minus zero

As part of the No Grownups seminar series, I gave a presentation on Friday about my experience in Google's Summer of Code 2005 program.

The talk went fairly well, although I should have spent more time preparing, and should have given the talk a practice run at least once... I had 20 slides that were meant to last ~20 minutes, but ended up rushing through them and finished within 10 minutes... Oops! There were lots of questions at the end though, which meant I ended up speaking for 25 minutes in total.

I find myself getting extremely nervous before these sorts of things, but normally once I start speaking the jitters evaporate. At least, that's how it seems to me while I'm stood up there talking... Perhaps from the audience's point of view I'm a nervous mumbling wreck!

In case you're interested, the slides are available.

I stopped working on pyBackPack a long time ago. The final year of my degree didn't leave a lot of spare time for hacking on the code, and it fell by the wayside.

Now, however, my good friend Andy Price has picked up the torch, and is going to continue pyBackPack's development. He's taken ownership of the code, and I've detached myself from it officially. Andy's created a project page, and the bug tracker and SVN systems are up and running. I've set up redirects on my website so all old links should be sent to the right places - please let me know if anything doesn't work any more.

Best of luck to Andy!

I've become something of a man of leisure since my return from the holiday. It's rather nice to not have to worry about deadlines, going to work and other such things. I should be a slacker more often :)

I've been able to indulge in some pet projects - the current focus of attention is an AJAX webmail client. At the moment I'm doing it the hard (easy?) way - Python CGI. No doubt this isn't the most efficient or sensible way of doing it, but it's a scratch for an itch. Redeveloping the system using a framework like Django or mod_python (ok, not a framework per se) would probably be a simple task because there's not a lot of code written yet.

minus-zero.org finally has some kind of coherent design and content, although there's not an awful lot to see yet. The pages are static HTML, generated from a template by a simple script. This could be interesting when the site expands, we'll see.

In other news, I'm heading back to Swansea on Sunday. The Great Job Hunt will then begin, as I attempt to find some form of income to offset the new house's huge rent costs. Hopefully having my CV (which I've yet to write...) bolstered by having 'Google paid me money!' splashed across it will help. Though having said that, I doubt if the average shopkeeper gives a monkey's. :)

My holiday and the Google Summer of Code both ended on the 1st of September, and they were great fun.

I put together the final (as far as being accepted for my SoC submission) release of pyBackPack and it's the best yet.

Screenshots

Changes

• SSH Backups and restores
• When performing a backup, a progress indicator is shown.
• Increments on the restore page are listed most recent first.

Download

• .tar.gz: pybackpack-0.4.tar.gz
• SRPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.src.rpm
• RPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.noarch.rpm
• deb: pybackpack-0.4-all.deb

Update - The RPMs were re-rerolled with fixed dependencies, they should work OK now.

Bugs
If you come across any bugs or problems don't hesitate to get in touch, either by leaving a comment here, e-mailing me, or using the bug tracking system at http://sucs.org/~davea/trac

Thanks
I'd like to say a huge thanks to Elliot Lee (my mentor from Red Hat) for all his help, guidance and invaluable advice.
Also to Graham Cole (chckens) and Jeremy Katz for bug spotting, and pointing out some of my slightly weird interface design choices. :)
I almost forgot! My eternal gratitude goes to Jen for letting me take her laptop on holiday so I could work and for putting up with my hacking instead of relaxing by the pool. :D

Of course, it's not finished yet, and all you hundreds of faithful readers will be pleased to know that the future releases of pyBackPack will be documented right here. ;)

Here's the latest batch of updates, nothing too major - a more streamlined interface, better checks on overwriting files, etc.

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.3.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.3-1.src.rpm
RPM: again, still on holiday so no RPM. Sorry!

Let me know how you like it :)

Fresh from the shores of Lesvos, I bring you pyBackPack 0.2.999.

