Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

WordPress recently released 2.3.3 as an urgent security fix for 2.3.2. Rather than wiping all non-configured files from my development site, extracting the replacement files from the tarball, and re-uploading said files by FTP, I used the fast and precise approach: Only upload changed files.

Duplicity is a backup program that only backs up the files (and parts of files) that have been modified since the last backup. Built on FLOSS (rsync, GnuPG, tar, and rdiff), it allows efficient, locally encrypted, remote backups.

Amazon S3 is a web service that provides cheap, distributed, redundant, web-accessible storage. S3 currently charges only $0.15 per GB-month storage and $0.10 per GB upload. The API is based on HTTP requests such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

The following is a description of how I made use of these to back up my laptop, which runs Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

When Firefox updates to a new version, some extensions are disabled. However, you can easily edit the extensions to make Firefox re-enable them -- no particular expertise required.

When I'm making a web page at home on my laptop (a Linux machine), I test it on Firefox and IE 7. (I only test on IE7 now, because it will be distributed to Windows users as a high-priority update.) Unfortunately, IE 7 will not install under Wine, which is annoying because that's how I run Windows programs on my Linux machine. However, there is a way to get the layout engine of IE 7 working under Wine -- and that's all I need.

For security and ease of troubleshooting, turn off Firefox's automatic keyword search and domain guessing features.