A nasty bug found its way in the latest release of BackupMonitor which caused the program to suddenly exit when something went wrong during the execution of one of the backup script.

The bug has been corrected  (a problem with threads and a method call that should have been asynchronous) and the “correct” behaviour is back: when something goes wrong an error log is displayed and the program “hiberantes” until the user wakes it up.

The updated version can be downloaded from the project’s page.

A new version of backup-monitor has been released including:

• bugfix for when the locale is not defined, or when playing a little with the script’s command line options
• refactoring of the GUI to give the user more feedback and to give more hints on where to click (GUI inspired by Ubuntu’s update-manager)
• using OptionParser to ease the command line handling
• change in licence: for the GUI changes I’ve look and taken ideas from many GPL project, so it’s just fair (if not plain compulsory) to release this new version under GPLv3.

Most of these modification were motivated by the first feedbacks I got from a friend, thanks to him then ;)

For more info and download, please go here.

I’ve just written a short presentation of a set of scripts that I’ve been using for some time now, and which makes it easy for me to do regular data backups. The whole lot is now fairly easy to install and customize.

The project’s page is here.

There are always more applications that help in doing regular backups and even if Backup Monitor is quite extensible, it is certainly not the most generic nor the most complete solution. However it works for me :) and it was the occasion to experiment with some interesting aspect of application development for Linux desktops:

• how to use “xdg” specifications like xdg-users-dir with the “user” install that should be done in ~/.local, configurations in ~/.config and the definition of folders like Documents, Pictures etc by environment variables that adapt to the user’s language.
• how to handle internationalisation with gettext
• how to install your own icons with xdg-icon-resource
• how to make your application start at each new session (put a .desktop file in ~/.autostart)

I’ve also updated the Ephyblog plugin to Epiphany so that they work after the API change that happened in version 2.22.

Backup Monitor

• a lot more doc is provided in the archive to explain how to install and use it.
• it now uses xdg-utils to find the important folder like Music,Documents,Pictures and Videos
• it is internationalised using python gettext module (texts are ok for en and fr but contribution are welcome for other languages).

EphyBlog

I’ve rewritten the new version based on the changes that had been perfomed on Ross Burton’s EphyDeli. I also had to take into account the API change of version 2.22 of Epiphany like the differences you can see in the following code snippets (one worked on <2.22, the other works fo 2.22):

# pre 2.22
embed = window.get_active_embed()
sitetitle = embed.get_title()

# post 2.22
embed = window.get_active_child()
sitetitle = embed.get_properties("title")[0]

Du coup, j’ai toiletté un petit peu des anciens scripts que j’avais composé à partir de bout de fichiers récupérés ça et là, pour obtenir au final un système tout bête qui se rappelle à ma place de quand est-ce qu’il est temps de faire une sauvegarde et se charge aussi tout seul de la réaliser.

Le tout marche avec des techno relativement anciennes¹, et marche essentiellement sous Linux². Pour ceux que ça intéresse, il y a ici, une petite page pour tout expliquer.

Sur ce, je vais pouvoir me remettre à engranger un max de photo en toute tranquilité :)

1. ça va de rsync+bash à dbus+galago
2. sans doute aussi très partiellement sous Mac