Borland brings back the Turbo brand

If you're an old hack like me you may well look back with fond memories of the Borland Turbo line of tools. For me it was Turbo Pascal, then Turbo C, and later Turbo C++ that were my development environments of choice for many years.

Well they are at it again, and now you can download the "explorer" editions for free from www.turboexplorer.com. The only downside is that you can only install one of the products on a machine at a time.

Unfortunately these days I'm a committed Linux user, and developer, and these Windows only products hold little appeal for me.

Total recall

After much deliberation I finally decided to purchase an external hard drive to provide for a complete backup solution for my server.

I finally decided on the Western Digital 500GB MyBook Essential. I duly brought it home and connected it to my Linux server (Mandriva 2006.0), but after initially recognising the drive it basically produced a lot of errors in /var/log/messages.

This was very disturbing, but I had tested the drive on an Ubuntu 6.10 system, and it worked perfectly, so I built the Mandriva 2007.0 kernel (2.6.17), and bootloader utils from source rpms, and installed them, voila new drive working perfectly.

Now I have a nice 232GBs of backups using a generational rsync script I wrote, that keeps 120 days of backups on the single 500GB drive.