Nate Edel's blog
I’ve been doing most of my updating on Facebook. I’m hoping I can find a way to pull my updates down here, for non-Facebook people, or to push some of the updates up. Til then, not much is new.
OTOH, I did upgrade mysql to 5.5, and wordpress to 3.2. Woot, I think.
Figured this might be a useful snippet of perl for other folks. When I rebuild my system last Nov, I wiped the drive with the following:
my $a = 0;
while ($a < 312581808) {
my $b = 60000;
if (($a + 60000) >= 312581808) { $b = ($a % 60000) - 1; }
print "\n$a: ";
`hdparm --trim-sector-ranges $a:$b --please-destroy-my-drive /dev/sdh`;
$a = $a + 60000;
}
To use, mount your SSD on another system (or use a system rescue CD or LiveCD with a new enough version of hdparm) and replace “312581808” with your actual number of sectors (check with fdisk -l or similar) and /dev/sdh with your actual drive.
The tricky parts were:
(1) Figuring out the syntax, although I suspect that it’s better documented now.
(2) Figuring out the 60,000 sector limit (actually 64k/65,536? Dunno. 60,000 exactly worked.) I’m not sure if this is an hdparm limit or an Intel X25M limit.
‘cept I fly AA, so it’s “Platinum” and most of my crazy flying consists of cheap international tickets.
Since it’s been a while since I posted a good “News of the Weird” link…
Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke
On screen, Dick Van Dyke has been rescued from untimely death by flying cars and magical nannies. Off screen, the veteran star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins had to rely on the help of a pod of porpoises after apparently dozing off aboard his surfboard. “I’m not kidding,” he said afterwards.
{Checks if it’s April 1}
{Nope}
Sparing my Facebook friends, it goes here instead.
(via AmericaBlog)
In case it’s useful for anyone else, if you run the ___.bin installer and see this:
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.
Due to a bit of stupidity I spent a lot of time looking into how to recover deleted files on ext3/4 and I thought it would be useful to other folks to pass on the following points after the break.
Continue reading “Recovering deleted/truncated files on ext4”
Piazza Navona:
More general Italy footage monage
What is Darth Vader’s diagnosis?
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
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Addendum: I’m clearly not blogging enough when I wrote it as [blockquote] on the first pass…
Apparently There Is A Meat Vending Machine In Spain
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?