Opening Up

Well, after a bunch of non-NArchivist work, I finally got back to my current pet project (though I'm really itching to get back to my REAL pet project, the TurtolCMS), and now NArchivist, my backup software, will not only back files up, but it can actually RESTORE them as well.  One would hope that would be a standard feature.  I've just "released" version 0.3 on SourceForge.   New features include:

• A basic desktop client from which you can select files to restore.  Of course, any file you would overwrite via a restore is first backed up (if necessary). 
• RackSpace CloudFiles support, so now you can store your backups to two truly distinct clouds, thus making your data a bit more secure. 
• After every backup session it backs up its own database.  You might think this would only be needed after a backup session in which files were uploaded, but since we also record "last-seen" data to catch file deletions, the database goes up every time.  Versioned, of course.  

Next, I'll have to make the website a bit more complete.  Which is to say complete at all.  After that, I'll try to get it running on Window, and flesh out the web-based interface I started.

 

I've just put up the first "version" of my new backup software, NArchivist, on SourceForge.  It's not available as a regular download just yet, as there's too much to do to make it ready for a casual install (even tho "casual" by SourceForge standards usually means pretty technical).  So you can get it from the source repository.  See the project summary page for the gritty-kitty details, or you can start with my lame-o-rama project home page if you're in for a larf.

Stuff It Does

• It takes files from one or more "locations" on your filesystem(s), and copies them and their metadata (stuff like ownership, permissions, etc) to one or more "targets" in the cloud.  For now, I only support Amazon S3, so if you want more than one target, you need to either create more than one s3 bucket or more than one AWS/s3 account.  Or you can add support for other storage targets.  Go ahead, it'll be fun.
• When a file changes, it backs it up again, and continue to until it reaches a configurable minimum number of copies.  Basic versioning.
• File names are obscured.  Actually, they're mapped via database to other, cryptographically-generated name.  Session names are not obscured, however. 
• It keeps a database of each of these operations, so we know where all our stuff is.
• There is a basic, text-mode installation/configuration program.  This doesn't install the software, per-se.  That'll be next.  This just allows you to bootstrap the thing, create the database, and manage the target, location and backup parameters.  Very rudimentary.

Stuff It Doesn't Do But Will

In no particular order:

• Sessions ("runs" of the backup routine) are named and kept separate on the targets, but the files from all locations are intermingled within the session.  I'd like to change this.  Ok, truth be told, since I'm using cloud storage, I really don't know how things are "mingled" at all.  It's a black box.  But for my piece of mind, I'd like to make keys like {session-key}/{location-key}/{file-key} rather than the current {session-key}/{file-key}.  And I will, very shortly.  Be warned if you try the software that the next version will lose all your existing backups for that reason.
• Backup is useless without restore, and I don't have a utility to do that yet.
• It doesn't back up the database, and must.

More to come.

 

 

 

I'm really good at tangents.  Not the line-intersects-circle type (particularly), but the here-I-am-working-on-my-favorite-software-project-when-I-start-a-new-one-instead type.  For quite a while now, I've been unhappy with the data backup solution I've been using on my servers.  Years, really.  And recently I added a Windows server, which just made it worse.  Windows has a way of doing that.  In any case, the problem really isn't one of platform, or software usability or performance.  It's about horizon and rotation.  The problem is philosophy.

Once upon a time

In the olden days, when men were real men and used tape cartridges for backup (some with as much as 4GB of storage), we would do "tape rotation."  The mainframe folks, being the lazy sots there always were, had a robot do it for them, but that's another tangent.  The simplest rotation scheme looks like this:

• Use tape #1

Simple, sure, but since you only have the one tape, if it goes south, so does your data.  And once it fills up, you have an even bigger problem: erase and start over, or get another tape.  That's a biggie. So then we did "round-robin" wherein we used a different tape for each day of the week. Wow. Progress. Same problem, only it took longer to realize.

The amount of time you can keep a copy of data on a backup media is called the "Backup Horizon" and is perhaps the most important and yet least designed-for attribute of backup solutions through the ages.  Attempts were made, to be sure, but they had to deal with the fact that tapes cost money, often a lot of money.  Somebody at some point came up with the "father-son" rotation strategy, wherein you used four tapes, one for each of Monday - Thursday (the world was simpler when nobody worked on weekends) and four more tapes, one for each Friday in the month.  Each Friday, you'd do a Full backup (all data gets copied to tape), and then Monday thru Thursday you'd do either an Incremental (all files changed or added since the last day's backup go to tape) or a Differential (all files changed or added since the last Full backup go to tape) on each weekday.  This extended the apparent (not real, more below) backup horizon to one month (give or take).  Adding a grandfather level to this (twelve "monthly" tapes) gives an apparent backup horizon of one year.

