Category: Web/Tech

Battle of the Online Backups – part 1 – Humyo

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 11, 2010

Humyo is a UK based online and colloborative/sharing service. Datacentres based in Manchester. Generally provides a very clean and smooth service – the web user interface is particularly impressive and relies on Java technology to provide functionality such as uploading/downloading multiple files.

Pros

  • Supports Windows and Macs
  • Good, clean, intuitive web interface
  • Very good collaborative functionality
  • Priced in £ sterling
  • Generally excellent Windows client (has improved since I last tried Humyo a few months back)

Cons

  • Web interface’s Java components do not work properly with OS X and Firefox – requires Safari to work
  • Backup client fiddly and does not accurate reflect the progress of transfer
  • Additional cost for historical backups/file versioning
  • Mac backup client still needs a lot of work

I did find that I had a lot of trouble forcing the backup client to restrict the amount of bandwidth it should use and ultimately this is what put me off using Humyo as a sync service.

The Ultimate Battle of the Online Backups!

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 9, 2010

Over the next week or so, I’m intending to post my findings of a variety of online backup services. I’ve tested:

SquirrelSave (note: I work for the company that runs it and am it’s primary support)
Jungledisk
Mozy Home
Mozy Pro
SugarSync
Humyo
Backblaze
Dropbox

I run both Windows 7 and Mac OS X (Snow Leopard), and have attempted try both platform where offered. My findings may surprise you, and I still advocate that you beg, borrow or buy a portable USB hard drive at the very least to store a copy of your data locally or invest in a Blu-Ray writable drive (they’re becoming cheaper slowly but surely) and doing the same.

Film studios forming online distribution alliance?

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 5, 2010

I was intrigued by this article from Ars.Technica about Apple’s potential plans to introduce “cloud” storage to the iTunes ecosystem.

As the article suggests, Apple may either allow iTunes customers to store backups of their purchased music, movies and TV shows so that they can recover them should their computers and own backups fail (after all, while the cost of storage is coming down all the time, there are few households with decent fault tolerant SANs), or to stream the content direct to the desktop, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. I’d go for the former – one can recover purchased Apps from the iTunes Store but not music, films or TV shows. This necessitates that one has a bloody good backup plan in case of failure. I myself backup to blank Blu-Ray media, external hard drives, and online backup services such as SquirrelSave (UK) and Backblaze (US).

However, the article suggests that as far back as 2008 (it may be nearly two years ago, but that’s an age in the digital era), the major film studios (NBC Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount and Fox) got together to flesh out something called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (or DECE for short). This is a system that intends to implement some form of universal DRM that would allow any device to play digital content such as video or audio. Thus iPhones, Android devices, Chrome OS netbooks, etc. could all play the same content across all these platforms, yet the content provider keep a tight leash over when the content is played – and by whom. The studios would be free to negotiate their own price points, terms of access, etc – something that they’re currently restricted by when using a third-party CDN such as iTunes.

I’m not certain DECE will be a success. It would require a complete industry acceptance of the system. Look what happened with HD DVD and Blu-Ray: studios such as Warner Bros., Paramount, and NBC Universal all initially supported and backed HD DVD over Blu-Ray. Fox was one of the few studios not to. Arguments over the technical details soon started to cause drifts and eventually the format lost out to Blu-Ray. The same could go the same way of DECE unless EVERYBODY agrees on how it is to work.

In short: Hollywood is unable to get together to agree on anything. It’s history of petty squabbles, fierce competition and greed has resulted in a horrible experiences for the consumer who ends up paying the price because nobody seems to be able to agree to anything. Will DECE produce something viable? Might do, but given the dominance of Apple and iTunes – it may be too little, too late.

The love affair is over: Nexus One a big pile of unfinished business

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 4, 2010

When I first got my Nexus One back in January, I was over the moon. Here was the very latest in HTC hardware and Google Android OS in one neat package. We had a wonderful honeymoon period in which everything seemed to work, despite all the naysayers on Google’s Nexus One forums.

Then the symptoms started creeping in. Losing the 3G signal in an area where 3G works well, Wi-Fi connections at home wouldn’t automatically connect and had to manually be connected through Settings, touchscreen would lose calibration, forcing me to twist the phone around like a baton until the bloody thing accepted the correct input. Google eventually rolled an update back in February which fixed the 3G part, but Wi-Fi was still giving problems and the touchscreen still is causing problems.

