Follow the directions below to install Back In Time for Ubuntu and backup your entire drive.

Install Back In Time

• Add the following line to your apt sources file (/etc/apt/sources.list)

  deb http://le-web.org/repository stable main
  

• Add the GPG key information:

  clc@lurr:~$	wget http://le-web.org/repository/le-web.key
  clc@lurr:~$	sudo apt-key add le-web.key
  

• Install the backintime application for Gnome

  clc@lurr:~$	sudo apt-get update
  clc@lurr:~$	sudo apt-get install backintime-common backintime-gnome
  

Now the default installation of Back In Time should be installed. You can stop here, but if you want to back up your entire drive starting from the root (“/”), you’ll need to install a patch.

Download and Install the Patch

clc@lurr:~$ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/35340108/snapshots.py.patch
	--2010-03-07 12:28:39--  http://launchpadlibrarian.net/35340108/snapshots.py.patch
	Resolving launchpadlibrarian.net... 91.189.89.228, 91.189.89.229
	Connecting to launchpadlibrarian.net|91.189.89.228|:80... connected.
	HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
	Length: 431 [text/plain]
	Saving to: `snapshots.py.patch'

	100%[===================================================>] 431      --.-K/s   in 0s      

	2010-03-07 12:28:40 (13.9 MB/s) - `snapshots.py.patch' saved [431/431]

clc@lurr:~$ sudo patch /usr/share/backintime/common/snapshots.py snapshots.py.patch
	patching file /usr/share/backintime/common/snapshots.py

Easy as pie.

Now launch backintime-gnome (assuming your are not using KDE) and configure it.

Configure Back In Time

clc@lurr:~$ sudo backintime-gnome

Configure where you want the snapshots stored and how often.

Tell backintime which directories you want to save. I’m going for my entire drive starting from the root (“/”).

Make sure to tell backintime not to backup special directories as well as the directory you use to store the snapshots. Mine’s under /mnt/backup, so excluding /mnt will get the job done.

Running as Root

If you want to backup your entire drive you’ll need backintime to run as root from root’s crontab. If you run backintime-gnome using sudo from the command line the config file for backintime won’t be saved in root’s .config directory though. When cron calls backintime it will look for the config and won’t find it, so you should create a link to the config file in root’s home directory.

clc@lurr:~$ sudo ln -s ~/.config/backintime/config /home/root/.config/backintime/config

Debugging Back In Time

By default the output from Back In Time will be logged to /var/log/syslog. If your snapshots are not being saved as you expect check the syslog log.

clc@lurr:~$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

I was stymied me for a bit when the cron daemon didn’t seem to be actually running backintime as it should. A quick tail of /var/log/auth.log pointed out that the root account’s password was expired.

clc@lurr:~$ tail -f /var/log/auth.log

Optional: Configure Dedicated Logging

By default Back In Time will log its progress to /var/log/syslog. That of course means that every time it runs there will be changes to filesystem, therefore, every time it runs it will need to take a snapshot.

You can configure rsyslogd to push Back In Time’s logs to a dedicated file and then include that file in the exclude list.

• Create and edit /etc/rsyslog.d/40-backintime.conf

  clc@lurr:~$ vim /etc/rsyslog.d/40-backintime.conf
  

• Add the following lines

  	if $programname == 'backintime' then /var/log/backintime.log
  	if $programname == 'backintime' then ~
  

• Restart rsyslogd:

  clc@lurr:~$ sudo service rsyslog restart
  

Important Note

As of today, March 7th, 2010, the public release of Back In Time (v0.9.26) has not been updated to correctly handle taking a snapshot of an entire Ubuntu installation starting from the root directory (“/”). The instructions above are a quick guide for how to correct the issue. Check the Back In Time download page for the latest version of the application as the public release may have been updated.

Further Reading

See the April 15th, 2009 LifeHacker article for a rundown of the features of Back in Time.

The only variable is the number of sectors. Calculate it by (size in MB) * 2048

Yoshiko completely surprised me this Valentine’s Day with an insane Zoology Chocolate Chimpanzee and two cans of chocolate laced beer. Now I have to find a way to top her for White Day

Figuring out how to eat him without melting chocolate all over my hands and face is only slightly harder than sitting through a Japanese driver’s license renewal class.

I guess I could cut him up with a knife, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as eating him bit by bit.

]]> http://simulacre.org/valentine-choco/feed/ 0 http://simulacre.org/add-twitter-widgets-to-a-page-dynamically/ http://simulacre.org/add-twitter-widgets-to-a-page-dynamically/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:59:56 +0000 Caleb http://simulacre.org/?p=127 .....]]]> I love it when clean and consistent HTML markup combines with simple Javascript to effortlessly execute repetitive tasks. It takes me right back to Data Structures class in college.

Good data structures lead to good algorithms.

Take a look at my Twidget demo. Notice how there are six different Twitter widgets in the demo.

