July 2010 – Page 3 – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

Monthly Archive: July 2010

Backups – Off-site is important

Well I had a review on this book that I wrote when it was fresh in my mind (the review not the book) but due to some weird Database error it seems that all my posts with the exception of the Linux centric posts were deleted from the time I wrote the original review.

That being said I felt it important to try and recreate this book review. So like any good nerd I went back into my repository of Site backups to see if I could find the backup only to remember that server died! It occurred to me then and there that Off-site backups is the way to go and well that left me with this post which I would have done my best to re-create from my horribly bad memory, however i would rather wait till i can give a more substantial review

Now I have multiple backup systems in place including a manual backup from phpMyAdmin to my Dropbox account. I now have a copy of the DB stored on Dropbox.coms server my own file server, and Amazon S3 as well. Needless to say I shall not loose a DB again (unless all three servers crash simultaneously god forbid).

Since my DB tend to be rather small once compressed I will also copy them to a USB flash drive. Also I will have my new Android phone (with luck the Droid X) and can copy the files over to the Mini-SD card on it as well.

So lets see that is 2 copies on physical removable medium and 3 servers one of which is on site. I hope that fits the bill for Off-site backup!

On another note with reference to the error that seemed to eliminate most of my blog posts (must have happened some time ago) it convienantly left my categories and tags alone how quaint. My post reviewing Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 i  believe it was at the time, Gone! my review of WIndows 7, Gone!

All this and several others, seems more like an attack then an error but oh well it has been done now time for damage control.

Trouble with getting a clean Face image

Ok so I am trying to join the Social Media trend and make a decent Face image to use as my avatar and what not. I am however running into some issues.

me.jpg This image is the source image the one i am trying to use to get the face image. I looked around for tools to help me do this and the only way I found to do it was to open the image in Gimp and then use the Multi-point selection tool to try and outline my face then cut the image from the background and past it onto a new layer on top of a layer with a transparent background.

This resulted in this image face-master.png

The image as you can see if technicaly a face image but it is no where near as cleanly done as I want. If you look on http://www.av-j.com/fedoraplanet you will see examples of people with clean faces ones that do not have jagged edges and do not look like an amateur edited them such as myself.

So what I ask you guys is, Do  you know of a plug-in for the Gimp or some site that can aid me in doing this more cleanly? I need the file it generates to be able to be safely re-sized with minimal degradation to the image quality (not a super good quality to begin with )

Digital photography is not one of my strong points here so anything suggested should be clear and to the point and hopefully something i can follow easy enough.

Droid X and Possible New Job Prospect

Job Prospect

Those of you that know me personally or even on a chatting basis, know that I have had one heck of a year with all that has been going on. One among many other things in my life that are less then fortunate, is that I am currently unemployed.

Enter Monster.com, I updated my resume on Monster and did the normal daily grind of late which is find 4-8 jobs and apply for them. Out of the blue one day I get a call from a company looking for someone to represent Sharp Electronics for their Marketing company basically helping educate customers on Sharp HD technology, I passed the initial pre-screen and anxiously awaited the interview.

The following Monday I got a call from who would become my manager should I get the job, The interview seemed to go really well and I am confident that the Interviewer got a similar feel for my experience. Now I should mention I have had experience in this type of job before, I sold Cell Phones for the 3 major carriers (not going to list them here you know who they are) wit a company called Mosaic Sales Solutions, This job i interviewed for was very similar to the cell phone one minus cell phones add HD tvs.

At any rate the interview was last Monday and I followed up on Thursday with a phone call re-emphasising how interested I was in the job and what it entailed. Now comes the waiting game, I should know by the end of this week (hopefully) if i got the job or not.

This job should I land it will require me to get rid of my pre-paid phone and get a regular posting plan phone which will be needed to keep in touch with my boss since I am completely solo on this job should i get it.

This brings me to the Droid X part of the post.

Droid X

Given that I would need a regular Phone and not a pre-paid phone, I began to look into which phone I would get and the more I looked the more it occured to me that if I had a smartphone I could be far more productive in several areas with relation to this job. For one customer questions I could not answer could be easily answered using the phone to do a quick internet search and pull up the information. Second I could use this phone to track my sales and log required information for the daily report at the end of the night.

So knowing I would need a Smartphone I began to narrow down which phone I wanted, would work for what I wanted. I tending to prefer anything other then Windows mobile was left with Palm WebOS phones or Android Powered phones. Having done a little research i found Palm was recently acquired by HP and while i have no beefs with Hewlett Packard, I felt with the buyout things might be a little late to be updated/fixed. Android was my choice of OS, then I began narrowing down Verizon Android powered phones as a means to get the phone I really wanted. Talking to several people and researching bit I found that the upcoming Droid X to be my phone of choice. It was not till after I chose this that I realized just how cool this would be, I could download apps from the Android Market to allow me to use this phone for non-work stuff as well.

True with the above things I researched which apps I would install off the bat as soon as I had network access, Some that came to mind were Seesmic, Bank of America for Android, WordPress, shopsavvy and Blizzards Authenticator app. I am sure I will install many more but for starters these are apps i would consider must haves.

Also Android is obviously powered by Linux which to me is one the best things out there. I use Windows for some things i can not get to work under WINE but for the most part Linux is my OS of choice so a phone powered by Linux just seems to be a logical choice.

All that being said, I will most likely not get a phone should I not get this job (at least not at first) since another monthly bill with no job is not the smartest of moves.

If you know a good (useful, or fun) app for android post it in a comment.