The last straw came when I went on-call for work. I found that I’ve missed out on emergency SMSes due to delayed sound alerts. Due to the speaker being positioned where it is, I also found that the alert sounds are quite muffled in comparison to our four year old Sony Ericsson non-smartphone. In short: I don’t trust the Nexus One in it’s current state. I was also hacked off that photos taken didn’t show up in the Gallery after the most recent OTA update. I could access them through USB and through the Camera application itself, but not through the Gallery. A reboot of the phone seemed to have fixed it and the photos then turned up in Gallery. I shouldn’t have to do that, though.

Thus I’ve stopped using it and gone back to the SE. The battery life lasts well over a week, I can hear all incoming SMSes just fine, and as a phone only, it does what it says on the tin. The Nexus One tries to be too clever and fails. The AMOLED is also a complete arse to work with in strong daylight. My wife has also been complaining about the quality of calls recently and has kept asking if I’m on hands-free when I’m not.

I’ve decided to go running back to Apple despite my earlier grumblings about them. Love them or hate them, they do make exceptionally fine products. Which work. I’m starting off with an iPod Touch 64Gb and assuming that I’m able to switch my contract to Memset late next year (or after the T-Mobile/Orange merger allows the legal purchase of an iPhone on my existing contract with T-Mobile), I’ll go iPhone. I’m finding it hard to go back to the Android platform right now – especially how well I’m finding the iPhone/iPod App store and how well multi-touch and Apple’s capacitive display just works. The quality of the applications seem a lot more professional too.

The irony is that I had no problems with the HTC Hero. It was a little slow, but it worked well. I hope the HTC Desire works better than the Nexus One – I’d so hate it to turn out like the Nexus after Sense UI has been applied.

I now split my smartphone use between the Sony Ericsson and my iPod Touch. Phone for the phone related stuff, iPod for the apps, calendar and everything else.

Dear Ancestry.com – FIX YOUR MAILING LIST!

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 4, 2010

There seems to be a spate of organisations at the moment that refuse to honour unsubscription requests from their mailing list systems. Whether these be hosted through third-party, specialist mailing list systems or through their own web host, something is going wrong.

This week: ancestry.com. Their automated systems have constantly ignored any and all attempts to unsubscribe. It states I will receive no more newsletters, but guess what – I receive more newsletters. I’ve blocked them via Postini’s Content Manager, but even when they receive SMTP refusal, they STILL bombard with newsletters.

They’re going back in SMTP block for good this time.

Do Androids dream of electric sheep in Dolby 3D? No. They’re banned from the cinema..

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 11, 2010

If humanity ever reaches the point in which we live side-by-side with artificial intelligent androids who may, or may not, look like us, then I wonder what the future will bring them in terms of rights.

I tell you one thing for certain, though – they’d never be able to visit a cinema or theatre – they’d be banned for being recording equipment and thus liable to pirate films for fun, profit, or just to piss off their owners. This will make the CEO of a mega corporation very upset as he’ll not be able to visit the cinema with his family and PA android who he relies on for everything. And the PA android would have so looked forward to seeing Avatar 4D: Na’vi versus Smurfs.

It actually makes me think about potential artificial implants, limbs or organs. For example, if you’re fitted with an artificial eye that sends electronic signals through a processor directly into the brain – could a film studio stop you from visiting the cinema because you’d be capable of recording the film into whatever device you can plug yourself into, and then watch later (or pirate the bugger out of spite)?

I’m curious to see, as artificial intelligence, robotics and genetic engineering develop, just how rights for both devices and humans change. Will freedom improve, or be hindered?

The call of *COUGH* Hulu

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 10, 2010

Well, I had to sneak that one in.

This blog post has nothing to do with great old ones, but plenty of current great ones.  I’m currently playing with SeeSaw, an IPTV platform which was previously known as Kangaroo, the controversial video-on-demand system which was blocked by the Competition Commission back in 2009.  Kangaroo was then sold to Arqiva and has been since become SeeSaw.

Having been given a beta invitiation, I’ve had relatively short amount of time to give it a spin.  It’s not without it’s problems, but looks promising.  I’ll give a more informed opinion once I’ve had a chance to play around a bit more.

What about Hulu?  What about Canvas?  Well, at this point my head is spinning with all these different systems and I’m not one to be confused easily.  All I want is a open standard platform which I can watch what I want, when I want, and in a format of my choosing.  I don’t care how it’s done, I just want it to work without too many (if any) restrictions.  The day Murdoch and chums play nicely with the Beeb, Channel 4 and Channel 5 will be the day I’m tap dancing naked to work.

Today’s the day: Apple to reveal iPad/iTablet/iSlate*

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 27, 2010

(* delete as applicable)

I’ll be bitterly disappointed if Steve Jobs doesn’t walk on stage in a toga, wearing a false white beard, holding an iPad/iTablet/iSlate tablet device under his arm and shouting to the crowd, “Behold! The 10 Commandments of Apple!” and recites things like, “Thy Shall Not Covert They Neighbours Macbook Pro – buy your own you cheapskates!” and “Thy Shall Worship The One True Computer Company”. You get the idea.

