Roberto Cosenza

I'm jetlagged so what do I do? I install Box Backup on my NetGear ReadyNas NV+. A while ago I have in fact built my own little datacenter in my loft. There I store all my music and most importantly the backup for all the pictures that I take. It is a raid 5 so if one of the disks breaks down, I can still recover 100% of the data. But what happens if it gets stolen or something really bad happens? I will loose everything so I need to have another backup copy of my data somewhere else. Meet www.boxbackup.org : The backup daemon,  bbackupd , runs on all machines to be backed up. The store server daemon,  bbstored  runs on a central server. Data is sent to the store server, which stores all data on local filesystems, that is, only on local hard drives. Tape or other archive media is not used. The ReadyNas NV+ has a Sparc CPU and at the moment there are no official builds for this platform so I had to build it myself. It took a while to find the right setup so l...

I have almost filled my yellow book with vaccinations. You get it when you contact NHS and make an appointment with your closest travel clinic. I went to my usual surgery Sterndale in Hammersmith. The nurse recommended to get Hepatitis A and B, Typhoid, Rabies and the compulsory Yellow Fever. Some of them require more than one shot so make sure to start your treatment at least 3 weeks before you leave. I am also going to get an anti malaria treatment but for that I need another appointment. The injection are almost harmless so don't be scared. Be scared of the bill though as some of those vaccines are not free and cost up to 40£ per short. And yes, you can also use private clinics as Nomad (STA Travel) but it will cost you more.

I finally booked all the flights to my adventurous journey to South America. My wife and I will be there for two weeks. On our return to Europe we'll head to Greece for a week. Crazy? Maybe, but we really need to spend some time in the sun to recharge from the rainy London winter (can you believe it is summer?) and there was nothing compatible with our timing. In fact, to fly from Brazil to the Caribbean islands, the only option was to fly to Miami and back! This is the detailed plan: * Buenos Aires - got family down there * Iguazu/Iguassu - need to visit the falls and the world's largest dam * Manaus - we'll stay in the Amazon forest for a few days. I want to see the sloth! * Rio de Janeiro - Corcovado & co at least! * London - unpack and pack * Corfu - battery recharging

Today I went to a branch, withdrawn all my funds and ended my short relationship with Citibank. I wanted to open an account to better manage my trips to the us and the euro zone. I was attracted by their free USD and EUR so after consulting with some colleagues that gave me ok feedback, I submitted an online application. Few weeks later I received a letter in the mail asking to provide some proof of address. Once I sent it back, took few days to receive a letter saying that they were processing my application. Finally, a letter saying that the application was rejected. I phoned them up and they told it was because I spent less then 3 years in the UK. Knowing that this was not the real reason (colleagues of mine have been in the UK only for few months and have successfully opened an account) I kept pushing, asked to talk to a manager which eventually said the there was absolutely no problem and the accounts where opened. Funny that the phone clerk suggested to wait the 4 extra month...

Setting up an account to backup a windows machine to my Nas I discovered an issue with the rsync setup. I first enabled the rsync protocol in the readynas admin interface. I then added a new user account and when I was testing I got the following error: rsync -av myidr/ newuser@mynas: newuser@mynas's password: Connection closed by 192.168.1.100 rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-35.2/rsync/io.c(452) [sender=2.6.9] I tracked down the problem to not having a ssh key on the nas for the new user: su - newuser Password: newuser@mynas:~$ ssh-keygen Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/c/home/newuser/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in . Your public key has been saved in .pub. The key fingerprint is: c1:25:12:5b:21:18:31:23:73:58:45:99:2c:0b:0e:7c newuser...

Banca : Aprire un conto in banca è un casino in Inghilterra. Ti chiedono una "proof of address" che è in genere difficile da avere se sei appena arrivato in città. Se il tuo datore di lavoro ti fornisce una lettera di raccomandazione è molto più facile. Le banche consigliate sono CITI e HSBC. Io ho un contro HSBC perché era la banca della mia ragazza e forse ci sono piu' filiali in giro. Proof of address In inghilterra non esiste l'anagrafe e pertanto, per fare qualsiasi cosa ti viene richiesta una "proof of address". In genere va bene o un estratto conto della banca oppure una bolletta del telefono o dell'elettricità (Non basta il passaporto). La cosa si fa interessante quando per avere un conto in banca ti chiedono una proof of address che ancora non hai... (Vedi sezione su come aprire il conto in banca, è la chiave di tutto) Cellulare In generale, la copertura cellulare a Londra è pessima, probabilmente dovuto al numero elevato di persone. Io...