kate's infrastructure

If you’ve been bouncing around the interwebs of late, you may have heard the hype surrounding the Asus* eee pc.  I see no reason to simply become a news aggregator, so here’s a link for the lazy.  For the lazier, here’s a summary:

• It’s a mobile computing device, not a laptop.  It has internet-centric and productivity (think OpenOffice) apps;
• Ultraportable: <1kg, 7″ screen (that’s about the size of an A5 piece of paper);
• Runs a build of Xandros (Linux based), however it’s more like a phone operating system;
• Inbuilt wireless, webcam, speakers;
• No CD drive;
• Solid state harddrives only, just like the iPod nano;
• White;
• Cheap! (AUD$499)**;
• Competing devices include the One Laptop per Child Project, the Nokia n800 mobile internet device, and the iPod touch.

I think the primary market is probably students and folks that aren’t that computer aware.  As the marketing says, it really is easy to use.  I’m not interested because I need my technology dumbed down, but that I want an ultraportable device that can actually do something.  I have a smartphone that runs Windows Mobile 6 and Pocket Word, and has inbuilt wireless.  I could conceivably do most of the same stuff as the eeepc, however I’d look like a tool and the process on a tiny system would be annoying.   It’s probably not a good idea to jump on tech like this so early, but it is awesome.

I’m ordering one tomorrow from Myer.  More updates to come. 

* Apparently pronounced “A-su-ess”, not “A-sis” as I’d previously assumed.  This is a tad annoying.

** It’s cheaper outside Australia, apparently either the exchange rate is to be ignored when pricing locally or shipping this distance costs HEAPS.

The above screen shows what I saw when I accessed the Windows Vista Support community site earlier today.  Noting that my screen is 1024×768, and I use Vista. Surely this site is meant for me.  Let’s look at how the screen real estate is used:

1. Enormous title bar with Microsoft branding;
2. The most useful part, the body of the post themselves.  Ridiculously difficult to use with constant scrolling;
3. Index of posts / forum topics;
4. General menu for support site;

I realise this isn’t much more that a pretty way to show me a newsgroup, but it’s also noticably slow.  Whatever you might think about Microsoft products, this support site is appalling.  I got nothing from it at all, and I’m unlikely to be back regardless of the value of the information it contains.  The final straw was when I tried to flag a post that was not contributing anything, it tried to make me signin to my Windows liveID.  I’ve got no issue with this if I was posting anything, but this really means that the casual browser is unlikely to assist.

 And now on to Apple.  I should preface this by saying that while I appreciate the apple design aesthetic, the resurgance of white electronics, and the I’m a Mac ads, the fanboys make me loathe it just a little.  Still, I was confident support was something they’d be good at, it’s user-centric after all.

Let’s look at how apple tackles the simplest of tasks:

1. Reasonably sized title bar with simple branding and site menu combined;
2. Context!  Something Microsoft overlooked;
3. Index of posts / forum topics;
4. Yes, it took me to a second page, but that’s cool.  Hey look, branding is maintained across the site;
5. Forum text is EASY to access

Yes, apple’s approach looks a little circa 1997 web forum, but it works.  Can’t argue with that.

NB: I should point out that I was searching for help with Vista’s tendancy to bluescreen when running iTunes.  Neither site actually helped.

Ignoring the smarts that may exist in off-the-shelf backup software these days, I’ve decided to include some info on how I backup my laptops*.  I’m also without a fancy one-touch hardware based backup solution, but I was equipped with:

• 1 x 320gb drive
• 1 x Vista Laptop, 80gb total drive space
• 1 x XP laptop, 80gb total drive space
• A general desire to make things as easy, painless and low-tech as possible.

Step 1 – Pre-requisites

To begin, I downloaded Robocopy from the Microsoft website, note that this is a part of the Windows 2003 resource kit and is required on the XP machine only.  Vista is already that smart.  Robocopy is a Robust File Copy utility which we’ll use to do all the hard work for us via batch files.  Watch out for rogue copies of software pretending to be robocopy, downloading from the Microsoft website is the best bet here. 

Next, I need to plug in my Backup drive to my computer.  If your computer has USB 2.0 as well as 1.1 ports, be sure to choose the 2.0 one to ensure the fastest transfers.  Windows should let you know if you’ve made the wrong choice.  When you’ve plugged in the drive, open Windows explorer and take a note of the drive letter.

Step 2 – Scripting magic

Here’s a simplified version of what I run:

echo “Starting backup process \n”

ROBOCOPY c:\ g:\firstLaptop /e /zb /R:3 /MIR

echo “Completed backup process.”

I told you Robocopy was worth the 11mb download. 

In pseudocode that would look like this:

[Run Robocopy.exe] [Copy from] [Copy to] [use these options/flags for Robocopy] 

Let’s look at the flags in use:

• /e  = Copy subdirectories, including empty ones
• /zb = Use restartable mode
• /R:3  = Number of retries if a file copy fails (default is 1 million!)
• /MIR = Mirror a complete directory tree 

You’ll see that these options are all about maintaining a mirror of my laptops and taking the intelligence out of the process.  The first time I run it, it takes forever.  The next few times its appreciably faster as it performs a file compare. 

Step 3 – Room for improvement

This pretty much meets my needs as neither of my computers have anything mission critical aside from photos or mp3s.  Everything else is either online or recreatable.  Primarily I’d put in a timestamp at the start/stop of the job and use some of the additional features of robocopy to make it prettier and easier.

* This in now way addresses the need for multiple off-site copies etc of your data.  I may address this at a later time.