Thanks!

Good point. Dan Gillmor wrote about web 2.0 the other day. Of course, I am in favor of it since I can do more interesting things besides read content.

Ahem. Some perl code may be slow, but it does not follow that perl is slow. My site is written entirely in perl and I do not run three miles waiting for a rebuild (and I have the figure to prove it).

Oy.

[rb]

My backup script was fine- it was those pesky file permissions when I moved the directory where the dumps are stored to a new location. Our backups do a bit more. There are hourly saves of everything in one backup file, and than on a daily basis, all databases are backed up as separate dump. Furthermore, we archive the previous month's data just in case.

And why exactly do people get so bent our of shape on captchas? I have seen the ones where you have to squint a bit to get 'em right, but when you compare the extra task of mimic typing in numbers to a total denial of 1000s of Porn, Pills, and Casino attacks, it is a small price to pay.

Unless anyonew wants to defend the posting of betiality and incest photo sites to an educational web site??

I really do hate the captcha (?) you've got going on here... At least the numbers are fairly legible...

I use the following script to back up my MySQL databases; I stuck it in /etc/cron.daily/01MySQLBackup on my Fedora box:

#!/bin/bash

BACKUP_DIR="/var/backup/mysql"
STAMP=$(date +'%Y%m%d')

if [ ! -e ${BACKUP_DIR} ]; then
mkdir -p ${BACKUP_DIR}
fi

find ${BACKUP_DIR} -ctime +7 -exec rm {} \;

for db in $(mysql -Bse "show databases"); do
mysqldump ${db} | bzip2 --best --stdout > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${db}.${STAMP}.bz2
done

(bet *that* gets mangled...)

In the meantime, try 'Public Mind' for Skype Feature Requests: http://www.publicmind.com/enduser/group.jsp?node=653

I keep forgetting to do that, and now I'm afraid to lose contacts on one or the other when I sync up :-)

At least it's reassuring to know that I am not alone in my disgust and disdain for the company.

"The ironing is delicious." Bart Simpson

I have collected a few more collaborative bookmarks systems in a note at http://www.timsoft.ro/weblog/index.php?title=bookmarks_nu_collaborative_bookmarks&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1.

Maybe could be useful.

Carmen

The method I used was that I arranged a Skype conference with me, Alan and my second computer acting as a recorder. It just sat there running Skype and listened in. The audio on that host was configured to record audio output into a file. Skype provided the mixing of both parties so I didn't need to care about that.

If you want to do it on a single computer, on Windows you need a software called Virtual Audio Cable.

On Mac there are a couple of similar approaches to virtual audio devices.

On Linux you might want to try similar configurations to record the raw audio into a file. I haven't tried this yet. I guess it's a bit harder because Skype is not yet using the new ALSA sound architecture and tends jo hijack /dev/dsp0.

As long as Skype doesn't provide recording features, recording requires two Skypes running on two computers or two sound cards / virtual sound cards.

The biggest problem with Skype is in my opinion not the recording (sure it's hard) but the fact it tends to adjust the input levels automatically to the maximum below peak. Well, the problem is you don't speak with the same tone all the time and it tends to peak when you get excited, resulting in disturbing distortion in the sound which is hard to remove. It's also hard to instruct the other party to configure his setup correctly in this situation.

Also, sometimes I have experienced gaps of silence or reduced quality of sound if the quality of the connection varies. Recording Skype is not 100% reliable, so I understand why IT Conversations use traditional phone lines.