Enter reality

But the truth is, it doesn't really work that way, for many important reasons. The first is that data changes more rapidly than the rotation can effectively deal with. If an important file is created on Monday, it gets put on the Monday tape.  But then if it's deleted on Tuesday, it's basically forgotten.  Let's say you need to recover it from tape on Wednesday: no worries.  But try that again the following Tuesday.  No joy.  Tape's been overwritten.  Ok, so maybe you stack your diffs (more than one backup session per tape).  When that runs out is a function not of how long you want to retain your data, but how full the tapes get.  If you put a no-overwrite policy in place, you end up with a mess of tapes with strange names like 'Monday #4c" which in no way relates to anything meaningful.  Many backup plans are not so much data retention plans as disaster recovery plans.  If something goes horribly wrong, you get back to almost where you were, but not quite.  But hey, that's what disaster means, yeah?

But a bigger issue is that if any one tape goes south, that data is just plain gone.  You may or may not have redundant copies somewhere.  Good luck finding and verifying them, in any case.  And since the more you use a backup tape, the closer you get to tape failure, the system is inadvertently designed to lose exactly the kind of data you will most likely want to recover - the highly volatile, transient stuff.  The document you accidentally cut from but forgot to paste back into and didn't notice since you were moving a paragraph from page 10 to page 225.

As disk space began to seriously eclipse tape capacity, and as data became more decentralized (no longer on the corporate servers), these backup solutions started having trouble keeping up.  And fell into disuse. Yeah, sure, all the big shops have backup server farms now, but it's not as easy for the smaller shops.  So we tend to use the "a copy is a backup" philosophy.  And it ain't.

Return of the King (or at least he's started the journey)

The only backup solution I've ever seen that DID get it right was called "Network Archivist" from a now-defunct company called Palindrome.  Their offices were only a few miles from my current house, and just down the block from my former data center.  Not that that has any relevance, since at the time I was using NA, I lived something like 40 miles away and didn't even have a data center. 

So because I need a better backup solution for my own servers and those of some clients, and all the offerings on the market now are of the just-copy-it-somewhere-and-call-it-a-backup variety...

The problems with being, as I so often am, distracted by too many interests and projects, are many.  I thought about working another clause into that first sentence so to further demonstrate my fractured lifestyle, but I got thinking about something else.  Anyway, this is just a very quick entry to point out that I really should take more time (a) to update this blog and (2) to just do things correctly in the first place so that when I change a password (for example) it doesn't fubar something else (i.e.) this blog which shouldn't have relied on that particular password anyway.  Sorry for the downtime.  I suck.

 

 

Ok, I broke my promise to announce the latest-n-greatest TurtolCMS here.  I did do the release (some while ago, now), but didn't make an announcement.  Color me lazy, or perhaps just overly busy.   And the book review will be forthcoming, some day.

Just last night, my cousin Rob asked me something along the lines of "have you ever been thinking about a blog entry for so long that you just couldn't get it done?"  He was talking about his own blog, mind, but hit the nail on the head for me.  So here's me getting it done, finally.

I alluded, in my previous entry, to another blog I would reference for a starting point.  That reference is below, but first, a little history.

A little history

Turtol, my much lamented previous endeavor, was originally started to be a hosting company, with 37signals-like aspirations to build some cool web-based applications.  Prior to Turtol, I had Yet Another Startup, and after I exited that, I took about 18 months off to be a Dad and work on my 50-some-year-old house and whatnot.  Some of my previous clients expressed an interest in my continuing to support their web sites (and so forth), so I put together a tiny little hosting operation, just to service them.  It gave me something to do to keep my hand in technology and was just self-sustaining; it made me no money, but I didn't care, because it wasn't supposed to.

After a while, some friend or other heard about my hosting, asked if he could have an account, and of course I put that together.  Then, of course, he asked for some changes, and I did that.  Then another guy came along, and pretty soon I needed to hack together some software to manage it all (web-based, of course), and keep me from actually running a hosting company so I could continue to play with my kids and generally be lazy.  Then Mike came calling, having heard about what I had put together, and needing a site for his then-current employer.  He asked what I'd charge.  I didn't know, because I didn't charge, except for those few who had sparked the whole she-bang in the first place.

