bin/java -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object


Check if rt.jar exists in the unpacked directory. If it does not, check if rt.pack exists. If it does, it means that the installer is missing a step.

Rerunning with the command-line options:

"____.bin --accept-license --unpack"


…will fix what ails you by making it unpack those files. If you no longer have the installer, google indicates that there is a program out there called “unpack200″ to unpack the .pack files to .jar, but I have not had a chance to try it.

2) Unlike on ext2, if you truncate a file, you can probably still find out where the old copy of the file is from the journal. Go journaling!

3) The tool you want is called ext3grep and has directions here
http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html (for other Gentoo users this is in the portage tree)

4) You’ll need to find the inode number. For a deleted file, see the instructions. For a truncated file, this is easier: just remount the filesystem read-only (you’ll want to unmount or do this ASAP anyway to avoid the data being overwritten) and then “stat /path/file-i-truncated-oops”

5) While you really should read the instructions in #3 the punchline is to look at “ext3grep /dev/YOURDEV –show-journal-inodes INODE#” which was part of what you found in #4

6) Contrary to the description in #3, if you are using ext4 the direct-blocks will typically show extents now, and the relevant numbers will be the 5th/6th fields in in the form “small #” “big #”
Ie “Direct Blocks: 127754 4 0 0 14 144539840 0 0 0 0 0 0”
Which means you’ve got an extent starting at block 144539840 and running for 14 blocks.

7) The improved odds of contiguity with extents on ext4 is really, really nice.

This is mainly here to jog my own memory next time this happens, but if it’s useful for anyone else, cool.

More general Italy footage monage

The manipulations of Anakin Skywalker, also known as Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” saga, have long been ascribed to the Dark Side of the Force. Now, psychiatrists suggests that the actions of the Jedi Knight could be used in teaching about a real-life mental illness.

A letter to the editor in the journal Psychiatry Research explores just what is wrong with Vader. French researchers posit that Vader exhibits six out of the nine criteria for borderline personality disorder. Unstable moods, interpersonal relationships, and behaviors are all characteristics of this condition, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health. It affects 2 percent of adults, mostly young women.

via Yahoo Movies

—
Addendum: I’m clearly not blogging enough when I wrote it as [blockquote] on the first pass…

Spain is a magical place. How do we know this? Because they apparently have a meat vending machine.

Said vending machine is located outside a 100-year-old butcher shop and allows customers to buy meat around the clock. The vending machine features meats, sausages, sandwiches and other goods on a seasonally rotating basis.

Jack Watkins, 25, and engineers Chris Hayes, 24, and Dave Sibley, 25, have succeeded in crossing Italy’s Lake Garda in a huge, inflated bouncy castle. “Great Britain has such a great tradition as a seafaring nation and we really feel we have played no role at all in adding to this,” admitted intrepid waterman Hayes. “That said, it was possibly the most fun we have ever had and we really never believed this most frivolous of dreams would ever be realized.”

This demands an American attempt to do the same. Lake Mead, anyone?

Top 10 Reasons the GOP Would Let the World Be Destroyed by an Asteroid

——————————————————————————–

Assume that a huge “planet killer” asteroid on a direct collision course with the earth has been spotted – nine months before its projected impact. President Barack Obama proposes an emergency program, in conjunction with the Russians, to knock the asteroid off course before it destroys our planet. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_russia_asteroid_encounter

The Republicans in the Senate promptly mount a filibuster against the enabling legislation, thereby delaying action, leading to the destruction of the planet and to the end of all human life.

Now for the top 10 reasons why the GOP let the world be destroyed:

10. Didn’t want to offend teabaggers who believed Obama was an alien born on the asteroid.

9. Furious over Obama’s refusal to declare the asteroid’s approach an act of terrorism and then bomb Iran in response.

8. Believed tax cuts for the rich would be a more effective response.

7. Just trying to prevent another big tax and spend government program.

8. Said, “Hey, if the asteroid hits in 2010, it will be during the one year gap when there is no inheritance tax, which means we’ll all avoid the ‘death tax!’”

7. Trying to save the world sounded like more of that sissy environmentalism crap.

6. Preferred private enterprise based solutions like corporate sales of anti-asteroid ointment.

5. Refused to accept the scientific consensus on the asteroid’s trajectory until they had absolute proof in the form of the earth’s destruction.

4. Said, “There were no asteroid attacks during Bush’s term. So it’s Obama’s fault and why should we bail him out?”

3. Insurance lobby wanted action delayed until they’d sold more “asteroid policies” (payable only in the event everyone on the planet was killed in an asteroid impact and if claim was then promptly made thereafter).

2. Wouldn’t support Obama’s proposal because the asteroid protection would have applied to illegal aliens as well as U. S. citizens.

And the number one reason why the GOP let the world be destroyed . . .

1. Allowing Obama to save the world could have helped the Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections and even the apocalypse was better than that!

Note: If you look closely, you’ll see that there are actually 12, not 10, reasons given. Somehow, when it comes to right-wing lunacy, 10 just isn’t enough.

disclaimer: not original, collected on the internets tubes

via Flyertalk

via Kotaku

Now I know that there is already plenty of old-fart nostalgia on this blog — a lot of people have interpreted Whatever happened to programming? as a yearning for the days when you had to do everything from first principles, which wasn’t really what I meant. But I do, I really do, miss the days when it was possible to understand the whole computer.

