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Computers and Life...

Posted: Tuesday 14th May 2019 6:05am
by Got2BeFree
Sometimes computers and life can be so cruel. Right at the end of March I had a massive hard drive failure while working on a new Gambas project. One moment I was cruising right along accessing a db, and the next moment my app was crashing because the db disappeared!

It was the drive I stored everything. Twelve years of photos, documents, downloads, Gambas apps, Gambas projects, databases, etc. (I had a major HD failure 12 years ago and lost thousands of photos.) I had gotten lazy the last few years about doing backups mainly because of life got in the way. And to make everything worse, shortly after the failure, I discovered my few existing backups were garbage. And to add insult to injury, my other computer, which was running Debian, decided to not want to let me access it, no how, no way. On the Debian box I had copies of some of my projects, but I couldn't get to them. No problem, I thought. I'll just reinstall Debian, grab my projects, and life will be a little better. I chose the wrong partition to format and wiped out my projects. At this point I'm just ready to toss all my computers into the trash and be done with it.

For about the last year or so I was getting frustrated with the way OpenSuSE was degrading and giving me problems and at times I just wanted to give up on computers, and technology in general, and go back to the simple life I had before computers and internet. I was actually looking forward to doing that.

I guess HAL9000 couldn't let me have a peaceful life again and had to show me who was actually in control of my life. I'm now running a RAID setup. OpenSuSE is gone -- I'm now running Debian on all my boxes. And, I'm learning how to program in Gambas again as most of my projects were a lot of copy and pasting of code from other projects and didn't require much thinking on my part.

I guess I'm stuck in this cruel world of computers and technology.... :(

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Tuesday 14th May 2019 3:31pm
by cogier
I am not the best at backing up either. I use Dropbox which is linked to all my computers and all my Gambas files are linked to it. They take up no room at all and even if you delete a file/folder Dropbox can get it back for you.
(Other file sharing options are available!)
Just a thought.

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Wednesday 15th May 2019 12:19am
by Got2BeFree
6 weeks later, I still haven't set up a backup plan in any form, but since I'm using Raid 1 I'm not too worried right now (I have nothing to back up anyway :lol: ). I might move to Raid 10 eventually only for the performance benefits over Raid 1.

On a good note, tonight I realized I had made Gambas project RPMs for my OpenSuSE box. The RPMs were created in my home directory, which also gave me tarball COPIES of my last 3 projects! For my other projects, I hadn't made any RPMs in a few years so I don't have those anymore.

That gives me another thought...
I need to dig through some old hard drives to see if I have a Home directory on them. If so, I might have project copies. :idea:

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Wednesday 15th May 2019 1:15am
by Quincunxian
Hey Sholzy,
I feel for you mate ... I've lost a hard drive and done the wrong partition thing as well over the years.
I've lost a lot of Gambas code that I'm struggling to rewrite as it was so long ago and you would think it would be easy to re-create once you had it done once.
That never happens - it's a long hard slog just like the first time ( if you can do it at all).

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Wednesday 15th May 2019 2:53am
by Got2BeFree
What irritates me most about losing that drive is a few photos of my mother taken a few months before her passing 2 years ago. And I also have to laugh about it because sometimes I think she had a hand in it's demise.

She absolutely hated having her pic taken because in her mind her poor health had taken a toll on her looks. About a year before her passing, I inherited her car. She hated that car and I hated that car. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice car; powerful engine, road nice, etc, but just different things we didn't like about it. Anyway, almost 1 year to her passing, the car was totaled by someone running a red light. I have to believe she had a hand in it's demise. That accident allowed me to get the car I wanted that she also knew I wanted. And now almost 1 year after the accident, the hard drive fails. So I guess I can look at the hard drive failure as paybacks for getting the car I wanted. :)

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Thursday 16th May 2019 3:27pm
by GerardBuzolic
For what it's worth, when I lost something or something breaks I get another, only a slightly better one, as soon as possible. I figure it is no use crying over spilt milk and I am going to need it. It reduces grieving time. And they have to be within budget. Photos and people are irreplaceable, but things and programs ... a newer model or a slightly better rewrite, we can do it. I lost all my photos. Couldn't believe I had done it. Tried to talk myself into thinking of it as decluttering. Then I found a backup I didn't think I had and got most back. I wish for you the same. However, Mother or Powers-that-Be might be saying "put some other things in your life". I have known people who have felt it necessary to remind me there is a world out there. Humbly we look for signs... The skill you have in programming, no faulty hard drive can take that away. It's yours until Alzheimer's. Hang in there. Now, to post or not to post...

