I was recently faced with having to make a copy of a bunch of data – nearly a terabyte – to backup a server before a major software upgrade on it. A test run of the copy looked like it’d take about 24 hours for the data to copy using “cp -Rp”. I wasn’t happy with that and wanted to cut it down, so I tried making a compressed tarball of the data instead, using “tar czvf”. Guess what? Creating the tarball took about half the time, just over 12 hours. If you think about it, this makes sense… you can’t change the amount of data you read in during a copy, but you can change the amount you write out through compression. By trading disk I/O for CPU, I was able to nearly cut the copy time in half. This also works for restoring the data too, just remember that you’re trading disk I/O for CPU. :)

Try not to make an ass of yourself:

Telegram from Marlon Brando to Michael Jackson. Massive amounts of awesome and win.

• Try not to make an ass of yourself
  The sheer randomness of this is full of awesome and win. Marlon Brando writes a telegram to Michael Jackson. Can you imagine how odd some of those conversations were?
  (tags: celebrities funny awesome)

And it looks just like my “Consume” Post.

Seriously, its pretty cool. It makes the phone about the same overall thickness as the “bumper”, yet it protects the back and gives you a lot more grippy surface. It also makes the phone easier to draw out of a pocket right-side up as you can detect which side is which.

It came with a screen protector and a microfiber cloth, but as is my way with screen protectors, I promptly screwed up the install and got a bunch of dust and air bubbles under it, and ripped it off and tossed it.

Bottom line: if you have an iPhone 4 and like cars, the Vroom case from Case-Mate is a great value, particularly for it’s $14.99 pricetag.