Remember the rule: no one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores.

The smaller or more portable the computing device, the more painful good backups seem to be. Making regular backups of servers isn’t too bad, and desktops are manageable. Laptops, that is where things start to get icky. Modern cloud solutions usually end up being a requirement.

Then we get to tablets and phones. At that point the only viable backup solution is cloud based. No one wants to regularly plug their phone or tablet into something else to let it do backups. This is one of the reasons why the promise of iCloud was so great and not living up to the promise has been so disappointing.

I’m already signed into LinkedIn, and apparently Ted is a 3rd degree connection for me. This triggers a response on LinkedIn that hides all of the profile information unless I upgrade to a paid account. I like LinkedIn, but don’t have an interest in paying $20 – $75 per month for it.

Turns out there is a very simple work around to the 3rd degree connection paywall. Logout of LinkedIn, then view the profile page again. You will be able to see the bulk of the profile information.

In my case I use Chrome as my main browser, which means a Shift-Command-N ( on the Mac ) brings up an incognito window where I’m not signed into LinkedIn. Toss in a copy-and-paste and you have a quick way around the LinkedIn 3rd degree connection paywall.

It feels wrong for a site to be more useful when I’m signed out than when I’m signed in.

You might have heard about WordPress turning 10 years old on May 27th. To celebrate local WordPress communities around the world are having anniversary parties on May 27th, 2013. This includes the greater Salt Lake City, Utah area. The details are at http://www.meetup.com/WordPress/Salt-Lake-City-UT/930892/:

When: Monday, May 27, 2013, 7:00 PM
Where: Sonny Brian’s; 33 East 11400 South in Sandy

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If you are coming be sure to RSVP so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. Bluehost is also giving away the 10th Anniversary WordPress t-shirts to the first 30 people who fill out this form on wpslc.com.

It will be a fun time to hang out and chat with other local WordPress fans/users/designers/developers.

Today VaultPress announced the Code Garage migration details. We really wanted to make sure that we had the details and options on this right. I know that migrations like this can often be annoying, so we went out of our way to make the process smooth and inviting.

Code Garage users that migrate to VaultPress will get their first two months on VaultPress free. For those who don’t want to migrate, we’ll refund your last payment.

Even if you aren’t a Code Garage customer, you should go read Peter’s CodeGarage Locker is Migrating to VaultPress post. He gives a personal history of how Code Garage came to be, how it grew, and how it ultimately was sold to Automattic.

As soon as you accept the invitation to speculation, the boundaries of the hypothetical problem you need to solve are beyond your control. The other person can change the situation as needed to throw you off your balance.

His suggestion on how to deal with these types of speculation questions is to stay on message.

The ioprofile tool captures a process’s I/O activity through lsof and strace and summarizes it. The result is a tabular display that shows you where the process spent its time on I/O operations.

Here is a screenshot from the first example in the original ioprofile docs:

Which shows the time spent in I/O for each of those files. Another useful option is the see the byte count of I/O for each file:

I think TokuDB will rapidly become the storage engine of choice for MongoDB, and could catapult MongoDB into the lead in the NoSQL database arena. This would have profound implications for opensource databases of all flavors, not just NoSQL databases.

It is easy to forget how long it took MySQL to get to where it is today ( and it still has plenty of issues ). When I look at MongoDB I see it going through a similar path to MySQL ( and most other software ) to reach a point of critical features, stability, and mass. Improving the underlying storage engine, by using an existing open source one, could move it down that path much faster.

The Wikipedia entry included a codepoint and HTML entity table, which makes it easy to list out all of the pieces: