Fnord.

I was looking at network backup software today, starting with the cleverly named ‘Duplicity’, and stumbled across backupninja. Check out this description from the debian package page:

Backupninja lets you drop simple config files in /etc/backup.d to coordinate system backups. Backupninja is a master of many arts, including incremental remote filesystem backup, mysql backup, and ldap backup. By creating simple drop-in handler scripts, backupninja can learn new skills. Backupninja is a silent flower blossom death strike to lost data.

Somehow, the ’silent flower blossom death strike’ made me laugh. This comes close to my all-time favorite, MGM, the Moaning Goat Meter:

MGM, the Moaning Goat Meter, is the ultimate sixty-ton cast iron lawn ornament for the desktops of today’s hacker set: A gorgeous, highly configurable load and status meter written entirely in Perl. Serious pink-flamingo territory. For evil geniuses only.

After all this, this is what it looks like:

I used MGM all the time at Fermilab and its great software, but their descriptions and FAQ page are required reading. A sample to amuse:

“Why MGM?”
Xload, procmeter3 and xosview are fine, fine pieces of software (perhaps a bit hard to read). But… dammit… at a time when geeks are cool, green jumpsuits stalk the streets and Volkswagen is hip again, they’re just too dull. Dull, dull, dull.

Evil geniuses generally have a finely honed aesthetic sense which they choose ignore whenever possible. However, evil geniuses do need something good looking, ultra sweet, way too big and above all tacky as hell to bolt onto the personal programming experience. This code is *it*.

Think of it as the SUV mentality applied to strollers. Bigger than the kid? Hell, it’s bigger than Mom pushing it. You can’t even *find* the kid.

…

“What about my social life?”
The software equivalent of a depleted uranium lawn gnome? Highly unlikely.

MGM was back in the days of much-less-memory, so a lot of the pages are no longer relevant. Still funny as hell, though.

More on Duplicity and/or backupninja as I try to get something scripted…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Debian, Geek stuff, Humor, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.