Month: August 2005

I’m back up, I think

After the hard drive problems I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my new hard drive arrived, and today I actually had time to install it.

I partitioned the new drive like the old drive, but with bigger partitions (because this was a 160Gb drive instead of an 80Gb drive). Being old-fashioned, I used fdisk instead of whatever the young kids use (parted?). Then I booted with a rescue CD and did the following to mount and copy all the partitions:

for i in 1 2 3 5 6 8 9; do
mke2fs -j /dev/hdb$i
mkdir /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda$i /mnt/hda$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb$i /mnt/hdb$i
rsync rsync -aSuvrx –delete /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
done

Then with everything copied over and swapped around the drives and attempted to boot with the new one.

Ok, how many people spotted my deliberate mistakes?

First off, I forgot to install grub on the hard disk. So I had to boot back with the original drive as hda and the new drive as hdb. I couldn’t get grub-install to even recognize /dev/hdb or hd1. So I went into the raw and wolly grub shell to do it.

Second mistake was that I forgot my /etc/fstab uses labels. So I had to quickly google how to put labels on the partitions using e2label. But I couldn’t figure out how to label a swap partition, so I changed the swap entry in /etc/fstab to not use labels. Not sure why I didn’t just convert them all to not use labels, but I’m trying to be a little more modern.

Third mistake was that somehow /tmp ended up not globally writable. I think all the other files and directories had the right permissions, so I’m not sure why that one was different. Probably because it’s the only partition whose top level is globally writable.

Everything seems to be working now, so my fingers are crossed.

How stupid can you get?

I just attempted to join Rochester FreeCycle out of a sense of futility at all the stuff we had to throw away when we moved. But when I attempted to join, I got an email that consisted of a Word document. strings(1) indicates that it’s just a page of plain text, asking me some questions. So why the hell is it a Word document? Are they saying that people who don’t have $700 to waste on a software package or who aren’t willing to pirate software aren’t welcome? What about people who refuse to read email on Windows?

Sure, I could probably fire up OpenOffice.org and read it, but why the hell should I? If it can be expressed in plain text, then send it in plain text dammit! And if it can’t be expressed in plain text, I probably don’t want to read it. I read my email using a plain text mail reader (mutt) and it works ssh’ed in from work, or over a modem connection from Ottawa, or (in extremis) using a 2400bps modem on a tiny little PDA screen. I’m not going to change that to suit you, so don’t even try. And calling me a Luddite isn’t going to change anything.

Time for iPod number 5?

After my post Time to find out if my iPod AppleCare is valid, I decided to try calling Apple Support. As expected, dealing with Apple Support was time consuming and painful.

The first problem is that this iPod is not the one that I registered AppleCare for. As anticipated, this meant that I couldn’t just register on the support web site for the repair. So I called. And as anticipated, the support guy couldn’t figure it out. At least not without putting me on hold about 4 times to consult with other people.

In spite of the fact that in order to activate my AppleCare extended warranty I had to enter all sorts of information on-line, it’s evidently damn near impossible for Apple Support technicians to type in your name and maybe the serial number of the iPod you currently own, and find out the serial number of the iPod that this one was a warranty replacement for, and maybe the contract number for your extended support contract. Haven’t these people ever heard of databases?

Anyway, he eventually figured it all out, and he’s sending me a box. But he warned me that if I send in the iPod and they test it and it’s not less than half the advertised battery life, they’ll just ship it back and charge me for the shipping. So suddenly I was worried that my one test wasn’t good enough. So I charged it all the way up, and at 5:00pm I unplugged it, turned off shuffle play, hit Play, and left it. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I looked and it was dead. Ok, I guess that qualifies.

I figure this battery replacement will get me another year out of this iPod, and then I’ll buy a photo-iPod. Or by then, maybe a video-iPod.

Time to find out if my iPod AppleCare is valid

I got my iPod a year and four months ago. This one was a replacement for a replacement for a replacement, the whole sorry story of which can be read here. However, when I got the one that this is a replacement for, I got AppleCare. But that one died in a matter of a few days, and they fixed it by sending another one with a different serial number. So the serial number isn’t the same as the one on the AppleCare registration.

And here’s why suddenly I care about this: Most of the time when I listen to my iPod, it’s plugged into the wall charger (and I have a very long headset cord so I can leave it there while I roll my chair around in my cube, but every now and then I disconnect it from the wall and wear it downstairs to the lab). But this Friday, I took it with me in the car. It had been plugged in right up to that point, and so it was fully charged, but I only got three hours of it before it died. This is really bad. Apple claims a 10 hour battery life for a new iPod, and I know I’ve seen at least 8 hours in the past. Apple also says that if your iPod’s battery life is less than half the advertised value, and it’s still under AppleCare, then you get a free battery replacement.

So either I find out whether I wasted my money on the AppleCare, or I say to hell with it, it’s not broken, just live with it.