Right now I’m mostly using Dropbox, and recently started BitTorrent Sync for my music collection sync between all the PCs and my backups server, as well as for sharing larger files at work (thanks to direct LAN connections, this is much faster with BTSync than with Dropbox, which has to first upload the file to Dropbox server). I’m also considering syncing a TrueCrypt container of my photos archive using BTSync. SparkleShare is potentially interesting, but given my trend to move to free code-hosting services, I do not yet see a need for it.

Below is a short summary table I’ve used to compare available solutions. Feel free to contribute to the table in the comments – I’ll update the post, then.

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Did you know that the creator(s) of BitCoin is/are unknown?
Did you know that the account which generated the Genesis Block is estimated to have up to 0.6-1 million BitCoins?
Did you know that the creator(s) of BitCoin disappeared from any BitCoin-related discussion and development forums a long time ago?
Did you know that 3 journalist investigations aiming to identify BitCoin creator(s) all ended up with different results?

This information is not available in one piece, but there are some of the pieces at the following URLs:

A mistery hidden in the Genesis Block
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Four years and $100 million later, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator remains anonymous
Ted Nelson Says That Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto Is Shinichi Mochizuki
Where in the World is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin

Below is a huge graphical brief history of Bitcoin, including the continued growth of its exchange rates.
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In one of the previous posts I’ve mentioned that BitBucket is über-cool

Redmine is also really cool, and is actually more feature-reach than what BitBucket has to offer, but maintaining it needs just a tiny bit more time and attention than I’m willing to spend these days. So, migration it is!

Redmine has issue 3647 titled “Data import/export system”; it is not resolved, but has a number of links to other resources. Like the redmine exporter at hostedredmine.com, which provides free hosted redmine service. Redmine itself has REST API, though I have no idea if it allows exporting all the data I may need. There’s also an XLS export plugin, but it has to be installed first, and I’m too lazy There’s also TaskAdapter, but they do not support BitBucket (yet?).

For the complete backup, I think of using the pure-ruby redmine project data export script. To migrate issues only, I’ll consider the redmine2bitbucket script.

P.S. Not implying anything (yet?), but my previous migration was from Trac to Redmine… At that time, Trac seemed to have less features than I wanted. And now I’m migrating back to “less features”, but with a benefit of no support required from me.

Here comes a heap of assorted web-links!

I had personally settled on using pbzip2 for these simple reasons:

• performance scales quasi-linearly with the number of CPU cores (until one hits an I/O bottleneck);
• when archive is damaged, you are only guaranteed to loose the damaged block(s) of size 100-900 KiB – remaining information might be salvable.

Compared to pbzip2, neither gzip nor 7z (lzma) offer quasi-linear speedups proportional to the number of CPU cores.
pigz, the parallel gzip, does parallelize compression, but gzip compresses not as good as bzip2, and decompression is not parallel like in pbzip2.
7z is multi-threaded, but it tops out at using 2 CPU cores (see links below for tests).

pbzip2 is also quite a good choice for FASTQ data files: even if a few blocks get lost due to data corruption, this should not noticeably affect the entire dataset.
Specialized tools for FASTQ compression do exist (see e.g. this article, also Fastqz, fqzcomp, and samcomp project pages.) I think I liked fastqz quite a bit, but I still have to examine data recoverability in the case of archive damage. It is possible to use external parity tools which support file repair using pre-calculated recovery files – like the linux par2 utility, also for bzip2 archives and any other files in general – but adding parity file may negate the higher compression ratio benefits. Also, if there is no independent block structure of the archive, insufficient parity file may lead to the loss of the entire archive. In other words, this still has to be tested.

Now the long-promised web-links!
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Github is awesome and still improving, but sometimes I’d prefer to have some of my repositories hidden from the eyes of the public – not so much because of the code value (though that is also important sometimes), but rather because those repositories are all “work in progress” or “short-lived” and may have so much junk in them at some moments in time that it would simply be too embarrassing to publish this untidiness.

Previously, I’ve used gitosis to setup git repository hosting on my server. I’m still using it for long-living projects, but I’m now lazy enough to dislike the steps needed to setup a new repo (and I’m creating more and more new repos, some of which are likely to die very young). Some kind of GUI would help, but gitweb seems not that useful to me (here’s how to make it work with gitosis, and another recipe, or maybe just try gitosis-web or gitosis-web-admin).

Another downside is that gitosis is no longer actively maintained and was even removed from ubuntu repositories. Suggested course of action for gitosis users is to migrate to gitolite. However, basic design of gitolite is the same, so personally (looking for something easier to use) I see only minor gains in this migration (which I’ll have to perform anyway sooner or later).

Another interesting self-hosted option is girocco. Too bad I have absolutely no experience with http://repo.or.cz/, so it’s hard to tell if girocco is convenient to use or not… Comments are welcome.

Using dropbox for git repositories (also here) seems a nice and fairly easy option, with only a few downsides: it’ll eat your dropbox space (which is still much more than you get from free git hosters), and it isn’t that easy in a multi-user environment. Also, you will have to setup dropbox on your headless servers where you may want to run your code, which isn’t exactly what I’d want to do. Same arguments apply to git on google drive.

An alternative to various self-hosted systems would be to use an existing system with free private projects. Git wiki has a list of hosts to start with.

Here’s a brief summary of the options I’ve found relatively attractive (see below for my experience with 3 of the listed services). (See also this recent comparison.)

Initially, I found GIT Enterprise and Assembla to be the most attractive options to try. After trying both, I found Assembla faster and generally more attractive to work with. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to create more than one source repository, but after figuring that out everything is smooth.

However, after trying BitBucket, I had immediately switched all my assembla repositories to it BitBucket is just like github, but with free private repositories. It also has an issues tracker and a wiki. It even allows small teams to work on private repositories!

Original PDF.
My local copy.

Quite an interesting article on the genetics of behavior.