WelcomeYou have found the home page and blog of Craig A. Struble, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at Marquette University. I am a computer science faculty member with interests in bioinformatics, data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms, computational algebra, and collaborative computing. You can find out more about me by clicking on the yellow topic buttons above. | |
It's that time of year again to get ready for the next year of courses. I'll be updating my site to include information on my courses. I hope everyone had a great summer! |
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In this day and age, very little is kept private any more. Right now, in the U.S. the political campaigns of presidential candidates are in full force, and their fund raising juggernauts have hit everywhere. Now, with the help of http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/, anyone can find out who has given to whom's campaign.
If you've given money, I might likely be able to find out to whom and for how much. I can easily identify which side of the political fence you're on and know at a basic level what some of your beliefs might be. For instance, in Milwaukee, it's interesting that Herb Kohl supported Joe Biden.
All of this is public knowledge anyway, but now it's so easy to get, the landscape of the right to privacy really changes. If I want to remain private politically, I can't give money to a candidate. There are probably a billion other things I can't do too, like own a house or register my car or have any run ins with the law. All that kind of information is easy to find out, if you know where and how to look.
So, be aware of or just don't care about your privacy. It's likely someone will learn more about you than you might intend. |
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Backing up computers is not a glamorous task. Today though, I was glad I spent the time setting them up. My wife decided to throw away her Pictures folder, hoping it would speed up our Mac Mini. Of course, it didn't, but it did raise my blood pressure when I thought of all our family pictures being lost. But after calming down, I got to work on recovering our pictures.
It's hard to find backup software that is easy to set up and recover from. Apple has been making strides with the inclusion of Time Machine, but what if you're a Mac OS X (or other Unix user) and don't have Time Machine?
Well, I found rdiff-backup over a year ago. It keeps a file level copy of directories you want backed up, so you can recover with the standard cp command. Better yet, it keeps a running history, like Time Machine, so if you delete a file, you can go back in time to recover it.
Every night, I have my FreeBSD server pull a backup from our Mini using the unattended backup tips from http://arctic.org/~dean/rdiff-backup/unattended.html. On a Mac, the root certificate goes in /var/root/.ssh, but otherwise the instructions are straightforward.
I recovered the deleted pictures from 3 days ago with the command (some details changed to protect the guilty)
rdiff-backup -r 3D backup-server::/backups/Users/wife/Pictures Pictures
I won't say rdiff-backup is perfect, but it seems to do a nice job for a majority of needs. If you have some Unix savvy, and need a tool that keeps a live backup copy, this should work in most cases. |
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Contact Information
Office:
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369 Cudahy Hall
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Hours:
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11-1 MW, 6-7 M, by appt.
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Phone:
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(414)288-3783
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Fax:
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(414)288-5472
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Email:
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craig.struble@marquette.edu
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Address:
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Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science
Marquette University
P.O. 1881
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
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Activity since Wednesday, August 27, 2008, 03:06 PM
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