The cult of Apple comes full circle today, I think.

Update: So it is going to be called the iPad. Looks good, I’ll admit, and I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one for review, but Apple isn’t exactly in my good books at the moment and I’ll wait until the iPad 2 before even remotely thinking of asking for or buying one. Not until I see how the uptake of this device goes.

Nexus One: Days Three & Four

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 22, 2010

Battery usage is now most satisfactory.  Can happily Spotify/listen to Android’s music player for considerable amount of time while emailing, tweeting, reading news, etc.  Similarly taking and making calls (after all, this is a phone..) don’t drag down the battery too much.  I should mention that I am NOT using a task manager (auto or otherwise – I’m just not using one full stop).

Have become adept in typing using landscape mode and using both thumbs to “touch” type.  Getting a relatively decent word rate, but still prone to errors which, thankfully, the predictive text system helps correct almost instantly (although I keep referring to Google Alps and not Google Apps).

The only real issue at the moment is the phone has twice failed to automatically join our home wi-fi network and needs manual intervention.  But this isn’t too big an issue and I can live with it until I can figure out what’s going on, or if it’s an Android bug, Google fixes it in an Over The Air update.

The Nexus One is still the best damn smartphone I’ve ever come across.

Nexus One: Day Two

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 20, 2010

Battery life improving.  Lasted around 16 hours from single charge and medium-ish use, including an hour and half’s Spotify use on the bus into work this morning.  Experienced small lock-up during Twidroid application in that the keyboard wouldn’t respond properly, and whenever I tried to press the H key, I activated the voice input.  It was if the CPU was taking a bit of a battering.  After a minute or two the problem soon went away.

Still very impressed with the phone despite these couple of small issues.  Have been playing around with Google Goggles and am very impressed by the way it’s able to detect objects and locate information on them online.  Also very impressed with RingDroid which takes your music collection and turns them into ringtones or notification sounds.  It has one of the most impressive user interfaces I’ve seen for the touchscreen.

Call quality is excellent, and I love the way that the phone disables the screen while you have it up to your face (so you don’t accidentally hit any buttons).  As soon as you move your face away, the buttons are there and are easy to access.  Far better than the HTC Hero.

Nexus One: Day One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

So far, everything has pretty much gone swimmingly.  The only issue I’ve seen is where I’ve been running TasKiller with the “automatically kill when screen is off” option enabled.  When pressing the power button to take the phone off standby, I’m greeted with the in-call display except I can’t activate any of the on-screen buttons.  If I hold the Home key, it then takes me to the security pattern draw unlock and all is well.  Disabling TasKiller’s automatic kill seems to have resolve this issue, so I can only think there’s a process that TasKiller is killing off that’s causing the problem.

As for the voice input, we’ve had marginally less success.  It comes out around 70-85% accurate now.  However, trying to search DediPower using voice input comes out as “Titty Palace”.  Working becomes “Wanking”.  And my name is really “Protein Drink”.  So there’s a fair bit of work to do, but I’d imagine Google will continue to improve this to almost perfection soon.

More later!

The Nexus One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

I now have a Nexus One Android phone.  This runs the Android 2.1 operating system and comes with a massively impressive screen and a touchscreen that responds beautifully.  As all of my contacts are stored in my Google Apps account, as well as my email, transferring from my previous HTC Hero to the Nexus One took literally just minutes.

The touchscreen keyboard operates a lot smoother than the Hero, although the Nexus does not contain HTC’s Sense UI and consequently does not feature a few refinements that make typing numbers and punctuation which means that one has to press a few more buttons to get to them.  But this doesn’t particularly bother me, and I’ve been typing away like a madman.

I’ve yet to try the voice dictation system whereby input fields can utilise the phone’s microphone to allow you to dictate words and sentences rather than having to use the keyboard.  Apparently the hit rate is anywhere between 70-80%, but will hopefully improve as Google’s voice recognition technology improves.

From what little I’ve been playing with it, this is one very impressive phone.  Android is blossoming as a mobile phone operating system and it just keeps getting better and better.  Now the hardware is catching up, Apple have a serious contender on their hands.  I am very glad I’ve given the iPhone the elbow.

Update: The voice input is absolutely bloody marvellous – so far it’s had 100% success rate, but that’s with a very limited test (I’d like to see what it can do with a tongue twister!).  I shall continue to experiment and explore.

