computers

Whoops

80 Comments

Uhm.
Yeah.
If you sent me an important email in the last three weeks, you may want to resend it.
I was trying to build a shell script to automatically get the nightly build of mozilla, and, uh…well, I managed to delete all my mail.
Serves me right for trying a new mailer (mozilla) without keeping my backups current. Back to Kmail for me.
I lose major geek points for this, don’t I?
:/

80 thoughts on “Whoops”

  4. Quietly saying HA HA and points.
    I’m just glad you’re making the
    mistakes first. Once you get
    everything reasonable figured out,
    I’m coming over to the dark side.

  5. Naaah. Don’t worry about it Unca Willy. Even the best of geeks shoot themselves in the foot occasionally. Believe me!

  9. I lose major geek points for this, don’t I?
    * * *
    Oh, you betcha… =0p
    But NOT because you deleted your email. But because you didn’t do a data back up (as you noted).
    Ah well, all’s fair in builds and back ups.
    -cece

  11. Uhm. Yeah Wil.
    I’m gonna need you to come in to the film shoot on Saturday…yeah…
    And about that TPS report…

  15. Most geeks have not run backups as they should have… and had it bite them in the arse… at least once. Curse, try to recover your data or reconstruct it, and always run adequate backups from now on!
    As a friend of mine says, about many things: Once is simply chance, twice is luck (good or bad), thrice is skill (or lack thereof)!

  16. Sure, you lost geek points. But this last week you got beaucoup coolness bonus points for hobbing and nobbing with TV’s South Park’s Chef. What’s losing a few emails compared to Mr. Cool, himself, Isaac Hayes telling you he admires your work?

  19. Just a quick suggestion about your mail…
    If you’re picking it up from your ISP via POP or IMAP (IMAP’s betteer), I suggest you use Fetchmail (comes with your Linux distro) which picks it up from your ISPs mail server and then deposits it in the standard mail spool — usually /var/spool/mail/username. You can then configure your mail client to either access access the spool directly (I *think* KMail can do this — I’ve been using Pine) or if you’ve got an IMAP daemon running you can also access the mail spool that way. The advantage to this is that you can store your mail without worrying about loosing the contents of the inbox. Also, your mail client should store its fo0lders in /home/username/mail. Another tool you might want to look into is Procmail — a very useful and flexible mail filter (can be used to screen SPAM)
    As with all things Linux, read the man pages.
    Hope it all works out for you.
    Best,
    Peter

  20. Wil -does- have a Mac, he’s talked about working on his iBook in the last few entries. Unfortunately with OS X it is quite easy to shoot yourself in the foot that way anyway. :(

  21. Speaking as one who is gainfully employed as a geek and who once deleted her entire … well. everything. rm -r *.* is not a good idea, let’s put it that way. Speaking as one who’s done that, I’d say you probably /get/ geek points for that kind of error. Just, y’know. Not the *good* kind of geek points. :)

  22. My heart goes out to you, Wil.
    I recently had to rebuild a Mac OS X server from the ground up, wthout losing the company’s ENTIRE email database (whole things on IMAP), which had unfortunately been stored on The Hard Drive that Crashed.
    Without recovering the email, this would have been, say, a 2-hour job. Just Yank drive, say Aw, Too Bad, and go from there.
    Instead, it was a 3-day backup restore restore restore rebuild restore kind of operation, including transplanting the sick drive into an operational machine to try to suck the life from it.
    Vulcans are probably immune, anyway.
    I’ll send you an email just to test it out.
    Later.

  23. Not to worry, Wil. That is, after all, one of the three foundations of learning: see much, study much, suffer much.
    I’ve just gone through a mail transition of my own, moving from Postilion to Evolution. It was tedious (moving all those mail folders over), but I managed to avoid disaster.
    You might try Evolution yourself…if you’ve used Microsoft LookOut^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook, you’ll find it looks pretty familiar. But without the security holes. :-)

  24. You slay me, Wil.
    I use the email that comes with the glowing box in front of me. I just discovered Fire, so I’m a bit behind on your Techy stuff. LOL *wink*

  28. http://getmoz.mozdev.org/
    BASH shell to downloading nightly Mozilla builds (and archive old ones)
    Can’t say if it works or not as :
    a – can’t get my linux box to get online – doesn’t work with my isdn box!
    b – know bugger all about shell scripts anyway! – if it ain’t got a gui I’m lost!

