backup to rapidly consume all available memory. I guess there was some recursive code in it. I couldn’t just delete all spam and be done with it, because the problem was in the already backed up files. I could delete all backed-up files and start all over but there were a few things there whose recent history I wanted to keep. So I set on the task to update rdiff-backup to it’s latest 1.0.1 version.
I wasn’t very happy doing this since I know that this is such an old version of RedHat Linux that updating stuff can be a chore. My fear became reality: compiling the new 1.0.1 version failed because it needed a new version of librsync. But, as it turns out, Dag Wieers still maintains an archive with updated RedHat 7.3 rpms. apt-get update and apt-get upgrade took care of librsync. rdiff-backup 1.0.1 compiled without even a warning. Running the new rdiff-backup cleanly reverted the backup area and my automated backups started working again. All in all the proces took about an hour and a half, thanks to Dag and the rdiff-backup team caring about old machinery. Thank you guys!
This was the second time in the last three years I had to work on this small server. Last year a harddisk failed. Took me a while to find a 40 GB drive for the RAID 5 array :-) Remember, this machine can just about run Windows 98. Linux can be good for the lazy sysadmin.
In case you’re wondering about the 14000 spam mails I’m keeping: I’m building a spam corpus for Spam Assassin or some other bayesian spam filter. I hope this will work better than my provider’s spam filter and Apple Mail’s spam filter combined. I just haven’t found the time to implement it. Reminds me about something: time to install rdiff-backup on my MacOSX machine.