Christmas without a TV is brilliant!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 26, 2009

Jennifer and I have been a TV free household for a considerable while now.  And we’re still coping nicely, thank you.  There are, however, a few issues that prevent us from accessing everything you might see on an ordinary TV.  The four main Internet catch-up services suffer from the dreaded regional licensing issues whereby certain programmes and films cannot be streamed or downloaded through these services.  Films, unless otherwise co-financed or co-produced by the broadcaster, are often off-limits as are big popular US imports (such as Family Guy).

That said, the BBC have excelled themselves this Christmas with their iPlayer.  Firstly they have been very quick to make available programs after they have first aired.  Usually this can take many hours up until a full day before aired programmes start showing up on iPlayer.  This Christmas period they’re now being made available at a much quicker pace.  Then there are films.  iPlayer is now streaming major Hollywood films through it’s service.  The Incredibles and Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End are just two of the big films that can viewed online.  For free (to those in the UK, of course).

On the other hand, the commercial catch-up services are beginning to suffer.  Firstly I’ve noticed that unlike the BBC, the quality of the video stream is considerably poorer than that their non-commercial, TV license funded competitor.  ITV is particular appalling.  When made full screen, compression artefacts make everything look horrendously blocky.  During the X-Factor programs, the constant changing of lights during the live performances turned everybody into lego men (and women) because ITV must have limited bandwidth or resources required to encode these shows in a more sensible format.  Torrents of ITV shows would, I imagine, offer better video quality to that offered by the broadcaster themselves.

The quality of these commercial streams probably lies with the (lack of) advertisers who pay to advertise their goods on them.  Judging by the same adverts repeated over and over in the same advert block, multiple times in a single program, must mean that there are very few companies choosing to advertise this way.  For example, on many ITV programs over this Christmas period we’ve seen the same Tic Tacs advert appear up to EIGHT times in a single hour’s worth of programming – repeated TWICE in each advert block.

Channel 4’s 4oD isn’t much better.  Slightly better encoding, but they too suffer from the same problem with the same old repetitive advertisers coming up again and again.  It gets to the point whereby you don’t want to buy their product or use their service because it’s far too repetitive to see the same thing.  It’s far worse than sitting through adverts on the over-to-air TV services.

Speaking of advertising on the commercial catch-up services, I’ve also noticed that the “controversial” Waitrose Christmas advert which featured a solider coming home for Christmas that was subsequently edited to remove that part, took at least two weeks to be updated on 4oD whereas from what proper TV I’ve seen during the day (whether it be at a takeaway, etc.) clearly had that part removed as soon as it was announced.  So it seems that it’s a slower process to get (or update) your advert on these services.

I had a look at Sky Player over the past day or so to see if they might offer Neil Gaiman’s short film, Statuesque, to rent.  Sky Player allows non-subscribers to watch Sky TV for either a monthly fee (identical to that of those WITH proper TV’s and satellite dishes) or a one-off fee for certain programs or films.  Sadly, Sky Player does not offer any of the Ten Minute Tales at all.  And Murdoch wants to charge you the same price for using their catch-up service as regular TV subscribers?  What a fecking liberty.  To rub salt into the wound, they don’t support the Google Chrome web browser – unlike all the other catch-up services which happily work with it.

So this Christmas, it’s been great watching the programs I do want to watch – for the most part – when I want, and for free .  I’m annoyed that Murdoch and chums have not considered opening up all of their programming to individual rental – especially when you consider the Ten Minute Tales were an original Sky Productions commission – for non-Sky subscribers.  Murdoch has long been bemoaning that the BBC makes it difficult for them to compete  in the marketplace for certain services, but yet Murdoch & chums are not making it easy for people to get their content how they want it.  Which is precisely what the BBC is doing, and doing a far better job of it to boot.

What’s also great about ditching the TV is that one doesn’t sit in front of the TV and flick channels.  It takes time to plan and choose what wants to be watched and you watch it when you want to watch it.  And to be quite frank, the lack of original ideas in the broadcasting industry these days makes it very easy for us in terms of what we choose to watch.

The HTC Hero/G2 Touch makes using a mobile phone fun again!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 21, 2009

On Saturday I received my T-Mobile upgrade handset, the HTC Hero aka the T-Mobile G2 Touch.  I must say that I’ve over the moon with it.  It runs Android 1.5, but HTC are due to release a firmware upgrade reasonably soon to bring it up to Android 2.1.  Even if the phone wasn’t upgradeable, the wide variety of applications installed and available from the Android Marketplace is wonderful.

