Two Possibilities

This is one post in the continuing saga of my challenges of backing up fairly important personal data. Over the years I’ve accumulated a good collection of music. Much of it comes from ripped CDs that I own and can easily recover if the digital files are lost. The rest of my music is not as easily restored, being purchased from Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic. I already regularly backup important files using an rsync job run out of a daily crontab. I’d like to expand the cronjob to also backup my music as well.

To complicate matters, I don’t want all of my music backed up, just the purchased music. I have been good about using the Comments field in the ID3 tag to record the source of the music, so I wrote a short script (my first attempt at Python) to filter on that. The python script creates a new directory tree of symbolic links which are then followed by the rsync command to backup the full file.

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This post was inspired by the Globe and Mail article linked below and a lecture given by one of my computer science professors (David Cheriton) on the theory behind directories and naming.

Telephone numbers have been used since the late 1800s as a way to make connecting phone calls easier for human operators. Eventually, rotary dialing and touch tones grew into the new world of automated call switching. Today, telephone numbers have a variety of purposes. They are used for everything from caller ID to locating the source of emergency 911 calls.

The history of telephone numbers is quite interesting on its own, saying much about the evolution of the telephone in the American household over the past 150 years. Wikipedia has a great history. Telephone numbers are most commonly used as the method for dialing a telephone call, or in abstractly, signaling the destination of your call. Yet, they also have many other uses that don’t immediately come to mind. For landline telephones, the area code and exchange indicate the geographic area of the number’s owner. With the emergence of cellphones this has become somewhat less reliable. New techniques such as aGPS is needed to locate a mobile phone. As mentioned before, determining the exact location of a calling phone, either through caller ID or aGPS, is incredibly important to the success of 911 and emergency responders. Informally, the area code has historically given a clue to the residence of a number. A Seinfeld episode even found Elaine rejected by a potential date for lacking the proper New York City area code. Finally, a phone number number can inform you of any long-distance charges (or 1-900 charges if you are into that type of thing) associated with a call.

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