Primordial Ooze

Yesterday, I finally gave in and reformatted by machine’s hard drives and re-installed Windows XP. My machine was getting old, by technology standards, having bought it in 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember. It’s a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 with Hyper-threading. Not a very powerful machine but it’s done it’s job over the years. At least it has 2GB of memory.

Now that Adobe CS3 is out, with native support for Intel Macs, I’m hoping a Mac Pro is in my future some day. But, I could suffer no longer.

Like most OS installs, it was getting slower every day. Partly due to the alleged “Windows crud” and partly due to the fact that my machines at work keep getting faster and faster. The latter of these two reasons makes the home machine “feel” slower when it’s not really so.

Anyway, I had hundreds of gigabytes of data to move around to do things properly. I have two 300GB drives in the machine. One is primary and the other is exclusively for backup of the first. This data migration is what kept me from doing this a long, long time ago.

Also, my Windows partition took up my whole drive. Forcing me to be very careful about locating my valuable data before I reformatted the drive. If I were to redo this, I’d stick the Windows partition on a 40-60GB partition and use the second 240MB for “data”. This way, Windows’ clock can be cleaned and I have very few files I need to pull off the main partition.

That’s just what I did. Now, aside from my “Fonts” and settings found in C:\Documents and Settings, my C: drive is expendable. Meaning, I could much more easily re-install Windows a year from now without too much pain.

I remapped “My Documents” to the data drive (D:), copied much of the data back and I’m back in business 24 hours later. The machine’s stability is back. It doesn’t freeze anymore. It goes to sleep and hibernates reliably now. And best of all, it loads much faster.

For a while, anyway, I can wait for that Mac Pro.

By Nick at 8:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

bagel to go
Originally uploaded by pwka.

By Nick at 9:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The king of Internet mapping programs keeps getting better. I’m not sure when they added this, but Google Maps now has a kind of 3D building view.

This is how New York looks at progressive levels of zoom:

The buildings also seem to be accurately portrayed. Consider this multi-level structure:

And the satellite view:

The angle is different, but pretty cool anyway.

I tried a few more cities and they were all partially covered: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. Even the Queen City of Buffalo was covered. Of course, that probably only means that this has been out for a long time andI just now woke up from my shell.

Oh, and Google Maps also has a traffic overlay… cool if you have a co-pilot using a laptop during your commute but I’m not sure how else this would be useful:

By Nick at 9:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the spirit of this blog being a way for me to remember how to do things, I present a method to delete filenames under Linux that confuse the command-line utilities.

I had a script which, as a result of a syntax error, produced a file called:

—exclude-from=exclusions

Trying to remove this file by simply deleting it yielded this error:

rm: unrecognized option --exclude-from=exclusions' Tryrm —help’ for more information.

So, Googling found this link:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/delete-remove-files-with-inode-number.html

The method described there is simple. Find the file’s internal i-node number and use the find’s ability to execute any command on results it’s finds to invoke rm on the results.

Two simple commands fixed by file:

obraxus:~/backup> ls -il
total 2932488
1746866 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   48218112 Apr 10 19:39 --exclude-from=exclusions
1746694 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206        328 Apr 10 19:41 backup_primordia.csh
1746494 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206        167 Apr 14  2006 crontab_file
1746547 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206   35799040 Jan 28 03:24 d21_200701.tar.gz
1746442 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206         25 Jan 28 03:55 exclusions
3216545 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2728 Apr 15  2006 moin_config.py
3216543 -rwxr-xr-x  1 ncodigno pg51206       2688 Apr 15  2006 moin_config2.py
1746546 -rw-r--r--  1 ncodigno pg51206 2915876864 Jan 28 03:23 primordia_200701.tar.gz

Then issue this command:

find . -inum 1746866 -exec rm -i {} \;

QED.

By Nick at 10:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

part of me worries that my blog has become a dumping ground for funny YouTube videos. Well, I can’t seem to stop!

Thanks Kevin!

By Nick at 10:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is a very cool video and I certainly can appreciate the technology that went into creating a robot that can do that… that is, if it’s real?

Thanks Johnny!

By Nick at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)