Crashplan Install Script for ARM Debian on Pogoplugs and Dockstars

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I’ve pulled together information from a few sources on installing Crashplan backup software on a Cloud Engines Pogoplug, or Seagate Dockstar, and turned it into a simple bash script.

The script assumes you’ve already installed and booted Debian on your device using the instructions and scripts provided by Jeff Doozan. Be sure to check his forum for updates.

My main contribution here is in pulling things together into a bash script. I’ve built on the work of others, in particular Crashplan user Torbjörn and Paul Chilton.

Get the script here.

Update:

  • The script now references a local mirror of the jtux source tarball, and the patchfile.
  • Script references an out of date version of Crashplan. You can probably just update the URL, but I haven’t tested it. On the other hand, Crashplan autoupdates for you.
  • More recent versions of Crashplan have a new native MD5 library dependency.  They complain about it in engine_error.log, but automatically fall back to a marginally slower java version of the routine instead.
  • The version of the openjdk6 package in Debian Squeeze has bugs in the JVM JIT. In my experience, this led to the Crashplan service dying occasionally, historically, and often now that I’ve got more files. The alternatives are to edit the java command-line options in /usr/local/crashplan/bin/run.conf to make it run in interpreted mode only (-Xint) or to download a copy of the Oracle Embedded JRE SE (ejre) for ARM v5 headless and update the crashplan scripts to use it.
  • I may update the script to deal with these issues once I have something to test the changes against, but I have too many other, higher priority, projects right now.

Inkling and Connexions

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TechCrunch brings news that Inkling, a maker of rich media textbooks for the iPad, has received big investments from textbook publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

I’ve checked out some of Inkling’s demo content, and the presentation is really well done. Personally though, I favor more distributed approaches to producing and distributing educational content, such as Rice University’s Connexions project

Mac App Store Thoughts

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I haven’t had a chance to download the OS X update that enables the Mac App Store, but I wanted to jot down some meta-commentary.

The iOS app store has benefitted from low prices. Developers tried pricing early apps close to $10, but average prices quickly fell to a few bucks.

iOS developers gnashed their teeth about the race to the bottom in app pricing, but a few things have helped make up for that. For one thing, low app prices likely encourage disproportionately greater sales. People are more willing to try multiple apps in search of the one that best fills their needs. Also, small purchases slip into personal budgets more easily than larger purchases. Combine this with the fact that Apple has sold in excess of 50 million iOS devices in the past year, and you get a decent opportunity.

I had my doubts that things could play out on the Mac in the same way, but I just learned that my impressions of the relative sizes of the OS X and iOS installed base was way off. There are roughly as many Macs as iOS devices, which suggests to me that the same dynamics could take hold.

I think this is going to be great for Macintosh hardware sales. Particularly since you get the same sort of multi-system licensing that iOS apps have. I’m really curious to see if it will be possible to buy a single license that works across both iOS and MacOS X in the future (and no, I’m not talking about a universal binary).

Verizon Selling Samsung Galaxy Android Tablet for $599: Lame

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Some people have been poo-pooing the iPad ever since it debuted, claiming that better, cheaper tablets running Google’s Android operating system were coming real soon now, and, last I heard, the Samsung Galaxy Tablet was going to be the one that finally delivered.

I don’t know what those people are claiming now, but now that the Galaxy is here, I’m not real impressed. Verizon is selling it for $599, only $30 less than what they are selling the iPad and a bundled MeFi mobile WiFi hot spot for.

I’m not surprised by the weak showing. Android phones have done as well as they have because mobile carriers and handset makers were terrified at the prospect of Apple getting all the goodies. It helped that their true price was hidden by the carrier hardware subsidy, and paid back over the life of a two year contract. The iPad is sold without a subsidy and so far at least Samsung is following suit. The result though is that the prices seem much more comparable, and so the deficiencies of Android, which Google themselves don’t think is ready for tablets, and the hardware are much harder to look past.

Splunk helps make logs transparent, but pricing murky

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I’ve been trying out the demo version of Splunk to aggregate and analyze all the log files messages generated on the servers we used to host the debut of Intersect.com. It seems pretty sweet.

I’m not sure how it works, but it correctly breaks up multi-line log messages from Ruby on Rails. It also makes it pretty easy to pluck specific fields out of arbitrary log files. You pick a type of log, it shows you a couple dozen example entries. You pick some example values from the field you want to isolate and splunk creates a regular expression to match it. If the match is imperfect, you can add other example values, otherwise, you can save the field.

There are still things I’m trying to figure out, but I’m a little reluctant to invest too much in it. The published pricing of $2000/year or $6000 for a perpetual license with 1y of support might be doable, but the lack of visibility into where pricing goes from there gives me serious pause.

iPod Touch FaceTime: Teen Sexting is so Last Year

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The new iPod Touch with FaceTime video conferencing support isn’t even available yet, and yet teens are already using them for immoral acts.

Ok, not really, but I’m sure it is only a matter of days before there are news stories and blog posts about the latest threat to “the children,” (won’t someone please think of the children?).

Further, I anticipate the following variations:
* teens revealing their privates to other teens in real time
* teens revealing their privates to other teens who then show them to other teens, in real time
* teens having sex in person and sharing the moment with other teens in real time
* teens being exposed to the privates of random non-teens in real time
* teens exposing themselves to random non-teens in real time
* teens doing any of the above for gifts and/or money.

With this blog post I am putting the rest of the world on notice, if you do a story or blog post that resembles any of the above variations on this theme, you are a cheap, sensationalistic and unoriginal hack.

That is all.