Through Market, I’ve already installed Spotify, Twidroid (Twitter), an SSH client, and Google Sky Maps (which is *fantastic* – it uses the phone’s digital compass so that wherever you move the phone, it’ll update the map on screen with the stars and constellations as they would appear in the sky).  Spotify makes listening to all my playlists built on the PC and Mac a breeze, and offline mode really makes the difference here (although note: I need to buy a much bigger microSD card to hold all of the playlists of interest).

As a phone, the call quality is excellent.  I now have all my contact information stored using Google Contacts.  Unfortunately my previous phone had all the contacts installed in the phone’s memory and I’m not really willing to take apart the Hero again to get the SIM to retrieve everything again – so I’m starting from scratch.  I may need to get in touch with some of you to update numbers, addresses, etc.  But at least this time I can take a copy of my contacts in CSV format in case Google explodes.  And I really like the ability to add a photo next to each contact.  I’ve got most of my family and colleagues photos in there (mainly taken from last year’s Christmas party <sniggers> :)

I now need to get a case to protect the phone, although the screen and phone itself looks resilient enough to carry around in just my pocket or backback.  The phone also comes with a fairly decent pair of in-ear headphones and the cable length is quite generous.  Charging is through mini-USB to the computer, or through a wall plug adaptor (supplied).  Transfer to and from the phone is through USB or Bluetooth, but I’ve still yet to figure out how to get Bluetooth file transfers working properly.  HTC Sync does NOT work with Windows 7 64-bit, but this is not too big a problem for me as yet.

The only gotcha for me was attempting to link the phone to my Google Account.  As I had re-instated my Google Apps account for drake.org.uk, and disabled email, I had assumed that Android would be happy to use that.  It would be if I had email enabled.  Trying to use my standard Google Account using my email address failed to work each time.  So I enabled Gmail for my Google Account (not Google Apps) and used my @googlemail.com address instead for the login and it’s all worked nicely.  So if you have both a Google Apps and Google Account using the same domain/email address – and you just want to use your Google Account – make sure that you sign in with your @googlemail/@gmail.com address.

Oh, and typing on the virtual keyboard is a real pleasure to use.  While my fingers do occasionally miss the mark, the predictive/corrective system works flawlessly.  Far better than the iPhone in my opinion.

Cloudy with a chance of falling files..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 16, 2009

I’ve recently been testing a variety of products for storage in Amazon’s S3 service.  I first came to get to know S3 through Rackspace’s Jungle Disk service which provides a Windows, Mac or Linux client that can backup all your files to the “cloud” either using S3 or Rackspace’s own “cloud” offering.

While I am very impressed with Jungle Disk’s Windows server backup solution, I’m not so convinced on the Windows or Mac desktop service.  Timeouts at both Amazon and Rackspace’s Jungle Disk gateway as well as numerous other little problems has not convinced me I want to entrust to it my 17Gb of well earned music, film and TV collection on iTunes.  I’m fine with the Windows backup since (a) Memset backs up the MDaemon directory nightly anyway, and (b) I’ve not seen any errors.

But something with Amazon S3 (particularly their Europe service) made me think that if I could find a utility that allows me to upload and download stuff as easily as an FTP client, or even offer full sync capabilities, I would still have a use for it.  Sadly, the options are very limited and I have to say I’m not at all impressed.

On the Mac, there is Cyberduck.  This is an FTP, SFTP, SCP,S3, WebDAV, Rackspace Cloud, MobileMe file transfer client.  It’s literally the Swiss army knife of file transfer clients and the very best thing I’ve seen for any platform.  Ever.  I can create S3 buckets easily in Amazon’s EU datacentres and upload/download and even mirror entire directories.  If I interrupt the transfer, I can resume the next time without any fuss.  Very confident my data is safe with Cyberduck.  And Cyberduck is freeware/donation-ware in that it’s free to use, but a donation to the author is appreciated.

I then tried Time Warp for OS X.  This is currently in beta and is free to use while this is so.  Unfortunately Time Warp did not offer me the choice of Amazon datacentre and seems to default to the US.  No good.

Next up was Atomic Drive.  This is a cross-platform client, but like Jungle Disk, requires that you sign-up to them and pay them a small monthly fee for the privilege of using the client (fair enough) as well as the S3 transfer/storage fees.  Unfortunately the client only allows US datacentre use, and does not resume transfers if you’re in the middle of transferring gigabytes of data and need to interrupt for whatever reason you may have.  This is not good.

After that was S3 Bucket Explorer, but found the user interface unwelcoming and cluttered (and the queue system I found to be too fussy).  It also takes an age to load on the Mac.

Thus the winner on the Mac is: Cyberduck.  By far the friendliest and most feature packed S3 client I ever come across.

