Using robocopy on Vista

For a while I've been using robocopy as my Windows backup utility. It's included in Vista, and you can download it for other versions as part of the Windows 2003 server resource kit. It has oodles of command line parameters, and I have it set up so that it copies files incrementally from my local disk to an external one, and also deletes files from the external disk they were copied on a previous occasion but have now been deleted from the local disk. The command line I used was this:

robocopy "c:\Documents and Settings" "e:\Backup\David\Documents and Settings" /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG+:e:\David.log /XD "Temporary Internet Files"

On Vista, I first tried this:

robocopy c:\Users\David %CD%\Backup\David\David /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG:%CD%\David.log

(This is run from the root of the external disk, hence the %CD%).
It doesn't quite work. It creates a deeper and deeper recursive tree for AppData. I think this is because there are some hidden shortcuts and symbolic links. You also get duplicate copies of some files under the Vista Documents folder, which has a secret shortcut from My Documents. So I now use:

robocopy c:\Users\David %CD%\Backup\David\David /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG:%CD%\David.log /SL /XJ /XA:ST

and this seems to do better. /SL doesn't follow symlinks (like tar), /XJ excludes join points (probably not needed). Critically /XA:ST doesn't backup system or temporary files, which seems to be the cause of most of the problems.

J G Ballard has died

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm

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I had a dream this week, in which I was eating lunch at the Googleplex. It was in the cafeteria on the ground floor of building 42. I looked out the window and there was a giant mechanical cow flying upside down far off in the sky. It got closer and closer and closer and finally burst through the big glass wall of the cafeteria, which shattered into tiny pieces. No-one was hurt, and it turned out this was an entertainment laid on by Larry and Sergey, and they didn't mind the cost of replacing the glass as keeping Googlers happy was more important than profits. And it was only when I woke up that I realized what was so strange about this dream: there is no cafeteria in building 42.

OK, this probably won't mean anything to my American friends, and my British ones are likely to have already heard of it. I simply couldn't let such an outstanding cultural advance go unremarked. At last, the doner kebab pot noodle. Truly these are the end times.

I've liked Werner Herzog's films since I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God in the early 1980s. In many ways, I think he's done better work in documentaries of recent years than in his feature films. One in particular I like is Wings of Hope, about a woman who survived falling several thousand feet from a crashing plane into the Amazon jungle. The mock-mockumentary Incident At Loch Ness is also fun.

A metafilter posting this week pointed me towards what claims to be a blog by Herzog written between April and December 2007. I have no way of knowing whether it is really anything to do with him, though I can imagine every entry read in his voice. Two of the last postings, about mice spitting at god and about how to react to tiny people, are examples of what appeals to me about it. Oh, and this one, about not tipping a waiter who says he enjoys his job. They have the same charm as some of Richard Brautigan's stories (particularly the ones in Trout Fishing In America), and to a lesser degree those of Donald Barthelme. They tell a story about a fragment of the world, like the shards that are left over when a gemstone is cut.

A few pictures from agility

One of the people in the agility class I do with Dylan took some pictures a couple of weeks back. I rather like this one:


It might be subtitled something like "Dylan at a gentle stroll while David tries to keep up".

A couple more:




Oh, and this one. Why are Dylan's cheeks bulging? Because he's just about to make the particular sort of woof that means "give me treats now!".

A notation

Now and again I borrow a book from the library to find that a previous borrower has added their own annotations to the text, usually to correct some kind of perceived error. It's a little puzzling why people do this; neither the author nor the publisher is ever likely to see the annotations (assuming that authors don't tour public libraries sneakily taking a look at their works), and to other readers, it's just a distraction. I suppose in the heat of that form of Tourette's syndrome known as Grammatical Correctness Obsession Disorder, it's hard to resist. It can happen even in the most elevated circles, as the Cambridge UL's page on marginalia and other crimes shows.

What would be even more obsessive than adding such annotations is someone going through them and critiquing them. So how could I resist? If you are the person who made comments on Hart and Boot by Tim Pratt in the paperback copy from Santa Monica Public Library, this is for you.

1. On page 58, you corrected the possessive of Doug from Doug's to Dougs's, presumably becuase it is modifying a plural (messages). This is incorrect. Dougs's would be the possessive of Dougs. You can see examples of the correct usage, Doug's, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik's A Grammar Of Contemporary English, section 4.101.
2. On the same page, you corrected She hated making people wait on her to ...for her. It's marginal, but here I think I agree.
3. On page 73, you removed the comma in a light, unreasonable rain. Wrong!
4. You changed people go missing all the time on page 94 to people are missing all the time. Not only wrong, but it changes the meaning.
5. Somewhere (I didn't note it), you missed a typographical error where too appears as to0.
6. On page 105, you changed unself-consciousness to un-selfconsciousness. I prefer your version.
7. On page 150, you noted the oddness of his noble face crouched in thought. Yes, it's odd, though no worse than rain being unreasonable on page 73 which you minded less than the comma.
   
8. Page 162 has a change from different than to different from. I fart on this one. Lots of people say different than is incorrect, including the odious Strunk. It's totally comprehensible, and that seems sufficient.
9. Page 187, one of the small pleasures available to we bodiless ones, change to us bodiless ones. Oh, I dunno. I like the original better.
10. Page 205, and here we reach the last and most glorious of your annotations. A character knows as The Regent refers to another character, Wisp, by name. The annotations says: but cf. p.185, last para, 1st line. It is beautiful that you tell us where to look, but not what the error is, thus engaging our own scholarship. The line cited is My name is not Wisp, but that is what zie calls me. Zie here is a made up pronoun and refers to Howlaa, who is not the regent. So presumably this comment is meant to indicate an inconsistency, that it is only Howlaa calls the narrator Wisp. However, there was a scene on page 192 in which The Regent, Howlaa and Wisp are talking to each other, and Howlaa uses the name Wisp. Hence it's reasonable that The Regent now also knows to call the narrator Wisp. So close, but so far.

Anyway, it's thoughts like this that have made me who I am today.