Last night started out with a simple goal. Nuke the Windows XP partition on my dual boot Linux box (my main workstation), re-install Windows, and get to bed early. Little did I know that fate had it in for me. Well, first I run fsck.vfat forgetting that this was not what I wanted to do. No biggie though, no harm no foul. I then ran the correct command, mkfs.vfat. It seemed to work, but when I booted onto my Windows 98SE boot disk it had strange and unusual errors. "Ok, just nuke the 10G partition under Linux with fdisk, and then re-create it.... it'll be fresh, clean, and windows will install nicely onto it." Or so I though.

Destroying the partition and recreating it under Linux didn't do what I wanted it to do. One of the great things is that if you loose your partition table you just re-create it on the same boundaries and bingo, bango, bongo, partition table restored. I forgot this and ended up with my old DOS drive exactly as it was before. I should have given up at this point, but persisted. I nuked the partition again, mkfs'd it, several times, using both linux and Windows (booting from the bootable CD . Eventually it appeared to disappear properly. I booted up into Windows setup and started doing things. At one point I ran format on it (from a DOS prompt ) and it told me it was formatting a 30G partition. Not quite right! I reboot back to Linux and make sure that everything is ok. It is, partitions all appear ok (cfdisk bitched about partition table not working properly, but normal fdisk showed everything was fine).

In retrospect, I should have started backing things up at this point.

At this point I booted back into the setup from the Windows 98SE CD and continued. After it had finished formatting, it said I had a 30 G drive. Not good. I booted back to linux to find...... "Invalid system disk...". ARGH! All is not lost though. Just boot up on a boot floppy, re-run LILO, or nuke and re-install the / partition. No harm no foul right? Wrong :( Booting up on a boot disk showed me my partition table was completely hosed , and of the original 7 (I think) there were 4, all showing errors, all with totally wacked out numbers. I quickly hopped over to another box, my MP3 server (not quite done yet) and started surfing to google to find how to fix this.

Most of the information I found related to simply re-creating the partition table under linux to match exactly what it was before. Of course, I didn't have a good idea of what that was. I popped the hard disk out of my workstation to throw in the MP3 system and of course, no Reiser FS support (which I have on all but / on the workstation. Even if the first couple of partitions were blown away I could survive, /home (where all my stuff is) is the 3rd of fourth one down, and even with 30 G formatted and fubared, it should be recoverable right? Right? please?

After much fighting I admitted defeat. I nuked all the partitions and created (once again) a nice big 10 G chunk for Windows, which I then installed Windows 98 and then, just because I was feeling like a masochist, Windows XP. Around 1am I started re-installing Linux, and once it started going I decided to leave it for this morning. This morning I got what I thought was a good setup going.... a base install of Debian, with ssh running so I could work on it in the background from work across the VPN. Well, it was a good plan in theory. Unfortunately when I got to work my workstation at home is not around, not even pingable. So much for getting a kernel compile and so on going huh? I forgot two important things before I left for work.... create a user account, or set sshd to allow root login (as at this point I only have root as the user], and to actually test that I could connect from work, before leaving for work.

So I get a fresh start. I didn't want one, and as I roll things that I lost around in my mind, it really sucks. Not all was lost, I have a very similar setup at work to home, so I can transfer my bookmarks, various xmms skins, fonts , and similar things over. A fair amount of old files were backed up a while ago onto CD, but that was over a year (though some of the important stuff hasn't changed since then, so that's not too terrible. Things that were lost were any mail since the backup, new wallpaper, the fact I spent a day organizing all my wallpaper neatly.... All my MP3s are ok though, safe on a separate drive :)

I guess I have a busy night ahead of me again tonight, getting everything back up and running.

Did I mention lately that I hate computers?

11/06/2001    -{ I Hate Pretty Much Everything }-

Bleah, what a way to end the day. I came home after a long and shitty day at work to find no milk in the house. No biggie right? So I head out to drive down to the store to get some and find my clutch now only works if it's pressed really hard into the floorboards. It would still go, but it was not "Good". It seemed like the clutch was always partially engaged, so putting my beast into gear was... not easy... possible, but only with lots of cursing.

Going to work this morning to take it in to get it's scratch from a while back repaired as well as the clutch was fun too. I had to push it out of it's parking spot because reverse was not an option. Neither was first gear... I'm glad that it's a nice powerful engine that starts off nicely in second (which was painful to get into as well. Downshift? I don't think so. Luckily the body shop has their own mechanic and they can replace the cylinder (or whatever it is) easily. Not incrediably cheaply of course, but it'll be done. I'm glad the clutch didn't go already, it's only a '98!

On the bright side, it looks like my bug is that files aren't being closed properly....

Oh, and WhtDragon is back! Whoho! When do we go play pool so you can kick my ass dude?

11/01/2001    -{ Ray Park Is Awsome }-

I was Luke Skywalker. I was also a kernel hacker, trying to do what I'm trying to do in Real Life. My dream took place over a fairly long period of time. It started when I was young, and had pranksters doing things to my home in suburbia. As I got older, I became aware of my job, and my quest. In this case my quest was to fit the Linux 2.4 kernel onto a embedded firewall device (which is similar to in Real Life, the Firecard ). My job took me into the city, across a large bridge at night (that's one of the images that sticks clearly in my mind anyway... think the final scene in Interview With The Vampire).

When in the city I met back up with my sister (Princess Leia) and a couple of friends. They were in hiding, planning a rebellion against the Emperor. The Emperor was the prankster, and looked like the actor who played Q, John de Lancie in his guest appearance on Special Unit 2 . I heard that something was happening, he was coming or had heard about us or something and went away, running up the street. For what seemed like a long time I didn't return to the sanctuary that was our hiding place. Then one halloween the Emperor and his sidekick, Darth Maul came to town. They were both out of costume, as I was I, so we didn't recognize each other. Either that or we did but had to pretend we didn't know who the other was.

There was a huge crowd of people going down the main street. When Darth Maul passed me (without his horns or red face on) I said "Hey, that's Ray Park!" and he turned and looked at me, snarling. "What did you say?" he groweled at me. "Ray Park, he's an awsome fighter ," I stammered, (not un-truthfully... it's funny how reality and fantasy mix in the dream world). "That's right buddy!" he said happily and started play-fighthing with me. When he left I told my friends "Oh My God! Ray Park was play fighting with me!" Pretty cool stuff, even for a dream. As Maul and the Emperor got closer to my friends' old hiding place, I managed to slip ahead of them in the crowd and get into costume/uniform. I was caught by them going to the hiding place and was forced to lead them to it.

When we got there it was deserted. The Emperor was pretty pissed off, and demanded to know where everyone was. I had no clue, but noticed out of the side of my vision a piece of paper with notes scrawled on it. Something like:

1994-5 - rebellion intact
1996-7 - rebellion intact
1998-9 - rebellion intact
2000-1 - rebellion intact

So I knew that they were around. There was also a sketch (hologram?) of the members, but none of them were my sister or my friends. Sadly I didn't get to wake up and defeat evil, due to a greater evil. My alarm clock.

I can see where a lot of this dream came from though. I watched Episode 1 a couple of days ago. John de Lancie was on SU2 last night. One of the guys from work came as Darth Maul yesturday and I had a conversation about getting the 2.4 kernel onto our Firewall device.