Technophile Monkey

Ever gave a talk while standing on a juicy, grassy meadow, in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night? Everything around you pitch black, ants crawling on your flipchart, a flashlight the only source of illumination? And all that in the Swiss Alps?

How about speaking in your own little classroom, talking about that FreeBSD-based fruit juicer you’ve invented, with your audience of geeks sitting on small wooden chairs made for six year olds?

Well, I guess now you can have that.

        ........ Introducing the BERGTAGUNG              ..
        ...... A Meeting of Free Spirits and Open Minds ...

        ..... Somewhere in the Swiss Alps             .....
        ...  Involving Beer    (and probably cows)   ......

                                     --[ bergtagung.org ]--

We’re so bloody open that you can dump the abstract of your talk in our wiki yourself.

Submit your talk to: bergtagung.org/wiki/Talks

Invitation

If your mind is reasonably open and your software predominantly free, you’re the perfect participant. If that does not sound like you, don’t worry. We have decent mind-stretching equipment and there will surely be some nerds around to fix you up with a liberated operating system of your choice.

Whatever you do, don’t stay at home!

Bergtagung 2007
(First Annual!)
July 20 – 22

Siat, Switzerland

Coming? Register at: bergtagung.org/wiki/Participants

Moo!

Etrian Odyssey is an RPG for the Nintendo DS in the style of Wizardry, Might & Magic, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master and all the other pseudo-3D first-person party-based RPGs we’ve spent way too much time with in our youth(s). I’ve been playing this for several hours, and a few things are odd here:

• It has a decidedly western play style, yet it comes from Japan.
• It’s an extremely classic dungeon romp. So classic that there’s mold on it.
• The enemies have zero frames of animation. None. They all just stand there like it’s 1986. Some wobble.
• Most of the world looks the same.
• You have to draw your own map on the lower screen of the DS.
• Most of the monsters stick your balls (if present) in a vise/clamp/fruit juice maker, and they won’t let go.
• There is only one town. You use it when you poke your head out of the dungeon to sell your loot and get quests. Why have an overworld?
• No one will hold your hand when it comes to money. Your party’s wiped out except for the Alchemist and you don’t have money to revive your guys? Tough luck.
• No one will help you build your characters. Wrong specs on that Landsknecht (what a stupid class name)? Start him from scratch. Wizardry didn’t help you make your characters either.
• I’m still enjoying the game a lot despite all that.

Several reviews and previews indicate that if you still manage to like a game that is that hard, you must be one hardcore gamer. I never felt particularly hardcore, but perhaps “hardcore” in this case is only a substitute for “aging and masochistic”. Which might fit.

If you’re still unconvinced (or a sissy), then let this video preview not convince you either. For me, this is one of the more convincing purchases in the life of my DS. Dungeon Master slash Wizardry slash mapmaking on the go? There was not a second of hesitation.

PS: Someone say Dungeon Master DS?

Japan and Norway are the latest countries to realize the benefits of open standards and Free Software. They are moving away from closed, proprietary and single-vendor solutions (with vendor lock-in), towards truly free, interchangeable systems.

This will strengthen both government’s sovereignty, in the sense reducing their reliance on e.g. foreign operating systems and productivity software.

We are currently evaluating a few Free Software backup systems. BackupPC is the one we’ve decided to put through its paces with a few weeks of real-world work, parallel to our existing system. So far, we’ve been using aging home-grown Perl scripts and the (quite excellent but sometimes dogged) rsnapshot.

The most interesting feature I’ve seen in BackupPC so far is file pooling. The project page puts it best:

• A clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PCs are stored only once resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk I/O.
• One example of disk use: 95 latops with each full backup averaging 3.6GB each, and each incremental averaging about 0.3GB. Storing three weekly full backups and six incremental backups per laptop is around 1200GB of raw data, but because of pooling and compression only 150GB is needed.
• etc.

Intwestin’! This should save us a lot of space, especially once we’ve finished virtualizing. Virtualized servers, shared LAMP servers and the like can profit massively from file pooling, as they will be sharing the same phyiscal space on the backup server. Even if 200 virtual servers share 300 MB each of system files, for example, all of their backups together will only take up a bit more than 300 MB instead of almost 60 GB. Even if the file’s attributes, owner, mtime, ctime etc. differ, the physical space they take up remains the same because BackupPC tracks file metadata separately from file data.

In addition to giving us more flexibility, more efficient use of our hardware, easier configuration and a better visual representation of our network’s backup status, BackupPC could theoretically also backup our users’ laptops. It doesn’t care which address the clients use, where they connect from etc. as it can pull the files incrementally and encrypted over rsync, for example. It even sends out messages to lazy users who haven’t backed up their machine in a while.

I’m still sceptical of the claims of being a full “enterprise-grade system”, but there are certainly enough features here to warrant some time investment into a more or less formal evaluation. Fabian already went ahead and put the thing into service on our new backup system, now I’m trailing behind in documentation lecture, but once I’ve caught up I’ll be sure to post about my experience with implanting BackupPC into an existing infrastructure.