Aigarius Blog

A though came to my mind just now - the method of copying text around by just selecting it to copy and using middle-click to paste it. So I wonder, why could one not apply the same for file operations in Nautilus? I would love to just select and middle click to copy files and maybe a Ctrl or Alt key could be used at the paste stage to switch to moving files instead of copying.

Anyone up to the challenge of writing this functionality? Should not be too hard.

Popularity: 37% [?]

This MUST stop now! If every DD would express his opinion and anger and frustration on the thread, then it would be the mother of all flamewars and it will suck the life out of all other Debian lists and stop the development outright. Flames shall not pass!

In case someone did not get the joke - it is fun. Join the fun. Display all the traditional flamewar tactics and frases in absurd and hyper overstated ways. Let off some steam in a fictional debate about nothing. Have a bit of fun. It is curiose after all.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I am offitially screwed. Last night I wanted to reinstall my laptop (which is also my only computer now), so I backuped the contents of my laptop’s hard drive to an external usb hard drive as a 13 Gb tar.gz file and happily went on with a format and reinstall.

Of course, when I had completed the installation and went back to unpack files from the backup, I was greeted by a nice message from gunzip - “invalid compressed data–format violated”.

Currently I am trying to follow gzip recovery guide that requires one to manually find the next undamaged compression block and make a new gzip file with standart header and then the undamaged compression blocks, but it is quite possible that data after that will also be damaged. Additionally I have no idea how tar will react to me giving it a middle of the archive, hopefully it will not get too confused. Unfortunately the damaged block is only 90 Mb into the 13 Gb file.

Oh, and of course there is a huge heap of really important files that I have no backup for that are on that backup. Fun, fun, fun.

Update: I have managed to recover two crucial OpenOffice.org documents from the formatted filesystem using Magic rescue and now I am proceeding with finding if I can recover anything from the .tar.gz backup file using Gzip recovery toolkit. It is buggy, but it is still better then doing it by hand.

Unfortunately, I also found out about some kind of hardware problem with my external harddrive - if I transfer lots of data to it (think a direct copy of a 13 Gb file), then it just locks up and stops responding until I power cycle it. If I turn off the USB2 support, then it works reliably, but very very slowly. This slows down my recovery attempts even more.

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Got access to a new, more powerful server, moved my blog from Mnemosyne to Wordpress, hopefully did not flood p.d.o, did not move the comments over yet.

And not to flood the planet.d.o with the move I did this little change to the Wordpress feed - at the very end of the wp-atom.php file there is this line:


<?php $items_count++; if (($items_count == get_settings('posts_per_rss')) && empty ...


So I changed it to this:


<?php $items_count++; if ((($items_count == get_settings('posts_per_rss')) || $post->post_date < 1150758000 ) && empty ...


Where 1150758000 is the UNIX time of some point between the last post from the old blog and the first post in the new blog.

And I also imported my old posts entries from an Atom feed using the rss feed import as a base. The diff is after the break

(Continued)

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Pre-story: In Forestgate in London police stormed inside a house, shot one man and arrested him and his brother. After 10 days it turned out that no evidence of any gilt to them was found in the raid and the raid is only based on some secret intelligence.

During the day when I was watching the news the brother that was shot was describing how policemen dragged him down the stairs shouting him to “Shut the f*** up!”, the F-word was bleeped and that was ok. The real surprise to me was that it was not bleeped out when retransmitted in the evening news at 22:00. I am glad that UK’s media are not as puritan as USA’s.

P.S. I think that this incident with another innocent Muslim person being brutally shot by the police without any warning is the best thing that Al Quaeda could have organized. I just hope that this will get the same outcry internationally as here in UK and that will turn the tide from “war” to “freedom”.

Popularity: 22% [?]

A couple of days before going off to Debconf6 the wireless access to the Internet stopped working for me in the network of my university. I went to the network guys and they told me that I was using too much of it, so they blocked my IP address and now need to check my laptop for anything that could be of a copyright violation. When they found out that the laptop in question only has Linux installed and that the “high traffic” was mostly bunch of podcast downloads and some CD’s of Linux distros (including some Dapper beta CDs), they decided to not look at my laptop (they would not know how anyway) and assured me that my laptop would be connected back the next day. I still could access the net by tethering myself to an Ethernet socked, so I was not worried.

The next day the wireless was still non-functional and so it was the day after that. I was working on with Ethernet and then left for Debconf.

Almost three weeks later I come back to the university only to find out that my wireless is still blocked. I go to computer guys again and they again assure me that it will be enabled the next day … or at least on Monday.

During the weekend I do all I can to get my Debconf6 photos out to somewhere you could see them and do it in proper format and quality. In the end I get them uploaded to http://koyanet.lv/~aigarius/ as zip files (no compression). “aday” is the day of my arrival, “cday*” are the DebCamp days and “day*” are the main conference days with “day0″ being the Debian Day.

I go home satisfied only to come back next morning and find that now _both_ wireless and Ethernet access is blocked for my laptop. Apparently my interactions with the photos and catching up on some audio and video podcasts have generated around 14 Gb of traffic (both ways summed together) and that looks to be a big NO-NO in this university.

After long and heated negotiations between my boss and the IT department the best we could agree on was that my laptop will be reconnected tomorrow, but if I use more then 2 Gb of traffic (both ways) in one month again, the laptop will be removed from the network permanently.

Wonderful studying conditions, right?

The only solution anyone could offer me is to get a ADSL connection in the place I am renting. That will cost me 12 pounds per month for “line rental” and 25 pounds per month for 8 Mbit down / 512 Kbit down ADSL connection with 40 Gb monthly traffic cap. And that is the best deal that I could find, because if I do exceed that cap for two months in a row they will not charge me per Gb as other will, but will only downgrade priority of my traffic until the end of the month. And the traffic cap in this service only applies to peak time and I can use it all I want during the night. But still the prices are just crazy and there still is a traffic limit.

Encouraging the use and discovery of new Internet technologies, right?

(…. sarcasm-o-meter overload ….)

Popularity: 22% [?]