Then, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a link to Migrating 21k Pictures and Videos from Flickr to Picasa and realised that it provided a good method. Using two different providers means that I do not have to worry about local backup media dying and it also gives me the choice to move from one provider to the other as my main host in the future.

As I do not have a Mac, I used FlickrEdit for the download and that took about a day. The upload took a couple of days. At some point I will need to sort out the photo tags and geotagging, which did not move over using this method, but overall it was a fairly painless way of making the backup.

Hot on the heels of WordPress 2.5.0 is the security update – WP 2.5.1.

Rumours that I have as many draft posts as SKG are false – though more than ten will exist soon if I keep leaving them unpublished!

My Route

From waking up on Saturday morning I was never feeling too great and this was reflected in my run. While my navigation and route choice was ok, I never managed to get a decent pace going.

For the first couple of controls my navigation was off. I was not taking enough notice of the map and compass – meaning I was running a way off. Through the next section I kept up a reasonable pace and navigated well. I had a small wobble on the way to 6, but sorted this out when I found 10 on route.

After getting to the spectator control I should have retired – I was not running well. I finished in just over 71 minutes, but should have taken 50-55.

How-To Geek recently posted instructions on setting GMail as the default mail client in Ubuntu. In the comments are equivalent instructions for Kubuntu users and there is an altered script that also deals with cc/bcc/subject/body.

Related to this is the question: ‘WordPress Visual Editor – Do you Use It?‘ I do not, switching to the basic editor wherever possible,

Less Watts
This site, from Intel, describes methods available to reduce power consumption on all types of machines running Linux. Available is software and tips that work to keep the machine running optimally, while reducing the amount of power used.

Is the 50 watt PC possible using commodity parts?
The answer to the question seems to be no, but not by much. For those building their own machines this gives some good tips for which products to look at to keep power usage down.

Recently I have been reading more about OpenID. While doing so I found OpenID Delegate WordPress Plugin, which allows me to delegate my LiveJournal OpenID identity to this domain.

Update on 18th July: Of course the blog world has spent the last few days debating when blogs started and which blog was the first.

Now it is the case that I do not use the desktop that much – instead preferring the freedom of a laptop. However, since I did have a recent desktop backup I only lost a couple of recently added files. Not much of a problem, but still not ideal. So I decided that I should put my 320GB external hard drive to better use and make a proper backup of both laptop and desktop.

I decided that an incremental backup would be best and so hit on using rsync. Simple, one command backup to make the first backup and then to update to the latest increment each time.
rsync -r --exclude=[something not wanted in the backup] [full path of source] [full path of destination]
I also found that if you need to exclude multiple directories then you just need to add more --exclude=[] statements. Simple, yet effective.

A couple of the tools I use in testing are rcov and Heckle. Between these tools you can reveal just how well you are testing your Ruby application.

rcov
With rcov you can run your tests and see which lines of code were executed during the tests. I find this really useful for reminding me which sections of code I have forgotten to write tests for. I use a modification of Mike Clark’s suggestion for running the coverage tests.
namespace :test do
desc 'Measure test coverage'
task :coverage do
system("rcov --rails --text-summary -Ilib --xrefs --html test/unit/*_test.rb test/functional/*_test.rb test/views/*_test.rb test/integration/*_test.rb")
system("open coverage/index.html") if PLATFORM['darwin']
system("firefox coverage/index.html") if PLATFORM['linux']
end
end
Note that the firing of Firefox to view the tests on Linux will only work if you can type firefox in a terminal and have it open a web browser for you. If this does not work then you can replace ‘firefox’ with another browser. On Kubuntu (and, so, I assume the rest of the Ubuntu family) sensible-browser will work.

Heckle
While rcov lets you know if a line of code is executed during testing it is useful to know if the line is actually tested. This is where Heckle comes in. It tests your tests.

Simply you run it with
heckle [classname]
and watch it go to work on your code. It takes the code in the class, mutates it in some way, and runs it against your tests. If your tests do not fail when code in the class is mutated then that section of code was never being tested. Simple and effective.