There’s been some nice, interesting and subversive street art popping up all over the city in recent times.
Archive for March, 2005
Quite accidentally stumbled upon this interesting old Wired article from 1995 about Ken Thompson, often affectionately referred to as “The Father of UNIX“, and what sounds very much like the burgeoning of the digital music “revolution” we’re currently wading through. The article is even more interesting considering what has happened with p2p in recent years, what is currently happening with the established music distribution industry in it’s death-throws and with the ongoing Grokster case still being fought through the courts in a battle to save the famous betamax ruling.
Oh wow, is that the time? 5am. It’s a good job I don’t have work tomorrow. Suckers :)
Now, if I hadn’t forgotten the power supply for my troubled hard drive I’d have been able to do something more constructive with my time than bitch about things I can’t buy and bugs in open source software.
While writing the previous entry I discovered a bug in WordPress whereby nested <blockquote>s are “fixed” in a way that breaks them. I don’t feel competent enough right now to fix the bug though. This bug possibly affects other tags where nesting is valid.
It’s possible to circumvent the bug by disabling the “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” option under “Options > Writing” but that its self caused more problems with validation and formatting.
I may take a look at the bug in the future and if it’s not fixed by then I’ll have a stab at doing so.
[ Update ]
Looks like this bug has been fixed by coffee2code with an embarrassingly simple patch. Hurrah.
Following my recent questions about the Futurama Complete box set I went into HMV and checked out their stock and found that the Complete box set simply contains all the previous season’s box sets in one larger box. Lovely.
Being fed up with it being sold out on play.com for so long I decided to ask them when they might have it in stock again, the discussion we had follows;
From: Play.com
To: “Cliph”
Subject: Re: Stock Enquiry
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 09:26:06 -0000Dear Cliph,
Thank you for your email.
We keep this item on our site just in case we are able to stock this item again.
We are sorry we are unable to supply you with this item at present.Kind regards,
Email Support Team
Play
—– Original Message —–
From: Cliph
To: Play.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: Stock EnquiryPlay.com wrote, on 03/22/05 16:37:
Dear Cliph,
Thank you for your email.
This item currently has a status of ‘Sold Out’. This means that originally it was only
available in limited quantities and that unfortunately all copies have now been sold.Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused
you and thank you for your patience and valued custom.
Thank you for your reply.
If the item in question is no longer available and if I understand correctly, you are unable to restock, why is it still visible on your store?
—– Original Message —–
*From:* Cliph
*To:* Play.com
*Sent:* Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:01 PM
*Subject:* Stock EnquiryHi,
I’d like to order the “Futurama - Complete Season 1 - 4 Collection Box Set” but it’s
been out of stock for some time now.Do you have any indication when it might be available again?
–
Cliph/ff
http://chicks-dig-unix.net/
So it seems that I wont be able to get the item from Play.com after all. I’ll pick it up in HMV during the week and pay their premium prices, unless any of you have a better idea?
[ Update ]
Ok, here’s how this ends. Went to HMV today with the intention of purchasing the box set to find that the price had been slashed to the low, low, super-crazy-price of €59.99, add to that (or subtract) the €10 note I found on the street earlier in the day means I got the box set for a supersweet €50!
I have a 200GB external USB/FireWire HDD with a large FAT32 partition and a smaller HFS+ partition. Unfortunately these partitions no longer mount for me on my Mac or a PC so I think it’s time for me to consider disaster recovery options. I’ve investigated the “Ultimate Boot CD” but it doesn’t appear to support external USB hard drives. A similar project, “UBCD for Windows” does have this support but requires a copy of Windows XP to run, that’s something I don’t have.
When I connect to drive to a Windows 2000 machine and open the “Volume Manager” I can see the entire drive displayed as “unallocated space”. I know, or have a feeling, that the files are on there, my suspicion is that the partition table is, to use a technical term, messed up.
I’ve taken the drive out of the caddy and mounted using an IDE ribbon in a PC. The OS, Knoppix, sees the drive but no partitions. Neither gpart nor parted can see any partition information on the drive. So, that’s definitely the problem - a corrupt partition table. Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to fix that.
Ran some Western Digital, the drive’s manufacturer, test utilities off the Ultimate Boot CD and confirmed that the drive is healthy, at least that’s something.
So my current plan is as follows:
Mount the drive in a PC at home along with an unused 20GB drive and use dd to copy blocks totaling in size less than 20GB from the 200 to the 20 and then use a disaster recovery or forensics tool to attempt recovery of files. Lather, rinse, repeat. The two tools most suited for this job are sleuthkit and autopsy.
There’s a couple of “live-cd” distributions I’ll also give a go, Helix and Penguin Sleuth Kit.
If I had access to the miraculous tools they use on CSI I’d have this fixed by now.
Any of you had similar experiences and success stories? Or, if you can help, please let me know.
Professional data recovery services are prohibitively expensive.
Funniest Slashdot comment of the moment, on the rumor that Apple are developing a two-button mouse:
by Ubergrendle (531719) on Wednesday March 16, @01:49PM (#11952495)
This morning I woke up and the skies were coloured of sackcloth, and the sun coloured as blood, and there was this distinct crunching sound on the floor as I walked over a carpet of locusts, and there were these strange markings on the outside of my door…. now I know why.
Personally, I use a Microsoft 5-button (Microsoft do one thing really well - make hardware, I like their keyboards and mice) Intellimouse Optical in silver. I use the forward and back buttons to scroll between tabs in Firefox and also to activate different Exposé modes.
Anyone doing or want to do something this evening?
[ Update ]
How about a session in Karl and Michael’s with Trivial Pursuit and Digital TV?
