I had a store credit to use up before Christmas, and so I bought a couple of USB key storage devices, one for the lady and one for me. I was quite please at how easy the were to set up, just adding a line to /etc/fstab and mounting the device. For the longest time though, I could only perform operations on it as root, which is tiresome. Luckily, Emma pointed me at some good documentation and so I was able to get everything working sweetly. Here’s what I’ve got working:

# A directory called /mnt/key
# These lines in /etc/fstab
none        /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults            0   0
/dev/sda    /mnt/key    vfat    rw,user,noauto      0   0
# And these lines in my .bashrc
alias key="mount /dev/sda;ls /mnt/key"
alias unkey="umount /mnt/key"

It works pretty sweetly, and these storage devices are awesome. I’ve never gotten close to filling it up yet.

I used CVS for a while for keeping my desktop and laptop in sync, as well as for versioning all of my school stuff and programming web projects. While it worked fine, I did find that it wasn’t great for binary data (because of its basis on RCS) and the fuss involved in copying, moving and deleting was tiresome.

After reading this I decided to give subversion a try. It was pretty easy to set up, and it works insanely well with binary data, because it uses binary differencing on all files, making the distinction moot.

Before I got started with subversion though, I wanted to clear out all of the CVS administrative directories so I wasn’t versioning those as well. Well, since there is a CVS directory in every directory in the tree, I didn’t want to remove them all manually. Luckily, TLUG came to the rescue with this: find . -type d -name CVS | xargs rm -Rf. Very nice, and useful in a lot of ways. I’ll have to spend some time with man xargs though, because I think that I’ll be glad to know it better.