San Diego Union Tribune - Not worth the paper it's printed on

I've lived in a number of cities and had the opportunity to read newspapers daily in some of the cities. The more I read the San Diego Union Tribune, the more I believe it is one of the worst papers I've ever read (even worse than USA Today). For starters, they put editorials on the front page; I learned when I was on the high school newspaper that editorials shouldn't go on the front page. Second, they put stories that are fluff stories on the front page. A few months ago, there was an article about Rejection Hotline on the front page even though nothing was new about it. This morning's paper (Sunday) had an article about the city attorney. While the article, itself, was OK, it wasn't breaking news as it followed the city attorney through a typical day and mentioned that it was done in September.

Furthermore, the newspaper has frequent mistakes, such as an article today that said: "...a member of the SDSU homecoming court who road in the parade in a white convertible." I almost busted out laughing at this mistake. Does anyone proofread there? Granted spell check wouldn't catch it, but reading it would. The newspaper uses a lot of wire reports and most of the real news isn't from their own reporters. While this isn't really a bad thing, I got most of the same information on the news with the same twist the evening before.

I haven't mentioned that the Republican bias is seen throughout the paper. It is very disturbing to have to wade through the bias and poor writing to get information out of the paper. Last year, they put a grotesque picture on the front page which was completely unnecessary and in poor taste. We almost cancelled out subscription then, but my wife likes the Sunday paper and likes certain sections during the week. At this point, I say that the only reason we keep getting the paper is so that the dog has something to do in the morning as his job is to run outside and retrieve the paper (yes, he actually does it, except for Sunday because the paper is too big).

Cocoa printing - On the surface it is easy

I had to add printing to an application I'm working on so that users can print out web pages for the built in web browser. Turns out that this only took about 20 minutes to implement. Cocoa is nice that way, but then today I needed to change the title of the printout (used in Preview, in the Job list for the printer and the default name when saving) as the name it picked up was the window name which didn't make a lot of sense. So, after much searching and realizing that I'd need to subclass some need WebKit object which was unfeasible, I took a look at categories. For the most part, I understand categories, but in this case, I added a category to NSView called printJobTitle, shoved in what I wanted if it was a WebHTMLView class, otherwise use the window's title and amazingly this worked. I'm not exactly sure how as I've found at least one other category for NSView that also has printJobTitle in it. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth; it works.

Note to Apple, please let me specify a print job title in the NSPrintInfo and override what is taken from the NSView. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has had to do this.

Backup scheme

I think that I finally have my backup scheme worked out. My server meltdown had me re-think the strategy. However, my meltdown, while time consuming to get everything working again, really only cost me one day's worth of data that I was able to restore from another machine. My backups sort of worked, except for the monolithic "dump" archive that I created. This archive got corrupted and caused the restore to fail. Luckily I had created tar/gzipped backups and had the files.

So my new backup strategy is quite involved. First off, I have 2 drives doing RAID 1 which will protect against hard drive failure (I hope). Next, I have a third drive in my server that every hour does an rsync of the main drive. Next, I every night, a nightly rsync is done of the main drive to the third drive. Next, I have a TrayDock that I do an rsync to every few days. Then I take the dock to my safe deposit box. I have a second tray for it and rotate those backups. I also do nightly tar/gzipped backups of important stuff to the third drive which then get copied to the TrayDocks. Lastly, I periodically copy the tar/gzipped archives to a TrayDock attached to my PowerBook (I have 2 trays for my PowerBook).

I think that I should be covered in terms of backups. While there is still the potential for downtime, I'll sleep better knowing that I can restore any one file or files without having to rely on a massive dump file still working. Yes, I may be paranoid, but my livelihood depends on data on my server.

DJs on Sirius

I'm not sure why Sirius needs DJs to annoy us. The song title and artist is already displayed on the screen, we certainly don't need to hear someone spout it off. Some of the DJs are tolerable, but one in particular, Madison, is extremely annoying. I sent Sirius some email about it and haven't heard back (now that is surprising, isn't it). My wife got very fed up with this DJ and also contacted Sirius. However, her message to Sirius was just too funny:You suck! If I wanted to hear a DJ talk, I'd listen to my local radio station. Shut up and play music!! I really don't care what you did with your cousbin over the weekend. PLAY MORE MUSIC!!! LESS TALK!!!