In terms of Windows clients, I was even more disappointed with the choice available.  Cloudberry Lab appears to the be leading developer of S3 clients.  They have a dedicated backup product (CloudBerry Backup) as well as a general S3 bucket explorer-cum-FTP client called CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO.  I liked CloudBerry Backup very much, apart from one problem.  The bandwidth and usability was sufficiently uncontrollable that my wife and I argued over it’s use!  I was forced, to keep the peace, to uninstall the product, even after limiting the bandwidth used by CBB, since stopping the manual backup saw the backup resume again after a minute.  Pausing the backup still seemed to  do the job, but activity was still present.  Thus, with regret, I had to walk away from this product which when I saw it working, seems to be one of the best I’ve seen.

Cloudberry S3 Explorer PRO is another product which I like, but seems to suffer from a problem whereby if I’m uploading a lot of files and then close the program, restart it, and kick off the queue again, just get errors upon errors and cannot resume the transfer for the files still in the queue.  I’ll need to look at the debug/log files to figure why that is.  Haven’t had the time to do so as yet.  The user interface is clean, crisp – everything I like in an FTP client and is very straight forward.  If I can get around the queue issue, I think this would be the best product for S3 bucket management for Windows.

I have yet to look at Cross FTP for Windows (or Mac), or CloudBuddy (Windows).  Everything else out there seems to be in perpetual development (alpha or beta).

Puppet Wars: Return of the Muppets

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 10, 2009

I’ve always been a big fan of the Muppets.  Loved them as a kid – proof may be found here:

Aghhhh! My eyes!

I had always wanted to work for the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and nearly came to a work experience placement with them when I was at secondary school except that due to heavy work commitments they had to pull out (I had an interview all set-up with Neal Scanlan who has now gone on to run his own creature FX studio – one of his most recognisable creations has been the Tweenies).

Somewhat ironically I ended up working in digital VFX instead and the Creature Shop in Camden had then consequently shut back in 2003-2004 – presumably due to the competition from the Soho FX houses and the lack of demand for animatronic creations (MPC itself took on a lot of work replacing creatures which started life as animatronics which just never worked well enough for the director).

But after Jim Henson died back in May 1990, the quality of the Muppets output dramatically declined and I stop watching them pretty much after the Muppets Christmas Carol which was, to me, the only good thingthey did after Henson’s death. Everything else was mediocre, made worse by the lack of the talented writing team that made the Muppets what they were. Sure, the performances from the puppeteers were marvellous (even though quite a few of the original team have retired from performing – most notable is Frank Oz), but they still seemed to lack soul.

So when YouTube videos of the Muppets started to appear over the past few months – with the likes of Sam the Eagle, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew & Beaker, and the rest (now under one roof) – I began to feel that the overall quality has significantly improved. The Muppets feel more like the Muppets again, and not some hollowed out shell that they once were. I particularly love their take on the Bohemian Rhapsody.

So: welcome back, Muppets. I’ve missed you (says this 33 year old man!).

(But is it just me – has the Muppets themselves received a bit of an upgrade in that those Muppets which had “arm sticks” no longer need them? It’s a bit freaky – it’s as though the hands have a life of their own!)

Protecting your data with SquirrelSave..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 8, 2009

Making Cedric the Squirrel work harder, faster, stronger for you!

Disclaimer/Caveat: This is a personal blog, and all opinions within are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employers, Memset.  I provide support for the SquirrelSave service and therefore everything you read here is merely a personal view rather than official Memset opinion or documentation.

Online backups versus traditional backup methodology

Over the past few years, I’ve found online backup systems to be absolutely invaluable alongside backing up to DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as using external hard drives.  An online backup account allows you to instantly retrieve a deleted file from the Internet much faster than it takes to find the right discs, put them into the drive (or hook up the right external drive) and then copy the files across.

Additionally, with historical online backups, you can delete a file – forget about it for 30 days or more, and then suddenly realise that you need it again.  Big problem if you’re simply dumping/overwriting the contents of a backup on a hard drive.  Your physical backup may also die when you least expect it.  DVDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life, and hard drives are quite prone to failing at any time for any reason.  Online backup services could be seen, in my eyes at least, to be like an extra insurance policy against both your computer and your physical media backups from failing.

Where SquirrelSave steps in

The service that I provide support for, SquirrelSave, has been successfully running for the past few years.  The datacentres in which data is stored are based in Reading, UK.  All data to and from the datacentres is encrypted between your computer and the backup server, and the filesystem in which your backups are stored is also encrypted.  But the real beauty and major advantage of SquirrelSave, for me, over all the other online backup providers (Jungle Disk, Mozy, Humyo, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc.) is that it’s based around existing open source software.  SquirrelSave essentially provides a GUI wrapper around SSH, rsync and SCP.

