You know what’s even more annoying?

You know what’s even more annoying than having to reburn a DVD and spend two hours preparing a test? When you go to burn the DVD and it hangs up your entire computer, flashing the caps lock and scoll lock keys on your keyboard, forcing you to power cycle the computer. And it happening not just once, but four times with your last two DVD blanks. THAT is annoying.

I went for a little flight today

I haven’t been flying in a while so I went out for a aimless wander around. I noticed the landing light was out before I left, but I’m bad so I didn’t deal with it until I got home. I’ve never changed a landing light before, but I did it. Not exactly Tina Marie level of owner maintenance, but I’m proud of myself.

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.