Delyte

I work on several different computer at home, in my office and have some machines standing at my most important customers. For my most frequently programs i have the configuration-files (rc-files) linked to my onlinestorage dropbox, and they are distributed automatically to all my computers. Here is an example: I use alpine (pine) for reading my emails and get access to my imap-folders on my web-servers. The alpine configuration-files in my home-directory (e.g.: /home/mike/pine.rc) are linked (ln -s) to my dropbox-directory which is automatically synchronized via the internet.

This gives me the advantage that I have the same configurations and settings on all of my computers and if i change the configuration on one of them, i have it done on all. For Opera I have "Opera Link" where the configuration and boomarks are stored and synchronized. If you have ideas or solutions for synchronizing program configurations, please be free to write a comment to this post.

I never joined Twitter, and maybe never will, but today i discovered a much more suitable solution to spread messages for a more or less small group of followers. I edit the RSS-file direcly with:

vim ftp://ftp.my-server-tld/www-root/messages.rss

, and distribute the rss-link via E-Mail to friends or offer it on my website. This is the hardcore-way of doing it, i not yet found a tool for editing RSS or Atom-feeds. Maybe I have to develop one (spare time required).

Now you can try this (in German).

I found a very handy tool for managing my private expenses and finances. I is very easy to use, you can generate various reports and statistics. "HomeBank" is available for several "Linuxes", MacOS and even Windows ( http://homebank.free.fr ).

To keep track of my expenses "on the road", I use "LightWallet" which runs as an Java-program on my mobile (found it on http://www.getjar.com ). Back home or in the office i update HomeBank manually with the entered records of LightWallet.

Next step is to write a small conversion-program to import the financial transaction from LightWallet directly into HomeBank. I will inform you, if this i done. Now i hopefully can keep track of my expenses an avoid money slipping through my fingers too easily.

As unfortunately nobody recognized, i started my weblog in December 2008. After the setup a opera-coomunity-account for Opera-Link, which holds my bookmarks in the internet, i found out that a personal community-page is included. So I decided to start a weblog, its almost my first one and the hype about weblogs is already gone.

Opera is my favorite web-browser for a really long time, i guess eight years or so. I started using it with SuSE-linux a long time ago, and still happy with it. Sometimes i check out Firefox, w3m or links on linux. Some years ago i read my E-Mails with Opera, but then came back to (al)pine.

I have the intention to add some postings to my weblog here more often, maybe twice a week, if someone will read my thoughts. I will write about Opera, Linux, programming, Python, and the world. So Welcome to you here one my weblog, please visit my community-page frequently or add my to your friends.

As a maintainer of several websites, i learned to love the linux cli-tool sitecopy over the years. With my not really intensive used webspace at my hosting-provider, i got the idea to backup some extreme important data via ftp onto my webserver. I made some experiments with sitecopy and symbolic linking and happily found out that it works. Here is the step-by-step howto (please adjust the commands to your needs):

1. Check your FTP-account and write down the FTP-server with a FTP-username and the according password. Then you should install sitecopy, for example by typing: sudo apt-get install sitecopy (Please read the installation-instructions).
2. Create a directory where you put in all the symbolic links to your very important files and directories with: mkdir /privat/backup.
3. Edit your ~/.sitecopyrc and insert following lines (please modify the values):

   site backup
       server ftp.server.tld
       username ftpusername
       password ftppassword
       remote backup
       local /privat/backup

4. The just add some symbolc links to important files into your backup-directory by typing (modify this too):

   ln -s ~/.sitecopyrc /privat/backup/sitecopyrc
   ln -s ~/important-file.txt /privat/backup/
   ln -s ~/rechungen/ /privat/backup/

5. After that you should init the sitecopy-backup by typing (This you do just once):

   sitcopy -i backup

6. Now you can do the backup to your FTP-server and enter:

   sitcopy -u backup

7. If you forget to enter the preceeding command, you can create a cronjob by editing the file /etc/crontab as superuser of cause, and add the following line:

   0 12   * * *   mike    sitcopy -u backup

Now I hope that this little tutorial is helpful for you and would be happy about some of your comments or different solutions, ideas, notes and so on.