So I put together pricing and Mike's company cut me a check and all was good.  But then Mike said something like "wow, that's like the best control panel I've ever used" and went on to tell me how bad most others were and how his pal Libor (who I hadn't, to that point, met) was always hating having to deal with them and how none of his designer friends even COULD use them.  I kinda knew that, since I'd looked at using them before I decided to just build my own.  Swell, I said.  Thanks, I said.  And that was that.

Until Mike asked "what would it take for me to resell your services?"  The idea, originally, was that I'd run the servers (and develop the control panel further) and he'd sell the service.  Several scenarios were suggested. Then Mike had an epiphany about the pricing structure and a few lunches later, Turtol was born.  The original business plan was we'd spend some time making the control panel totally kick ass and Libor (who had come on board by then) would help us bootstrap by bringing in ten or so of his freelance designer friends who each had at least a couple of current and upcoming sites needing hosting.  But what would become the critical piece of the puzzle was largely an accident born of my frustration with some of the work I was doing.

 

I've been thinking a bit recently about the title and ostensible purpose of this blog.  Now, mind you, this blog is largely a cathartic exercise on my part, not by any means an important bit of... well, anything.  But still, I like things to have some sort of order, consistency and meaning.  Originally, I started this thing talking about the various facets of life in an Open Source company.  It was intended to be very much my personal expression of my personal philosophy, centered around how that philosophy related to running my business.  With a bit of other hijinx thrown in whenever I got bored.

Since then, of course, the business itself has gone away, leaving in its wake the TurtolCMS software project.  And this blog (or at least it's tagline) with no clear meaning.  I'm no longer running an open source business.  Yes, as I've hinted, I intend to, and have several irons in the fire (both iron and fire being Open Source, naturally).  But I'm not, at present, actually running an open source company.  I'm managing an Open Source project, but that (at present) drives no income, and without income there really can't be said to be any business.

So, do I evolve the direction of this thing to follow along with whatever I'm doing right now?  Could be boring, but really I guess I'm doing that already, as I've had to post something from time to time, just to brain-dump.  Eventually, I suppose, it will evolve back into a blog about my (next) Open Source business.  But how long before that happens?  Will I still care?

Or do I revolutionize it entirely into... what else? I don't think the intarweb needs another site that links to other sites for the sake of it.  I'm just not into that.  Not enough catharsis. 

So, coming up:

Another book review (actually, two, but combined into one) not at all related to software, Open Source or Business, just because I wanna; and a post commenting on a story run on another (more widely read) blog, but not just so I can link to it; and the announcement of another release of the TurtolCMS, any day now.

TurtolCMS v0.6 is out. I released the next version of my favorite pet, the TurtolCMS a couple days ago.  Ok, let's be fair: WE, Roberto and I, released it.  He did at least as much work as I did.  So credit where credit is due. This is pretty much just a maintenance release and a version bump.  I've changed the copyright to reflect the fact that I own the software now, not Turtol.  We completed and added a bunch of the features that have been waiting in the wings since Turtol's demise in January.  And Roberto and I mapped out where we want to take the software.

When Turtol was around, we had a guy (Will) whose job was pretty much to work on the CMS.  He did other stuff, but since we based our operations around the thing, it made sense to have a guy devoted to fixing the bugs and advancing the features.  As we took on projects, we'd look to see where their specific feature requests would overlap with our "general" feature wish-list, and we'd get Roberto and Will to hack it together.  It was, in my opinion, a pretty good way to run things.  If we had enough advance notice of an upcoming feature, the guys could spend the extra time to build a general purpose tool rather than a specific one, and then we could resell the crap out of it to other customers (or, very often, to concurrent customers).  If we didn't have that kind of time, we'd do the general design, Roberto would crank out a very specific solution for our customer (at an appropriately higher price, naturally) and some while later Will and Roberto would generalize what had gone before, and THEN we'd resell the crap out of it.

There's no doubt that software publishing has the greatest potential ROI of any industry, precisely because you can resell the crap out of it.

"Not Dead Yet" was uttered at about 85 MPH on a desolate stretch of country road, some 15 years ago, by my pal Andrew with a huge grin on his face.  He and I had gone, one fine early spring day, to get my '73 Javelin/AMX (don't worry that you don't know what that is, not many do) out of storage.  It was, even then, starting to show its age, and I hadn't had the time to really get it back into shape.  So, after checking the fluid levels, tires, belts, hoses and other bits, we set out to "blow the carbon out of her."  That's car-geek code for flooring it until you're just plain scared of how fast you're going.

