Links shared from del.icio.us today:
I'm taking a break from anime backgrounds for a while (stop the presses!) for this photo taken of the Dequindre Cut in Detroit of all places!
The Dequindre Cut is a below-grade pathway, formerly a Grand Trunk Western Railroad line located on the east side of Detroit, Michigan just west of St. Aubin Street. Much of the Cut has been converted to a greenway; the colorful graffiti along the pathway has been left in place.
I found it while doing research on the automotive industry, and I was spellbound by it for some deeply weird reason. Maybe it's the forced perspective, or the colours, or the way the concrete frames the monitor around the edges, or something. I don't know, I'm not a visual designer or a pro photographer.
Credit goes to Andrew Jameson, if he had a link on the photo page for me to plug, I'd put it here.
Having fun with FreeBSD on my Libretto this afternoon, I didn't have internet access to install Vim from ports so I decided to finally learn more about the bundled nvi editor. I missed syntax highlighting, but if you customise it right it's still a nice, lightweight, capable editor.
Because Vim and nvi are both implementations of the classic vi/ex they have a number of functional similarities, but because nvi has been essentially static for licencing reasons in the BSDs and given Vim's continuous and rapid development, the gap between the two editors has been widening for quite some time. That was a needlessly long sentence.
Historians with complex flowcharts showing the origins of software would faint in horror at this assertion, but I like to think of nvi as a sort of "Vim-lite". In that context I don't fret about lost features, I just learn what they have in common and work with it, just like a guy with a scooter doesn't expect it to perform the same as his dad's Ducati. Does that make sense?
Unlike Vim's ~/.vimrc, Nvi reads from the historically named ~/.nexrc file.
I like to include plenty of comments in my dotfiles, but as I learned from trial and error (and error, and error!) nvi is more picky about what you can include. You can't place comments on the same line as settings, and if you include a blank line anything below it is ignored!
This is part of my ~/.nexrc file, you can check out the full version on my dotfiles site if you're interested.
" GENERAL SETTINGS set columns=80 set secure " " I LIKE 2 SPACE INDENTATION set autoindent set shiftwidth=2 set tabstop=2 set ts=2 " " TELL ME WHEN I DO SOMETHING STUPID set errorbells set flash set verbose " " SHOW LINE NUMBERS, COLUMN/ROW POSITION set number set ruler " " ABBREVIATIONS abbr _aa This is The Tale, of Alan A'Dale abbr _bw The Bird is The Word abbr _gc Grilled cheese sandwiches abbr _nc #include <ncurses.h>
Even if the first thing you do on a fresh system is install Vim, nano or another editor, because nvi is distributed with all the major BSDs by default it's a great idea to have a working knowledge of it. It's like a dependable friend :).
And it works! Yays! ^_^ I'll be detailing how on Sunday when I have more time, suffice to say it was far more complex and time consuming than I imagined it would be. The Windows 95 partition has also been preserved, albeit in a smaller partition.
It may be a nerdy thing to admit, but working on puzzles like this and solving them is just about the greatest feeling in the world. ^_^
Am I the only one who gets a bit frustrated when I see a brand and either thing the company sells something else, or when the brand is so generic the company literally could be selling anything?
For example, here are some brands I've been exposed to in Adelaide recently (how indecent) that sound like they sell something different:
And here are some brands I've been exposed to in Adelaide recently (how indecent, is that joke old yet?) that from looking at I didn't have the foggiest idea what they were.
It's madness I tell you, madness!
Sometimes its very easy to tell a website has been dynamically generated with virtually no human oversight, presumably so as big a site can be made in the shortest time for serving ads.
Michael Franks – Don’t Be Blue lyrics
Send “Don’t Be Blue” Ringtone to Cell Phone
Don’t Be Blue is a the song from the upcoming album Sleeping Gypsy by Michael Franks which was released Dec 10, 2008.
~ LyricsMode.com
I had no idea my mum was a time-traveller who visited the recent past from 1977 just to buy an LP and go back! She was even more awesome than I thought ^_^.
You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!
First make sure the drive is unmounted (aka ejected), it won't cause errors if it's mounted when you attempt this, it simply won't work.
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk \ -filename [NEW DRIVE NAME].vmdk \ -rawdisk /dev/disk3
Replace the /dev/disk3 with the block identifier that represents the physical drive you want to access, in my case USB and FireWire drives. You can right click any drive in Disk Utility.app to find out what that is on Mac OS X or your fstab file.
This command essentially creates a pointer to the raw physical drive which you can then add to any virtual machine, just like any other virtual drive. As with creating it though, if it's mounted on the host it won't work. Also this command is undocumented and subject to change, so if the above syntax doesn't work they may have changed it since I wrote this up.
Because it enables raw file access, I'm assuming lower level tools like SpinRite can be used in a virtual machine this way, but I have to confirm this.
For more information, I found this VirtualBox forum topic insanely useful with plenty of relevant links.
I've finally found a drive that PartedMagic can't handle, but fortunately I still have a friend in dd. Sounds like a trailer for an episode of Dexter's Laboratory. UPDATE: Even better, use an old Knoppix CD!
PartedMagic is a Linux live CD optimised for drive maintainence with tools such as GParted and Partition Image that I've been recommending and using for a few years. I was an avid fan of PartitionMagic before Symantec bought the company that developed it and killed the project, and PartedMagic filled that void really well.
Unfortunately, the [relatively new] WD hard drive that came with my [relatively ancient!] Libretto 70CT has been the first drive since I started using PartedMagic that the bundled applications simply can't handle. GParted reports that it can't read the data and as such I can't resize the partitions, and Partition Image simply panics and quits.
The Windows 95 partition boots on the machine and works flawlessly, ScanDisk doesn't find anything, I've run SpinRite on level 2 and 4 for several long days, I've done every file system integrity check known to humanity… NONE of them reports problems.
What I want to do is keep the Windows 95 partition intact but shrink it by a few gigabytes so I can run FreeBSD with my ncurses environment I've been developing. As it stands now, GParted/libparted can't read the data in the 95 partition even though it boots fine, the drive is fine and the filesystem is fine. I think.
I read on a few forums that people have had success with FAT systems running older live CDs when this problem occurs, and they surmise there may be an error in the newer versions. I'm willing to give it a shot, in the meantime I'm using dd to copy the whole drive to an image file as a backup, but I need to be able to resize this.
I wonder if hdiutil could do it? Hdiutil can resize non HFS+ partitions provided they're not running the system, can't it? I'm sorry this whole post was an excuse to think out loud!
Turns out those forum folks were absolutely right, I tried an old version of Knoppix from 2005 and it worked flawlessly! The newer versions of libparted must have introduced a bug with old FAT filesystems, or something.
In case you needed another reason to obsess over the up and coming second season of the moe-blob-but-still-awesome music anime K-On, there's going to be a new character called Miura Akane-chan.
She's going to be 172cm tall which would make her tower even over Mio, and get this: she's going to play the tuba! I'm really interested to see how they fit a tuba into a pop band, I mean, it's a gigantic tuba! A… tuba!? It probably weighs more than she does! Wait, hold on, let me see if I've got this straight: a… tuba!?
To tell the truth, if they were going to introduce a new character I would have been more excited if he was a guy, someone like Kyon to be mock horrified at their afternoon tea and complain they never get any work done. ;).
That reminds me, I only got up to watching episode 08, and I only blogged up to episode 06. I'd better rectify this before someone with a tuba comes along. A… tuba!?
While I think of it, she also reminds me of someone, but I can't quite put my finger on who. Well I suppose that's a good thing, otherwise I'd be arrested.
