It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

—Douglas Hofstadter

I like paranoia in design. Well, I take that back. I don’t like it when it inhibits programming experimentation and creativity, but I do like it when it comes to services, and most especially when it comes to backup.

I wanted to write about my experiences with consumer offsite backup services (e.g. Mozy, Carbonite, Jungle Disk) as well as the plain practice of having a redundant storage device onsite. But all that was side-tracked when I recently needed to quickly backup my servers, and discovered tarsnap.

Before the Internet, there was an effort to distribute news to the 2000 or so home computer owners in the Bay Area. It only took over 2 hours to download an entire newspaper over the phone at a $5.00 per hour usage charge, now that’s tech!

“Mind your web presence,” said my former boss and mentor Gilles Vandelle. We were discussing the kinds of hits we get when we do web searches on people. Gilles, who specializes in search technologies, showed me some of the things he found about me. Results focused mostly on my photographs, some friends’ website links, and miscellaneous contributions to journalism and charitable efforts. This made me think: What can one do to mind his/her own web presence?

About the Site

A place where DM puts things he found helpful or noteworthy. Running since 2000.

For a current about page, visit dm.omg.lol.

About Caffeinated Code

Caffeinatedcode.com started in early 2000 as a router/webserver personal project hosted at home using a CyberMax tower PC on a static DSL connection. It was pre-wiki, but intended to be a repository of easily forgotten information: Solaris x86 configuration notes, Oracle admin SQL scripts, unix shell scripts, java code snippets.