Free Speech by preprint

People have, predictably, made the knee-jerk response that ‘People should not be allowed to preach hatred like that’ and comments of that ilk. What fascinates me is how, yet again, most folks don’t think it through.

Yes, the man is unquestionably a shady character and having him peddle his ideologies to the impressionable can be seen as a Bad Thing. On the other hand, the canned response points to a deeper problem within society at large: the steady decline of personal responsiblity.

Over the past couple of decades, Britain has been seeing this happen more and more. Political correctness, increased health and safety legislation, personal injury lawyers, schools held solely responsible for kids’ education… The list goes on.

The problem with all this is that people have been conditioned into believing that it’s someone else’s responsibility. Have a fall? It’s the council’s fault for not maintaining the pavements. Kids doing badly at school? The teachers aren’t doing their job.

The notion that it’s somehow your responsiblity to watch where you’re going, even if there is ‘inadequate lighting’ or that occasionally your child needs help with their homework or to be told that certain behaviours are Bad hardly arises in peoples’ minds.

I am angry at you! Listen to my ranting!

Coming back to Abu Qatada: while he is, by subjective measures – i.e. my opinion – a really messed up individual who probably needs psychiatric care, I wouldn’t stop him from doing his thing. Because ultimately, the people have to decide what to believe. You can’t tell them that, even ‘for their own good’. Down that road lies The Peoples’ Glorious Bureau Of Truth and similar orwellian constructs.

Does my opinion differ so wildly from yours that you’re frothing at the mouth with incoherent rage? Great! Differences of opinion make for fascinating debate,  ideas and a broadening of horizons. Ultimately, it is your choice whether to agree, question or dismiss my ideas. Same way that people should have the choice to listen to inflammatory speeches and laugh or to follow the teachings therein and accept the consequences of acting upon them.

Responsibility!

Today, though, I had to Do Stuff. I’m posting this mostly as a reminder to myself on how to do stuff and on the off chance that Google indexes this page and others of its ilk under ‘ZFS Tutorials’ or ‘ZFS How-To’ or something.

Snapshots

ZFS uses snapshots to record the current state of a given dataset. Snapshotting creates very little CPU and storage overhead, making it a useful backup method, especially if you have  CRON job set up to regularly snapshot your important data. You can also manually snapshot a dataset:

zfs snapshot tank/data@080212

This will create a snapshot of your dataset (here called ‘data’) with today’s date appended to it. You can use anything after the @, but some identifiable date/time string is advisable.

If you want to see the snapshot:

zfs list -t snapshot

tank/data@day_02 46.4M - 73.7G -
tank/data@day_03 18.1M - 73.7G -
tank/data@day_04 16.1M - 73.7G -
tank/data@day_05 16.0M - 73.7G -
tank/data@day_06 16.0M - 73.7G -
tank/data@day_07 18.7M - 73.7G -

It’s a good idea to use the -t snapshot switch to just view snapshots instead of showing all  of your datasets.

Restoring files from a snapshot

Sometimes, you will need to recover lost or deleted files from an earlier backup. You can either opt to restore an earlier snapshot of the current dataset or if you want to recover specific files, you can do this:

zfs clone tank/data@day_02 tank/data_restore
cp -Rv /tank/data_restore/some_folder /tank/data

That’s all.

More to come as I figure out what other goodies ZFS has in store

Case in point: MegaUpload. The site was shut down in the middle of the PIPA/SOPA debate/outcry. I remain undecided whether this was hilarious inability to see past first-order thinking, blind stupidity or whether someone on the inside really didn’t want SOPA to go through and chose to pull this off to galvanise the masses against the House. The jury is still out on that one and feel free to make up your own theories.

Back on topic, though – MegaUpload, while being a data haven for people uploading films and MP3s that were occasionally in breach of copyright, was primarily a place for businesses – mostly small and medium privately-owned entreprises – to store their data so it would be safe in “The Cloud”. Their clients/customers could get at files they needed and the business didn’t have to worry about paying for terabytes of SAN storage as well as the hefty bandwidth fees that they would incur if they ran their own file service.

The fact that the SOPA/PIPA and now ACTA are giving America the power to essentially go after any site that hosts content in breach of copyright, even unknowingly, means that cloud providers are now at huge risk of liability. Either that or become private police, snooping on their users’ data, much like DropBox was accused of, despite claims by them stating that their staff had no access to user data.

Cloud providers the world over now have a decision to make: sacrifice user privacy in order to protect their own interests – and thereby likely lose a lot of business from the more privacy-sensitive clients – or close up shop.

For more information on the latest threat to net neutrality, ACTA, have a look at this:

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too!

Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

Without further ado:

So I got Skins to shoot some rough & ready clips of me flailing wildly with my poi in the hope that someone somewhere finds some new ideas!