  29. I’d give ya 10 points for effort. See, me, I prefer to wait until my computer kindly deletes all my email for me rather than initiate it myself.

  30. Wil, Wil, Wil….
    Three Easy Steps to Make Sure You Don’t Lose E-mail
    1) Leave your mail on the server for a few weeks/month. This way if you have a disaster, you can recover. Many e-mail programs give you the option to delete mail older than X weeks old.
    2) Pick up your mail from more than one computer. Your iBook has a nifty mail application called, oddly enough Mail.app.
    3) Write a shell script to back up your mail. You can use a similar script on your iBook.
    Bonus iBook tip: You can keep your schedule/calendar in the calendar in Mozilla and read it on the iBook using iCal. They use the same file format .ics

  33. Hey,
    I love moz, I use it to browse the net, but don’t touch the email client.. I hope the loss of your email dosen’t totally ruin your life
    *hugs*

  34. just use ximian evolution. it’s a superb email client in comparison to mozilla mail or kmail. if you are using mandrake, just load it via the rpm. also using the getmoz script will help out enormously :)

  35. Wil, you mentioned you have an iBook and were running MacMAME, so I assume it’s not a huge leap to assume you’re running Mac OS X.
    If so, you may want to consider running Chimera:
    http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/chimera/nightly/
    It’s a beautiful browser built on Mozilla, but far, far nicer on Mac OS X. More can be found about it here:
    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera/
    The nice thing about going over to Chimera is that there’s an application that’ll automatically take care of the nightly build downloading for you. It’s called ChimeraKnight:
    http://homepage.mac.com/chimericon/

  37. I don’t think you loose points for that. You didn’t loose a screw driver in the computer case nor did you NOT bring screws to put in the CD-R drive.

  38. Hey. At least you can figure out kmail, even. I’m having a horrid time getting even Mandrake functioning properly – though you did inspire me to install it!

  39. Yeah, lost several geek points. Now your at the level of the flamers on slashdot.
    :-) bad wil for not backing-ur shizat up.
    Oh yeah, guess that doesn’t mean you got MY e-mail professing my love for you either. ;-)
    ~Tim

  40. Writing a program that has unintended consequences earns you geek points, actually, as every True Geek has at least one story like that.

  41. Actually you gain them for trying.
    We’ve all been there one way or another.
    BTW, good geeks read emails with emacs.
    And truly real geeks write their own
    mailers…
    Have fun,
    -B

  43. Backups?? Hah! I know what I’m doing.
    Everybody knows losing data isn’t nearly as important as what you were doing that caused it. Automating getting the nightly build of Mozilla? You rock, in stereo.
    Congratulations on getting the movie, meeting Chef, knowing when to STFU, and understanding that the temperature of a burrito is not as important as updating your website.

  45. E-mail is the devil ]:) You’re always deleting something you wanted to save or neglecting to delete things you don’t need. Deleting the mail doesn’t lose you geek points. I would consider it a “feature” not a mistake :)
    Ooh! is your movie…
    “Book of Days,” a tale of a man who tries to alter fate after discovering a book listing the dates of people’s deaths
    Yes? No? Still can’t say? Did I win a prize?
    I linked the URL to the site I got it from, in case I’m right and someone says you spilled the beans.
    Keep on Farkin’
    -SR

  50. Eh. Wil, just about every computer geek makes this mistake from time to time. For instance, I once ran “tar czvf mail.backup.tgz .mail ; rm .mail ; touch .mail” because my inbox had grown to over two megabytes in size (and no, not from attachments, from years of not deleting things I needed to “get back to”). Of course, the tar failled, and I was left without any mail. Including about a month of unread mail because I had been away.
    It sucks, but it happens.
    One doesn’t lose geek points, the hit to your ego takes care of everything necessary.

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