One moment, we're pulling out onto the road, slowly, carefully, motor shaking slightly, grumbling moderately.  The next, we're burning gas, and roadway, at an alarming pace (this was when gas was cheap, mind you), the hissing sound of the V8 swallowing huge volumes of relatively cold air into the cowl-induction system and the outright angry roar of the exhaust pure music to our ears.  Yes, it was showing its age, but my Jav wasn't dead yet.

Some while back in this blog, I noted that just because my company, Turtol, had gone defunct, our product the TurtolCMS, wouldn't.  This is because it is Open Source Software, and as such can survive the death of the parent company, provided there is sufficient energy, somewhere, to keep it going.  I'm pretty attached to the TurtolCMS, but because I've been making other plans and pursuing other opportunities (yes, yes, eventually, I'll let you in, when things are more stable), I haven't been able to put the energy in.

Recently, that changed.  One of my "other opportunities" will be based on the TurtolCMS.  To further that, I, along with Roberto (late of Turtol, also), have been working on the next version.  We made some significant advances, but most of the work has been focused on taking a slightly worn-out engine and rebuilding it so that it will be even better in the future.  We'll do some benchmarking in the very near term, hoping to see quite a lot of performance improvement.  We have some plans in place which we expect to provide even larger gains in performance, features and usability.  But it's Not Dead Yet.

Look for the release of TurtolCMS v0.6 in a week or so in all the usual places.

I can't promise how long this link will be good, but if you want to take a look at the video we made with Fave Media, then take a look now.  Since Turtol is defunct, I don't know how long it's going to remain available.

I see by the clock on the wall that it's been 20 days since my last post.  I intended to make a post on the 28th of last month, with a brief update and the news that I'd be gone for 12 days or so on vacation.  But time slipped away and I never got it done.  Then we left for Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. 

It was a very nice trip and a very nice stay at a very nice golf villa,  tho I never actually got around to playing golf, instead spending my time laying around and watching my kids see the ocean for the first time.  They were enthralled.  Living vicariously through your kids is not as bad as it sounds, as long as you're just re-experiencing the shear joy and splendor of discovery, and not trying to compensate for not having been picked first for everything on the playground.  I did try to post an entry via my BlackBerry, but my wife got wind of it and, well, let's just say it's a good thing that those BlackBerrys are so rugged.

Then off to Atlanta for my cousin's wedding.  A lovely affair, and great to see my aunts and uncles again, whom I haven't seen all at the same time since my grandfather's funeral some 8 years ago.  I think that's why we have weddings and funerals: It's not to celebrate a marriage or mourn a death, but to see your relatives whom you never seem to make the time for otherwise.  Sigh.

One of the benefits of this trip was I got to have some very good country fried steak and good ol' down-south sweet tea, which you just can't get here in Chicago.  I wouldn't trade you a raging case of the clap for the hot dogs they have down there, but you surely can't beat the fried steak.  I usually try to get my fill of biscuits and gravy while down south, too, but alas, I didn't have the opportunity. 

Since getting back, I've been working on reproducing the sweet tea, and I'm pretty close.  What I haven't really been doing is making much progress on some of my technical projects.  Ah, such is life.  

I was reading Robert X. Cringely's most recent column for this PBS feature The Pulpit and something struck me.  Metaphorically, not physically.  What grabbed my attention was this passage:

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

You should read the whole article to get the full context, but Cringly's thesis is basically that education is being transformed by how we access information, much to the chagrin of educators.  Now, I fall into that latter category from time to time, having taught general computing, hardware, software, operating systems and programming.   So I know that this topic is not so much a can of worms as an oil-drum full.  Still, I see where he's coming from. 

For example, while teaching a programming intro class, I had two students who are really archetypal of what I usually see. 

I'm a huge fan of Formula 1 racing.  I've comment previously about being fascinated by rare talent, and F1 is so knife-edge that it take rare talent to even get into the seat.  Multiple-time champions of other racing series have totally failed to even make a good showing in F1, such are the demands on a driver's talents.  It's a stunning sport to watch, so much so that right now I'm watching the practice session (Really!  Practice!) live from Malaysia.  It's mid-afternoon there, and a while past midnight here.  I'm a pure sucker for this stuff.

One of the questions in that Shane And Peter interview to which I've referred a few times was on life/work balance.  Now, my balance has very recently been thrown totally off. 