Manually instantiating a Twidget object for each would have been seriously repetitive; not to mention a pain.

new Twidget({user:"calebcrane", element: "calebcrane-tweets",
              onRequest : function(){ $("calebcrane-twidget").spin() },
              onComplete: function(){ $("calebcrane-twidget").unspin(); },
              onCancel: function(){ $("calebcrane-twidget").unspin(); }
         });

//... repeated 5 times with different user names ...

Not only would it be a pain now, but what if I wanted to change their behavior in the future? If I didn’t want to use Spinner any longer, but use Slider to transition the tweets into the page, I’d have to change each and every single one.

I could, of course, auto generate the Javascript code on the backend, but that will put more load on my server.

Isn’t one of the great pieces of the recent JavaScript renaissance the ability to distribute processing costs to clients?

Imagine, if for some reason, I wanted to create a page with hundreds of Twidgets … *yuck*

Well, the easiest thing to do is use the consistent markup of each of those widget DIVs along with their IDs to construct the Twidget objects.

<div class="twidget" id="calebcrane-twidget">
    <div class="border">
       <div class="center inner">
           <h3>Caleb Crane</h3>
           <a href="http://www.twitter.com/calebcrane"><img src="http://c5.simulacre.org/images/twitter0a.png" /></a>
           <div class="tweets" id="calebcrane-tweets"> </div>
       </div>
   </div>
</div>

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
      window.addEvent("domready", function(){
          $$('.twidget').each(function(twidget){
              var tweets = twidget.getElement(".tweets");

              new Twidget({ user:tweets.get("id").split("-")[0], element: tweets,
                            onRequest : function(){ twidget.spin() },
                            onComplete: function(){ twidget.unspin(); },
                            onCancel: function(){ twidget.unspin(); }
                          });
          });
      });
</script>

We just Loop through the .twidget elements (line 3); and for each one create a function that

1. takes the twidget element as an argument
2. grabs and holds a reference to the first child element with class .tweets (line 4)
3. instantiates an anonymous Twidget object with
   • a Twitter username determined by breaking the twidget element’s id in half at the hyphen -, e.g., calebcrane-tweets -> calebcrane
   • the referenced child element above (tweets) as an element to display the actual tweets
   • event handlers that properly reference the twidget element passed into the function rather than manually referencing DOM elements

Rather than manually writing the code to create each Twidget object we let the structure of the HTML and simple references and good naming convention (IDs with the username in them) do it for us. That being said we are increasing the execution time.

I am, however, happy to sacrifice – what is likely only marginally – increased execution time in favor of programmer productivity, reduced likelihood of refactoring errors, and bandwidth savings (less text to send to the client).

Twidget retrieves recent tweets from any user’s public timeline, marks them up and puts them into a container element.

Demo

new Twidget([options]);
		

<p class="tweet">This is a <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23tweet">#tweet</a> that mentions <a href="http://twitter.com/mootools">@mootools</a> <a href="http://mootools.net">http://mootools.net</a>.<span class="when">3 days ago</span></p>
		

div.twidgets .spinner {
 	position: absolute;
 	z-index: 999;
 	opacity: 0.4;
 	filter: alpha(opacity=40);
 	-ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=40);
 	background-color: black;
 	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
     -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
     -border-radius: 5px;
 }
 div.twidgets .spinner-msg {
 	text-align: center;
 	font-weight: bold;
 }

 div.twidgets .spinner-img {
 	background: transparent url(http://c5.simulacre.org/images/twidget/spinner.gif) no-repeat -10px 0px;
 	width: 80px;
 	height: 24px;
 	margin: 0 auto;
 }

 .twidgets:after{ content: "."; display: block; clear: both; visibility: hidden; line-height: 0; height: 0; }

 div.twidget{
     border:3px solid #ebebeb;
     padding:0;
     margin:10px;

     -moz-border-radius: 5px;
     -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
     -border-radius: 5px;
     width:200px;
     text-align:center;

     float:left;
     position:relative;
 }
 div.twidget div.border{
     -moz-border-radius: 5px;
     -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
     -border-radius: 5px;
     border:1px solid #8d8d8d;
 }
 div.twidget div.inner{
     padding:5px;
     -moz-border-radius: 5px;
     -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
     -border-radius: 5px;
     border-top:2px solid #fff;
     border-bottom:2px solid #fff;
     background: #f3f3f3 url(http://c5.simulacre.org/images/wdgtbg.gif) repeat-x 0px 0px;
 }

 div.twidget h3{
     margin:0 0 10px;
     font-size:11pt;
     text-align:left;
 }

 div.twidget a{ text-decoration: none; outline: 0; -moz-outline: 0; color:#dc2509; }
 div.twidget a:hover{ position: relative; left:1px; }
 div.twidget a:active{ top:1px;}
 div.twidget img{ border:none;}

 .tweets{
   text-align:left;
   font-size:8pt;
 }

 .tweets .posted, .tweets .when{
   font-size:7pt;
   white-space:nowrap;
   margin:0.25em 0;
 }