remixreality.com

Went out cycling today, but not on my electric bike (I recently bought an electric bike from The Electric Bicycle Co, very cool) and I finished up riding 13 kilometres overall. We rode out to the Western Plains Zoo and back and my wife took the electric bike with the kids in the trailor on the back. Was a great Sunday thing to do.

Once I returned home I was pottering around on the web and came across a reference to the gbak.exe utility that comes with the Firebird database and is used to do online backups of the database files. We use Firebird for an in-house developed payroll and invoicing system and I thought this would be a handy utility to use in automating backups of our databases.

I decided to build something using AutoIT as it can compile brilliant little executable files that will hide things like database passwords. Here is the basic AutoIT code that I used to build an exe file that I put into a directory with the gbak.exe utility and the fbclient.dll.


;Run Firebird backup routine using GBAK
RunWait("gbak.exe -user dbusername -password password ""d:\path\to\database.fdb"" ""d:\path\to\databasebackup_" & @HOUR & @MIN & "_" & @MDAY & @MON & @YEAR & ".fdb""")


Replace the variables above as needed. It will create a file with the time and date appended to the filename in a location you set. As a bonus this gbak.exe utility creates a backup file that is smaller than the original if your original file still has lots of white space.

Important Note: The gbak.exe utility will affect performance considerably so use this to backup after hours to reduce impact on users.

Next step is to just run this from our new Kaseya system (still waiting for a licence key however!).

Been a long while since I did some website type work but a recent need to look at some alternative arrangements for my employers websites had me getting my feet wet again.

Installed Drupal 7

Did a little look around and checked in with the Drupal community again. Downloaded the latest Drupal 7 and installed it for this website. Very easy stuff.

Thinking About Drupal Downunder

Am even looking at attending the Drupal Downunder 2012 gathering next January. I attended it this year in Brisbane as it happened to be the weekend before the Linux Australia Conference which I had already planned to attend. Enjoyed it immensely and was a great event with plenty of real IT professionals to network with.

Not Thinking About Attending linux.conf.au Again!

Talk about the conference not to go to again! I managed to talk my employer into paying for me to attend the Linux Australia Conference this year. We don't even use Linux in our business but I was interested in networking with some other IT professionals that are really into networking and do a similar job to what I do and I figured that linux.conf.au would be a good place to meet such people. But unfortunately it was quite the opposite.

Yes there were a few professionals around but they were very outnumbered by hardcore geeks and linux fanboys that had little professional nature about them. Trying to discuss applications and issues in the real world, yes that one where someone pays us money to do a job and sometimes that may not be 100% to our liking, was an absolute waste of time.

Six months on and I am still considering how much of a waste of time it was. Unfortunately the greatest thing I learned from the experience was how immature and unprofessional the Linux community is and how unready most of these people are for supporting real businesses. I don't think I will ever return to one of their conferences again.