No screen shots this time (I don't think my wallet could handle the GPRS bill :)), but here's what's new:

• Editable backup sets
• Nicer interface for including and excluding files/folders in a backup set
• pyBackPack now uses nautilusburn to provide a much nicer way of writing CDs
• Single-click backup of your home directory to a CD from the main pyBackPack window

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.999.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2.999-1.src.rpm
RPM: I forgot to install the right packages on the laptop before I left, so no RPM this time unless someone else is able to build one... :)

Bugs
I've run into a frustrating bug with rdiff-backup - namely that it doesn't like restoring from directories with a '.' character in their name. It throws an AssertionError. This bug seems intermittent, so any feedback you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Update - The problem disappeared when using pyBackPack on a different machine, so perhaps I screwed up rdiff-backup on the laptop. Ho hum.

The latest and greatest...

Screen shots

Changes

• User interface looks nicer and works a little more intuitively
• Can now restore from any increment, allowing the user to rollback to any point in time where a backup was made.
• Output logs now report something more meaningful
• CD backups/restores are now possible - This in particular needs lots of testing to see how it copes with different hardware combinations.
• It's now possible to do multiple backups/restores in the same instance of pybackpack.
• lots of other small improvements
• nb. Network (SSH) code is not yet active, should be done for 0.3

Download
tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.tar.gz
RPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.i386.rpm
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.src.rpm

As ever, if you've got any comments/questions/suggestions, don't hesitate to get in touch and let me know what you think about the tool. :)

pyBackPack is a user-level GUI tool to back up files.

It is written in Python, uses libglade and GTK+, and interfaces with rdiff-backup.

This is the first release so it's going to have at least 1 bug - your task is to help me find it. ;) I don't think it will chew up your home directory and trash everything, but if it does - sorry!

A few screen shots to whet your appetite:

Download: pybackpack-0.1.tar.gz

If you have any feedback/bug reports, you can either e-mail me or leave a comment here.

Enjoy :)

I just discovered a minor bug in pyBackPack (as it's now called):

• A user wants to backup her Firefox settings - so creates a backup set that just contains ~/.mozilla, and does a backup.
• Something screws up Firefox's settings, so the user restores her latest .mozilla backup to her home directory.
• The user then wonders where the hell the entire contents of her home directory have gone, and why only ~/.mozilla is left.

Several issues I've been meaning to blog recently:

Music

Impulse buying is fantastic - I heard Plump DJs for the first time in FOPP on Monday and bought the CD while I was in the shop. Dance/Electronica is fairly far removed from my usual listening habits but the funk grabbed me and I've not stopped bouncing since. What is mildly annoying is that my brothers have latched on to it (as they seem to with most new music I pick up) and insist on playing the damn album on repeat. Also worth a mention is the new Finch album - I love how they've stuck to their guns and moved away from the mainstream sound and stayed true to what they want to do rather than bow to the record company's wishes. At the very least, they give a good impression of being able to do just that. :) Going in the opposite direction, Funeral for a Friend's new stuff doesn't have anywhere near the same kick as their last disc (which in itself was a step down from the raw hardcore sound they had before they signed to a major). Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold have also been assaulting my aural passageways and inspiring me to get a proper handle on how to use the double bass drum pedal properly - I swear some of these guys have 8 legs or something.

Games

I've been getting into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and it's brilliant. Rock Star have really outdone themselves this time; the game is a thing of beauty. The story, the city, everything (so far) screams with attention to detail that I've not seen for a long time. Top notch stuff.

Code

I've been hacking on the SUCS Blog on and off since the exams have finished, it's progressing nicely. I read a few articles on AJAX which all seemed to be Ruby-related so I decided to pick that up. However I soon dropped it onto the backburner when I realised that the backend language was pretty much irrelevant. Javascript seems to get quite a bad rap, but it's actually damn useful. I've been careful to include backwards compatibility for browsers with disabled/absent JS support. The more I use AJAX, the more I think I'd find a custom library to handle it all generically quite handy, so that'll be something to code up at some point.

The hyperbole has slowly been building up over the course of this entry, so here's the big one: I've been accepted on to Google's Summer of Code program! W00t! They had some 8700 applicants and 400 spaces, so I'm dead chuffed that they picked me. The application I wrote is here. There's a crap load of paperwork to wade through in an attempt to pay the least amount of tax possible, but either way it's going to be an amazing experience and will no doubt put me in good standing for 'real world' programming.