With SquirrelSave you define your Include and Exclude lists within the GUI (SquirrelSave ships with a set of sensible defaults – generally your C:\Users\<username> directory is set for backup, and many temporary/system directories are set for exclusion[1]) and then hit Start Full Backup.  This kicks off the long backup process which can take several days to several weeks depending on how fast your broadband provider’s upload speed allows[2].  You can specify a limit to the amount of bandwidth SquirrelSave uses if you find that Cedric the Squirrel is feasting a bit too much on your uploads.

Examining backed up data or restoring is simplicity in itself.  While SquirrelSave does not provide a web based interface for this, it does include the WinSCP client that makes it easy to navigate through the backup server directories to recover your files.  It is then simply a case of dragging and dropping directories and/or files over to your hard drive to restore them.  SquirrelSave also has multiple historical backups, so that if you do delete a file from your machine, you can restore a file from 2,4,6,12,14, etc. days ago (the historical data doubles each time).

I’ve used SquirrelSave myself both at work and at home to recover files that I’ve been stupid enough not to back up manually first.  The most recent case was when I had to reinstall the Macbook due to serious rainbow beach ball issues upon start-up.  I recovered all of my documents, SSH keys, etc. within a matter of minutes of installing the SquirrelSave client.  Note: the Mac SquirrelSave client is still in development/testing at this time.

SquirrelSave Tip #1

If you see “Some files not completely transferred (23)” when performing a SquirrelSave backup, don’t worry.  This indicates that somewhere within your Include list, you’re backing up temporary files which existed when SquirrelSave (or rather, rsync) was compiling it’s list of files to back up.  By the time the backup started, those files were deleted or moved.

Restoring files to a new PC

There’s no right or wrong way of restoring files to your new/replacement PC.  But there are several ways of doing so.  My suggestion would be to ensure that you keep a backup of your local SquirrelSave config directory.  This is located (on Vista and 7 machines) under C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\SquirrelSave.  I’d make sure that you’re using something like WinZip, PowerArchiver or any ZIP utility to back up the contents of this directory and keep it safe.  Not a problem if you forget to do this, as you can restore without this data – but any customisations made to your Include and Exclude tabs will be lost.

On the new PC,  if you’ve kept the config files, then restore them to the same path as was on your old PC.  Install SquirrelSave.  If you don’t have the config files, you’ll be prompted to login and run the configuration file from your SquirrelSave online web account.  If this is the case it is VITAL that you pause/select backup later when prompted.  You do NOT want SquirrelSave to start backing up your new PC just yet.

Once SquirrelSave is installed and configured, you can then use the View Backup button to connect to your files and then copy them over to your new PC. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not want SquirrelSave to back up these files again, or delete the contents of the current directory hierarchy on the backup server – make sure you copy these files back to the same paths on your new PC as before.  If you put files into different directories, SquirrelSave will think these are new and back them up.  Eventually the files in the old folders on the backup server will be deleted.  So files and folders must be like-for-like on the new PC if you wish to avoid these issues.

Once the files have been restored, you can unpause SquirrelSave and it’ll start to back up your new PC.

SquirrelSave Tip #2

The more advanced SquirrelSave user can use any SCP client to connect to their backup store.  Your private key is stored as ssh_key in the config directory (see above), and you can use this to connect to the backup store (the host that you need to connect to is formed from your SquirrelSave username, followed by .backup.squirrelsave.com).

There you have it.  SquirrelSave is a safe, easy-to-use, online backup service which costs just £4.95 + VAT per month (with 30 day money back guarantee) for unlimited storage.  While it is offered and supported on the Windows platform (XP, Vista or 7) at the moment, it WILL be expanded to the Mac and Linux platforms in due course.

If you need assistance with SquirrelSave, please do NOT contact me directly here – please use the official support email of support@squirrelsave.com.  We aim to reply within 2 hours of receiving your email (Monday-Friday in office hours).

Footnotes

[1] Users of Microsoft Outlook will need to explicitly declare the path to their PST files as SquirrelSave exlcludes the AppData path by default (this is because it can contain a LOT of unnecessary data).  To backup Outlook data on a Windows Vista/7 machine, you’d need to include C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook within your SquirrelSave Include tab.

That said, I HIGHLY recommend Outlook users consider buying a copy of AJ Systems OutBack Plus 97 which can bundle Outlook configuration and PST files into a single file, as well as other Windows application preferences.  The resulting file can then be backed up by SquirrelSave quickly and easily.

