Mad Marv's Place

So I’m getting started on my taxes tonight and I’ve found this big hole in my record keeping strategy. I use Truecrypt to protect my financial data separately from all my other data. As various forms arrive in the mail throughout the year, I scan them to PDFs and save them in the Truecrypt volume. Now as I’m searching through the documents some of the PDFs are corrupted. Not sure how that happened, or how to fix it because the Repair Filesystem feature couldn’t find anything wrong with the Truecrypt volume. Luckily, the corrupted forms don’t seem to be critical, but it could’ve been otherwise.

So now I’m backing up the unencrypted data with EMC Retrospect. The Retrospect backup has its own AES encryption system built in.

But, the question I’m grappling with is how far to trust encryption systems with critical data. I could (and probably will for the forseeable future) replicate data between two independant file encryption systems just so that if one fails I still have a hopefully intact backup.

Has anyone else run into this kind of a problem?

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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Tried my Treo from the office where I have a four or five bars of signal. The results are not spectacularly different, but encouraging. There’s one metric that is not displayed in the graphic below. The latency between my computer and the test host was over 500 ms when I ran the test from home and now it has dropped to < 200 ms. It’s still doesn’t compare to a landline connection via cable modem or DSL. But now, web browsing doesn’t seem to drag on forever.

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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I’ve been testing my Treo 700p bandwidth and it is not all that impressive. I’m currently testing it from home, which has one or two bars of reception. I’ll try again at work and see if it improves.

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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Note to self, migrating WordPress to a new web host is not as simple and straightforward as it looks. Do not try upgrading and migrating at the same time. And most importantly, do not change the directory structure while migrating and upgrading. Sigh.

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This may only be of interest to civil engineers and planners, but topographic maps generated by the U.S. Geological Service are public domain because tax payer monies are used to generate the maps. However, map services have charged for these maps because it costs money to print and distribute the physical copies.

This has changed somewhat recently when a collection was taken up by these guys to liberate these maps. The maps are now distributed by the Internet Archive and can be downloaded for free from this “temporary” directory. It is organized by state, and the maps are in TIF format. XML meta-data files area also available.

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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