There were problems, of course, among the three Turtol partners, mostly small but not all of them.  None were large enough to be show-stopping, at least in isolation.  And, truth be told, I really was a bit surprised by the turn our final pre-breakup conversation took.  My intention, when we sat down to talk about our then most-recent management issue was to alter our role/responsibility balance among ourselves, favoring more control by me at Michael's expense.  It's certainly possible that I was too harsh in my criticism of Mike, though I believe it was well considered and accurate, if not delicate.  And I recall Mike agreeing with me at the time, though he may not actually do so now.  I don't know, we haven't discussed it.  All our conversations since that one have been about handling his decision to close down the company.  I briefly considered trying to continue on without him, just buying him out of it, but Turtol was his idea, his brainchild and largely his baby. 

Still, after a time it was my baby too, and the loss still hurts.

 

I've been putting this entry off for quite some time now.   Not entirely on purpose -- though of course my silence was purposeful, as it was motivated by legal matters.  But to increase the sense of drama, I'm not going to get right to the point.  Instead, first some rambling about the nature of Open Source.

In the Open Source world, a "fork" is, generally, a Bad Thing.  It means that some project has gone in a direction inconsistent with the needs of a large portion of its community (or, if you prefer, user base).  Or that it's gone nowhere at all.  The project leaders, keepers of the Sacred Code Repository, are either doing their own thing or nothing at all, but either way, the community gets pissed off enough that they "fork" the code.  This isn't as dirty (nor as punny) as it seems.  It just means that they are taking the code and making a brand new project out of it, with new leadership and new direction, like the proverbial Fork in the Road.

Forking is considered a Bad Thing, as I said above, because it indicates that there's a real disconnect among the developers and users of the project, but more so because it results in two projects in the same ecological space, so to speak.  This is thought to dilute support for BOTH projects, a kind of electronic overcrowding leading inevitably to starvation of the species.  

I'm not entirely convinced of this conventional wisdom.  There have been successful projects which forked to created two separate but equally successful projects.  And there have been forks which produced very good products which eventually re-merge into one, all stresses being forgiven.  Plus, Free Market Economy 101 says that competition is intrinsically a Good Thing, and I tend to agree with that.  The reasons that OSS (Open Source Software) folks seem to dislike forking is that (a) they aren't economists, by and large and (2) they are often idealists who believe that we should all be able to just get along, and forking shows the flaw in that ideal.

And this all leads to my personal Fork.... (don't you hate that I'm making you click to read about it?).... 

 

Well, if Hollywood misses their golden chance to pick me up, looks like I'm on my way to the Pulitzer.

I did the Shane and Peter Interview thing a couple of weeks ago. It was fun, and I figured it would be a good way to fill some blog space without having to come up with an idea of my own.

Then, Naomi over at IttyBiz saw my entry and posted a compliment about my Steve Jobs v. Bill Gates response. I guess she either had nothing to do or her mouse broke and she couldn't click away from my site, because apparently she read my article on Talking Shop. This she then added to her list of 32 Must Reads to Ensure Small Business Success. Wow, I'm blown away. I note that I'm higher up the list than marketing uber-guru Seth Godin. Clearly, I'm more of an authority than he.

So I'm on Cloud Nine.

But then, Shane picks me as a best interview finalist! I mean, Holy Crap. You can probably tell by the fact that my posting frequency has increased the effect all this positive attention has had on me. Hey, I never claimed not to be narcissistic.

Thanks for the links, Naomi and Shane! Right back at ya'.

Programmers say that a lot. I suppose all of us, when looking back at our earlier work, swallow a bit and say "I can't believe I did that! What was I thinking!" This just shows that we're always growing, getting better at what we do. I hope.

I've been spending most of my time with business development matters recently, with the exception of laying the technological groundwork for the next major version of our TurtolCMS software. Well, the first major version really. We've been using the "0.5x" moniker for a while, because we know it's not what we want it to be. But we have 50 or so clients using this tech, and we can't just wholesale replace it, so Will diligently makes improvements and keeps it alive. Meanwhile, I've been doing a clean-slate redesign. It's been fun.

But once in a while, I need to revisit my earlier mistakes (again, 0.5 is good, but not as good as I'd like) to see what NOT to do in 1.0 of the thing. A client requested a search bar in their site, and I figured I could kill a couple of birds with just the one stone. I set about to create a Google toolkit as an add-on to the TurtolCMS, including a site search mechanism. It was pretty easy code to produce, but it was way klunkier than I'd have liked due to some built-in deficiencies in the old codebase. Leading me to that "I can't believe I wrote that" moment.

Here's to continuing to improve at everything we do.