Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November

I've noticed a clever fund-raising campaign by the republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul.

Referencing the movie V for Vendetta, the Ron Paul campaign has fairly explicitly compared their candidate to the character "V" from the movie, who compares himself to a historical British revolutionary named Guy Fawkes, about whom the following rhyme is recited in Britain:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,

The gunpowder, treason and plot,

I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

The implication is that Ron Paul intends to overthrow the government, though not by an act of terrorism as his counterparts attempted(they both attempted to blow up the British parliament building, but "V" succeeded). He intends to use his massive underground movement to raise $10 million on November 5th and send a shockwave through the mainstream press.

Will it work? We'll see...I'm tempted to give $100 myself to be a part of it, because in my opinion the US government has gone too long without a thorough shake-up. I'm also tempted to register Republican(I've always registered independent) so I can support him in the primary.

Gutsy Gibbon

I recently installed Ubuntu 7.10, which just came out on the 18th of October. I'm quite impressed with it. I'm writing from a blog posting applet integrated into Ubuntu. :-)

Confrontation

I have found that I lack the will/courage/nerve to confront practically anything in my life. It's very interesting. This trend goes to the extent that I have trouble even forming opinions about things. Or rather, I find most anything for which one could have an opinion to be agreeable to my liking and generally have to be shown otherwise.

Most of my opinions that I do form seem to center on the logic of the matter. I feel rather like Mr. Spock of Star Trek sometimes, recently. It doesn't really matter to me if I actually agree with some action/belief. But if there is a logic I can formulate around how the action came to be completed or the belief came to be believed, then I am OK with it, and I might even like it.

Dell And Ubuntu, Sitting In A Tree

Today, Dell released their first line of computers preloaded with the Ubuntu operating system. This most promising alternative to Windows is used by Michael Dell himself on his primary computer.

The importance of the release goes beyond the benefit of having a choice of operating system when you shop at Dell. The importance lies in the fact that Dell has a mighty influence over hardware vendors. One of the greatest stumbling blocks for Linux has been the lack of hardware support, since there is no financial incentive for hardware vendors to support an operating system with no major OEM support. And if there's no hardware support, then the major OEMs have no incentive to provide Ubuntu.

If these systems sell to expectations, and Dell can continue producing new models preloaded with Ubuntu, Dell will(and already is) leverage its influence to force hardware vendors to fully support Linux in its hardware driver software.


The downside of their current offering is that Dell isn't preloading media codecs that require royalties to be paid(MP3, DVD playback, etc.). This means any normal user who wants to use these common media formats will have to acquire them illegally. Dell is working to be able to offer these codecs eventually, though.

Lastly, the new systems are not available through the main website links, but you have to go to http://www.dell.com/open in order to find these systems. Dell explicitly states that they intend the current offerings for people who already know what they're doing. Hopefully, as the system-wide support becomes comparable with Windows, they will simply include Ubuntu in the drop-down list of available operating systems.

Here here! Hooray for Dell and Ubuntu!

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Just doing my part to stick it to "the man".

Farewell to a Hard Drive

A week ago, my computer's hard drive stopped booting. I ran out to Best Buy immediately and bought a new Western Digital Scorpio Hard Drive with 120 GB capacity(double the capacity of my ailing 60GB Hitachi Travelstar) and I loaded a fresh install of Ubuntu Edgy Eft on it. I happened to have backed up my data about 6 months ago, so I got my old stuff back immediately. But, as I have some mission critical data that was not backed up, I had to retrieve this data.

If you've never had this happen to you, it's quite nerve-wracking. As you may know, most all of my productive work takes place in coordination with my computer, and thus, a hard drive on that computer. If the hard drive dies, I must retrieve what's on it, because I've spent countless hours developing my projects and will reuse the resources from them in the future.

I took the drive to a computer repair shop that has been helpful before, and tends not to charge me anything. After a few days with them, they were not able to recover my data, since the drive would not boot. Oh crap, what was I going to do about this? A professional repair shop can't even get my hard drive to boot, so what hope do I have that won't cost me an arm and a leg? Oh well, at least they didn't charge me...

But, I had one trick up my sleeve yet! I read on the web about a certain technique of hard drive data recovery that involves placing the hard drive in the freezer for an arbitrary but significant amount of time. The principle behind it is that if some part in the hardware is out of alignment, the cold temperature will cause the metal to contract and possibly snap back into alignment.

So, having nothing to lose, I put the HDD in the freezer for an hour. No effect! I put it in again for three hours. Still nothing... Then I left it in the freezer for about twelve hours over night. When I tried it again, the motherboard wouldn't even recognize the hard drive!(until the drive warmed up again)

Well, that didn't work... But I remembered one comment I'd seen in reading forums about this freezing technique, and that one person had had success with the opposite technique: heating up the hard drive, thus causing the parts to expand. I have this little space heater that I use when it's cold. So I decided to give the heat idea a try. What I did was to put the heater on its back, so it pointed at the ceiling, then place the hard drive on top and put a towel over the whole thing. Then I plug in the heater and heat the hard drive for 3 minutes on each side. You have to be very careful and pick up the drive with a towel, because it's like touching a pot that's been on a stove.

So, after doing this, the hard drive got a little further! I couldn't believe it! It still didn't work, but it encouraged me to keep on trying to heat it up. After another round it actually tried to boot up! But then as it got cool it stopped working again. But after I heated the drive another time, I was able to get the drive to boot and look at all my data! I was able to then copy my most important stuff to my flash drive and upload the rest to a school server. I had to upload to the server because the drive stopped wanting to be written to after a few minutes of being booted up, and wouldn't mount my flash drive or my new hard drive. Occasionally I had to hold my computer over the space heater when it started to lock up again.

Hopefully this will help some people who are at their wits' end about recovering their hard drive :-)

Kurt Vonnegut Dies At Age 84

So it goes.