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Friday 17th May 2019 12:35am
by Quincunxian
Mind you, going over code you have written long(?) in the past is a great experience.
You sit there with your head to one side, eyes scrunched up, forehead wrinkled with concentration and wonder what in the sleep deprived, caffeine fuelled hell you were thinking when you wrote this piece of C***.
[mumbling]
Why would I do that.....?
What's this variable for .....?
What in hell was I thinking when I wrote this......
[/mumbling]

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Friday 17th May 2019 3:08am
by Got2BeFree
GerardBuzolic wrote: Thursday 16th May 2019 3:27pm For what it's worth, when I lost something or something breaks I get another, only a slightly better one, as soon as possible. I figure it is no use crying over spilt milk and I am going to need it. It reduces grieving time. And they have to be within budget. Photos and people are irreplaceable, but things and programs ... a newer model or a slightly better rewrite, we can do it. I lost all my photos. Couldn't believe I had done it. Tried to talk myself into thinking of it as decluttering. Then I found a backup I didn't think I had and got most back. I wish for you the same. However, Mother or Powers-that-Be might be saying "put some other things in your life". I have known people who have felt it necessary to remind me there is a world out there. Humbly we look for signs... The skill you have in programming, no faulty hard drive can take that away. It's yours until Alzheimer's. Hang in there. Now, to post or not to post...
I long for the day I have a normal work schedule that gives me time to have "more to life" than I've had the past 4 years. Being gone from home 12 hours a day doen't leave much time for "normal". Can't do much at night other than sitting at the computer researching for a repair on my car or thinking up some crazy way to accomplish something using Gambas. On my days off, I'm either working on my car or running around trying to get things caught up that I couldn't since my last days off, or I'm driving my wife around so she can get her stuff caught up.

May have to wait until I retire in a few years before I can be normal again! :lol:

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Friday 17th May 2019 3:17am
by Got2BeFree
Quincunxian wrote: Friday 17th May 2019 12:35am Mind you, going over code you have written long(?) in the past is a great experience.
You sit there with your head to one side, eyes scrunched up, forehead wrinkled with concentration and wonder what in the sleep deprived, caffeine fuelled hell you were thinking when you wrote this piece of C***.
[mumbling]
Why would I do that.....?
What's this variable for .....?
What in hell was I thinking when I wrote this......
[/mumbling]
Yeah, I've been looking at code from those 3 projects I've discovered while I start over on the project I started when my HD crashed. I'm thinking why in the world did I do that twice in the same sub? Redundant code does not make the code more robust! Also trying to recreate a project when all you have is the database containing multiple tables can be a head scratcher. But it's helping to force me to do something a better way.

Re: Computers and Life...

Posted: Monday 20th May 2019 4:02pm
by gbWilly
Hi Sholzy, Quin, Cogier,

Good to read you guys again and see we all kinda make the same mess of (not) backing up data.
I lost a lot of digital stuff in the years past, but I somehow managed to save all my Gambas projects, thanks to Dropbox.

At work I setup git repos on a server and I have a cloned repo on my client.
I've been using it now for a few years, even wrote a GUI interface to manage my specific develop workflow using git and I am impressed with what is possible. Still discovering more and more...

As a matter of fact, I'm writing this post in my break at work, where I am currently working on a class named GitMan, to manage all kinds of stuff using git.
I'll be using it for the digital versions of employee contracts, made on a local client, with one of my applications, where changes get detected and next get added, commited and pushed to the repo on the server. Another implementation I'm thinking of is intranet website management using git repos.
Seems the sky is the limit with git.

Because I do translations for the Gambas project, I needed a gitlab account to fork the gambas project to my personal Gambas project on GitLab. Next, I needed to clone my Gambas repo to my client system and from there I could work on translations. The process was easy as eating pie and fast as lightning. 8-)

When I add, commit and push (git slang ;) ) my translations into my Gambas repo on GitLab, I can do a merge request for the upstream Gambas repo.
Benoît decides if he merges it into his copy of the Gambas project.

The workflow is so simple, once you get a basic understanding of git, and perfect for:
- community projects where multiple people work on the same project
- experimenting with your own code without messing up the last release (thanks to branching)
- create a workflow of your need
- clone on any internet connected linux box anywhere on the world, to continue working on Gambas projects and push changes back to Gitlab repo of the project

All this experience with git got me thinking of using my gitlab space to put all my gambas projects on (one by one that is and after long reviews that is -> probably a lot of the what the hell did I do there and what was I thinking,?)

This makes my projects accessible for all that want. Non contributers can simply clone the project to review the code.
Even better if they want to contribute/fix/improve something in the project they can fork the project on their GitLab account, do their thing and ask me for a merge request (which I can approve or deny).
So, I stay in control of my projects, I can review diffs made by others and decide if I integrate them in my project. Perfect 8-)

So maybe for backing up you code (and making it available for others to review) git might come in handy. As I said, my projects will slowly be leaving dropbox to take advantage of all git has to offer, especially for developers.

For more insight on using git I suggest reading chapters 1 and 2 of this manual (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2). It helped me a lot getting a good idea on understanding and working with git.

My 2 cents on this topic.

And hey, it is great to be back. I have had little time for Gambas (except at work that is) because of private circumstances. Also try not to spend all of my spare time coding as there is more to life than Gambas, like the last episode of Game of Thrones when I get home from work ;)

Have a nice day,

gbWilly