Spyced

About three years ago (so pre-Mozy and definitely pre-Mac Mozy) my brother had his powerbook hard disk die. As in, not just mostly dead -- it would not power up. It had a lot of stuff on it that he didn't want to lose, but he felt like the usual suspects who charge $1k to $2k for data recovery were a rip off. So he hung onto the disk in case a cheaper option came along. Then just recently when I saw some people on a local linux group mailing list recommend utah data rescue I suggested to my brother that he give it a try. UTDR starts at "only" $300. UTDR did indeed recover the data, although they charged $100 extra for this one. Mac fee? Tricky hw problem? I don't know. But it was still a lot cheaper than the other companies I googled for fixing a physically dead drive. (As opposed to a corrupt partition table or something where the hardware itself was okay.) At least, the ones that actually give you a price up front rather than hiding behind "reques...

I had to install subversion on a couple HP-UX boxes. Fortunately, there's an HP-UX software archive out there with precompiled versions of lots of software. Unfortunately, dependency resolution is like the bad old days of 1997: entirely manual. And there's fifteen or so dependencies for subversion. So, I wrote a script to parse the dependencies and download the packages automatically. It requires Python -- which you can install from the archive with just the Python package and the Db package -- and BeautifulSoup, which you can google for. Usage is hpuxinstaller <archive package url> <package name> [e.g., hpuxinstaller http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Development/Tools/subversion-1.4.4/ subversion] [wait for packages to download] gunzip *.gz [paste in conveniently given swinstall commands] Here is the script: #!/usr/local/bin/python import urlparse, urllib2, sys, os from subprocess import Popen, PIPE from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup required = {...

I left backup service provider Mozy about three months ago, and yesterday they were acquired by EMC as rumored by techcrunch earlier. The cool thing about startups is they pretty much have to hire people who are totally not qualified to do awesome things and let them try. There's no way Amazon would have hired me to write S3, but that's what I did for Mozy. Mozy was the third startup I've been a part of, and the first to amount to anything. I was employee number #3 and saw it grow from sharing a single rented office to 50 employees in two years. With people who didn't think it was strange to wear a tie to work. Trippy. Unfortunately I'm not there to witness the final stage of being assimilated by the Borg firsthand, but I hear that's not really any more fun than it sounds so perhaps it's just as well. Nice work, guys.

Wing IDE version 3 has been released . The list of new features is a little underwhelming. Multi-threaded debugging and the unit testing tool (only supporting unittest -- does anyone still use that old module anymore?) are nice but I don't see myself paying to upgrade from 2.1 yet. Now if they could get the GUI to keep up with my typing in Windows, I'd pay for that... I guess this is a sign that Python IDEs are nearing maturity; Komodo 4 didn't have any earth-shaking new features either, at least as far as Python was concerned. (Personally I think someone should start supporting django/genshi/mako templates already. Maybe in 3.1, guys?) Following ActiveState's lead , Wingware has also released a completely free version, Wing IDE 101. The main difference is that where the most essential feature Komodo Edit leaves out as an incentive to upgrade is debugging, Wing IDE 101 includes the debugger but omits code completion. Wingware also continues to offer the low-c...