I’m not claiming that I ever had the level of mastery that people like West and Butterfield had. I was never really a big machine-code programmer, for one thing — I wrote routines to be called from BASIC, but no complete programs in 6502/6510. And I’ve never been a hardware hacker at more than the most trivial swap-the-video-cards level. But I did have a huge amount of Commodore 64 lore internalised. I knew which memory location always held the scan-code of the key that was pressed at that time; and where the screen memory-map began; and which locations to POKE to play different pitches on the various channels of sound, or to change the screen or border colours. I knew hundreds or thousands of those little bits of information, as well as being completely familiar with the horrible BASIC dialect that was in one of the ROMs. In short, I knew the machine in a way that I don’t even begin to hope to know any of my computers today; in a way that, I am guessing, no-one anywhere in the world knows their machines.

I miss that.

I know exactly what he means.

Long, nostalgic ramble after the break. Consider yourself warned.

I’m not sure whether there was one single point of inflection, but I think the real change happened quite quickly in the first half of the 1990s, too. Up through somewhere around 1993, you could pretty much gain that level of understanding (at the systems level, at least) of the ISA PC architecture, from registers and bus-level IO ports[*] up through pretty much how all of DOS worked, and even get a pretty good handle on what each of the core DLLs and drivers in Windows 3.x did. Sure, there was some wacky high-end stuff like Microchannel and EISA, but that was for the most part outside the consumer/home computer space, and to the extent that it broke compatibility even at the port level, people would complain about “not really being IBM compatible.”

One might place the breaking point earlier (MicroChannel in 1986? the 80386SL introducing SMM in 1990?), but I’d suggest 1993-95 as the point to really look at: the combination of the new hardware standards (PCI and USB), MUCH more rapid turnover in the motherboard chipset space, the increasing ubiquity of things like networking and power management, and a much more rapid turnover in CPU generations… and on the the introduction of two much more complicated OSes (NT 3.1 in 1993 and Windows 95) which finally gave PCs a real driver model and broke through the old requirement for being at least mostly backwards compatible with the wonderful old IBM PC/XT/AT family. Games seemed to be the last thing to leave and direct hardware mangling, and that transition was pretty fast (to my recollection at least) after Win95 came out.

I wonder, though, if part of it isn’t just age on my end, and realizing there is a much bigger world in computing. In 1993 when I was a senior in high school, knew the PC as intimately as I ever have, and was trying to use that to write a toy OS, I had a LOT of free time and energy. I don’t today, to anywhere near that same degree, and a lot of the stuff I do know today would have been rather like knowing Vaxen then – big, complicated business-y stuff (exactly like the EISA and MicroChannel stuff then, or like the Novell stuff I was actively in the process of learning.

Further, if we go back to when I was a kid rather than a teen, when you looked across 8-bit micros as a whole, there was a lot of fragmentation. C-64 vs 128? (let alone VIC20, Pet, C16/C+4, etc) Several generations of Apple II? Atari 8-bit? That’s all different sets of knowledge just on the 6502/6510/8510 family. Add in the various forms of 6800/68000, 8080/8085/Z80 and a few outright oddballs like the TI-99 series, and well… did anyone really know more than a slice out of that space all that closely?

Which really makes me wonder what I’d be learning if I was 17-18 today. It strikes me that, given my inclinations, the whole open source device based on an ARM SOC and a stripped down Linux (ie GP32X, Pandora, maybe even hacked Android phones) would be tremendously exciting. Given the availability of information on the internet (vs dead trees) plus open source OSes and drivers, it strikes me that these might be enough easier to learn and hack on to more than balance their greater complexity. Even at 34, if I were to suddenly become independently wealthy, learning these at the level of detail I used to know for the PC would be highly tempting.

[* I wonder - how many of my readers still remember that the x86 architecture has a separate address space for IO ports and for memory? ]

Anyway, I ran into it today and re-read it, and this particular point stood out:

So now we’ve got exactly one log off button left. Call it “b’bye”. When you click b’bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn’t already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer.

…as the culmination of his whole argument. To me, in context, it just reads as a “reductio ad absurdum” against the very showing why Microsoft did the RIGHT thing in making a flexible UI.

Then again, I am at least a sigma, and maybe two, into the “control, customizability and flexibility freak” side of things when it comes to computers. I run Gentoo Linux on my server, and if I pitched Windows on my day to day machines, it would be for Gentoo (or some other very customizable Linux distro) and not for something more out of the box like Fedora or SuSE (let alone the MacOS!)

The REALLY interesting question, to my mind, is how do you design an interface that scales in depth – to be accessible enough for someone newly sitting down at a system to be able to use it while at the same time allowing an experienced user to optimize his or her own processes – for one trivial example, I don’t want to have to pull the battery in order to get a “real” shutdown or hibernate of my laptop before a flight or a long day away from it: how long it’s going to be before I need it again is something that the software isn’t going to know, but I’ll usually have a pretty good guess of when I shut down.

As these things go, I’ve found Microsoft’s “big” products (Windows and Office) to be some of the better software out there in that respect, although I haven’t needed to play around nearly as much with Office customization since I moved to Office 2007. Vista and Windows 7 were (IMO) HUGE UI improvements over 2000/XP in my view.