[2] I’ve found that Virgin Media customers are seriously disadvantaged due to the peak usage caps that they place on customers.  I would advise that Virgin customers seek another broadband provider if you’re wanting SquirrelSave or other online backup provider – regardless of whoever you choose, you will see major delays in uploading your data versus other providers who do not impose such limits.

New feature: service invites

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 3, 2009

For those that are reading this on an RSS/news feed reader, the blog itself has a new sidebar section which advertises how many invites I have on offer for a variety of new and existing services – such as Spotify and Google Wave.   The figures will, obviously, be updated as and when I have new invites or have used up existing ones.

To request an invite, just drop me an email to either spotify@drake.org.uk or googlewave@drake.org.uk and I’ll issue them on a first come, first served basis.

I’m a Mac AND a PC. Yet I’m not complacent.

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 2, 2009

Interesting article over at the Mail Online about the so-called Windows 7 “black screen of death”.  Even more interesting is the comments where the forever OS snobbery war continues.

People saying “Get a Mac”, or “My Mac has never seen a virus” are far too complacement for my liking.  In the six years of working in an industry where Macs are the dominant platform for creatives (followed behind by Linux – yaaboosucks to Microsoft!), I’ve seen Macs become infected by trojans – installed by users who have unwittingly given the trojan access to their system by giving it their admin user password (which is usually only required for major system operations, such as installing kernel extensions or amending system configs).  This has resulted in an compromised system – and this is because the users have usually downloaded something from a dodgy (warez, illegal torrent, etc.) web site and believed their Macs were invulnerable to viruses, etc.

The same can be said of some Windows users.  Despite the almost universal paranoia of Windows systems getting viruses, I’ve also seen some Windows think along the same lines of the smug Mac owners in that “I’m careful – I’ve never caught a virus before and therefore do not need anti-virus software”.  Subsequently their machines have been compromised and it’s re-install time.  NEVER think you will be affected because one day you’ll most likely be kicking yourself.

Regardless of whatever platform you use – it’s always worth having some form of anti-virus/anti-malware software installed (free or otherwise) to ensure that you’ve got some warning about the new application you’ve just aquired will do.  Never willingly grant strange applications access to your system and always verify their source first.

Mac users – I highly recommend Sophos Anti-Virus.  Despite a few wibbly moments which have since been ironed out, Sophos is one of the most trusted and respected security vendors for all the major OS platforms.  Certainly, I’ve been very impressed with their Windows products in the past when I’ve used them.  For Windows users, I do not hestiate to recommend ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus.

Another thing that bugs me are people who do not take care of their system backups.  It’s now so incredibly cheap to buy an external hard drive, CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray rewritables to back up all of your sensitive data.  And add to this the numerous onlne backup services (my favourite being SquirrelSave – but then again I provide the majority of support for this as I work for Memset who own and run it!) and you’ve got no excuse for losing data.

Ooh me frozen .. hands, PCI compliance and Thunderbird 3 rc1

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 1, 2009

Set off to work by electric pushbike this morning thinking that I wouldn’t really need my gloves.  How wrong I was.  In fact, it got so bad that I stopped off at Sainsburys and bought a £9 pair of fleece-lined leather gloves.  Legs were quite a bit cold despite wearing thermal lined leggings.  I think tomorrow I might need the under thermals as well.  Eek.  I think it’s safe to say it’s now PROPER winter.

Was very glad to receive an email at work from the University of Surrey asking for feedback from cyclists who cycle in and out of the Surrey Research Park.  Have sent back an email to the Uni telling them exactly what it’s like.  It’s not generally pleasant ever since the Royal Surrey Hospital opened it’s new car park.   That said,  it’s always been bad when you leave the Research Park around 4pm.  You see loads of cars all backed up around Occam Road waiting to get into Gill Avenue as everybody waits for cars to come out the hospital car parks, people crossing at the out-of-action traffic lights, and having to deal with a nightmare roundabout at the end of it all.  There’s not much point asking for cycle lanes as there is just no room for them.  The best I think us cyclists can hope for is a dual pavement/cycle access lane.  Who knows?

Have also been tinkering with servers to get them PCI compliant.  You’ll all be pleased to know that the miniserver this blog sits upon has passed with flying colours (albeit with some caveats).  I even recompiled and installed the very latest OpenSSH on this box to go above and beyond what is required by some of these PCI checkers.

Finally – after a good few days of solid use, I’m pleased to say that I absolutely adore Thunderbird 3 (albeit I’m running a release candidate!).  It’s far exceeded my expectations and I’ve even moved from Apple Mail on the work Macbook to Thunderbird 3.  No major issues encountered so far.