But this post isn’t for a personal update! This post is for VD + UNICRONS!!!

The most recent package I received from RightStuf had this entertaining little number in it (I haven’t seen the show, but even I know that you never enter into a contract with Kyubey):

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Another personal favorite is this card, however poorly Photoshopped it may be. Lastly, Andy got the first strike in the day’s Valentine Wars with these classy Hark! A Vagrant cards.

Apparently my neighborhood’s thing (remember that I live on a hill) is to sled down the middle of our street. I guess one inch of snow is sufficient for such endeavors, as people have been doing so constantly for the last hour and a half. (I’d guess the continued snow isn’t hurting.)

…and a kid just sled into a dog.

I’ve been sipping Russian Tea and watching the festivities from my office window, since while I can sleep through a yowling cat or crying baby I am still weak against thousands of children simultaneously screaming in a combination of joy (those on their feet) and terror (those sledding).

…and a kid just tried to assassinate a sledder using a bowling ball-sized snowball. He failed (didn’t lead his target).

The end is drawing near, though; next week should see my code’s maiden voyage. After fixing whatever bugs exist… we’ll see if I still have a job. Not sure what the odds are, there.

From @Matt_Alt, via Andy.

This has manifested in odd ways, such as a dream I had two nights ago. I dreamt that I was dodging a barrage of knives and other implements being hurled at me.

Then I dreamt that I woke up and realized that this was actually a recurring dream.

(Then I woke up on a plane. (INCEPTION))

*OK so the parentheses are completely stupid, but they made me and my sister laugh.

This is important!

I last tried rolling my own backup program in mid-2009, cobbling together something in Ruby that theoretically worked. (It even tapped into FSEvents to know which folders to examine for changes–not the most trivial thing for a Ruby script!) In reality it was completely broken by the fact that it wanted to store everything (everything) in a database. (I’m probably talking out of my ass here, but I don’t recall the various NoSQL databases–which might have a chance in heck of being able to store files in the database–being very prominent back then.) I knew it was busted when I wrote it, and never actually used it to store anything.

…

Fast forward to this last weekend, when I discovered Incremental Backup. This AppleScript file held the core to what I wanted to do years ago–multiple custom incremental backups–and that all boiled down to an rsync flag that I didn’t know existed: --link-dest. That miracle flag tells rsync to look at the specified folder for an existing copy of the file it’s examining–and if the file is unchanged, creates a hard link to the existing file instead of copying it anew. Smart use of that flag allows rsync to effectively mimic Time Machine’s behavior (albeit somewhat slower, as rsync doesn’t use Apple’s FSEvents shortcut)–but with all the flexibility that rsync provides.

Yes, using that script requires you to compile your own version of rsync, at least for now. Yes, it’s a bit clunky (it keeps a log of backup folder names as a quick way to determine the most-recent backup, rather than just examining what folders exist, and you have to be careful to escape special characters, like spaces, in your pathnames), and a tiny bit buggy (if you have a backup source directory whose name contains spaces, it’ll get backed up to a folder named whatever text follows the final space). It’s still the best-looking customizable backup script/program/what-have-you that I’ve found.

I think I’ve managed to hack my own version to sidestep the issues I’ve found… my final hurdle is figuring out how to schedule the script to run regularly. Recent versions of OS X rely on launchd instead of cron. Thing is there only seems to be one launchd editor out there, Lingon, and I’ve had absolutely no luck getting that program to work.

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Oh, and the general rsync --link-dest theory should work on all Unix variants, not just Mac OS X. (Looking at the date on that article, I can’t help but wonder why I never thought to Google “rsync time machine” back in the day. I would have saved myself a whole lot of time.)