Another Opinion Among Many

I was reviewing a few of the spam comments that Akismet caught but insisted that I read before discarding.  Here are three:

“David”, from IP address sixty-six dot seventy-nine dot one sixty-three dot one eighty-seven wrote -

 I like your stuff, even though i came here by accident!

“Eric”, from IP address seventy-two dot two fourty-nine dot thirt-two dot one eighty-four wrote -

 To all the uninitiated out there - read this and take heed. This is good stuff. Thanks….

“Jessica” from IP address sixty-six dot seventy-nine dot one sixty-three dot one seventy-nine (David’s next door neighbor?) wrote -

 I came here by accident, but like it

Its so nice to know that you’re appreciated! Thanks, random robots! I feel much better knowing that my writing is feeding your souls.  Its been fun, but scram, now.

I have to agree with Eric, though.

[photopress:cutecalebinbed.JPG,thumb,pp_image]So, the weather network is decrying bad things, like a 30cm snow/ice-fall warning. What wacky weather we’ve had this month. Its bee -30°C and +10°C. Today was -26°C and tomorrow is supposed to be around 0C. But, tonight, its supposed to start snowing and not stop.

Will schools be canceled? I’m taking bets (not for money). I’m saying no for now. I’ll update at 5-6am

This morning, I was late for work.

I did not leave late. It usually takes about 6-7 minutes to drive from my house to work. Today, I left, as usual, about 35 minutes before I was to start. But, I was 15 minutes late.

The reason that I was late is because there was a huge accident on the Westmoreland St bridge, which connects my area of the city to the south side. Both directions were blocked, so traffic was jammed up across the whole span. The southbound traffic is what usually fills the bridge in the morning. After a few folks in the inside lane realized that they were going nowhere fast, they U-turned northbound and headed off the bridge.

Once the way was clear, I did the same and headed for the Princess Margaret bridge, which was in the opposite direction from my workplace. I was only 15 minutes late.

There were several cars involved in the accident and I’ve not heard if anyone was seriously hurt or not. The road was bare this morning, but I imagine that, since it was -27°C this morning, some people had a hard time getting their cars started on time. Add that to a chronic late departure is a recipe for an accident any day. I see the same thing happen when it storms. These accidents happen because someone stopped paying attention at the wrong moment, usually because they’re in too much of a hurry.

Is dying or killing worth being “on time”? Personally, I’d rather be late and live. Or, even better, I check out the weather forecast the night before so that I know if I will have to get up a bit early to shovel my car out or if I have to allow extra time in case my car won’t easily start. It only takes a minute and I arrive alive. I sure wish that these poor folks, who at the least have smashed up cars, had done the same. Nobody needs the results of an accident.

I sure hope so!

I’ve just noticed that on the Gentoo home page, which has been pretty much stagnant, as far as news or activity is concerned, seems to have had a burst of activity.  Since January 12, there have been 9 posts on the home page.  This is more than in the previous 5 months.  The news is encouraging.  I’m happy with what I see.  Awesome!

I can’t decide which. I must applaud you for sitting through the game in that frigid weather. Its here, now! I was wondering when we were going to have real cold again. I guess that was today. This is the first time that our car had trouble cranking over. This morning, I went out about 6 times just to get it circulating enough to spark itself up. I managed to get it going (under much protest), even without being plugged in. Thank you to the jerk who stole my 30 foot exterior cord, by the way. I hope that it cracked and left you to freeze somewhere!

But, seriously, folks! With the wind chill, its -29°C outside right now (-20°C without - but its a little windy). I know that you sat through that kind of cold for hours! You’re dedicated. Naw, you’re nuts!

It’ll be nice to see the nice balmy temperatures that Toronto has, like -6°C!

NOTE: this tip may be specific to Ubuntu, as far as the command goes…

One thing that I’ve noticed is that many distros are starting to change their partition references in /etc/fstab to a UUID from the more familiar (but no friendlier) reference to the volume in /dev (such as /dev/hdc3, for example).  This might be a sign of things to come, since any distro based on the 2.6 Linux kernel has pretty much dropped the /dev for udev (hot plugging for cold plugging, etc).  After looking into things, its good for situations where drives are being moved or removed now and then (as in when you plug in your USB hard drive).

However, if you’re a constant alpha/beta tester at heart, like I am, you are probably using a main Linux partition or drive to work from and have either a spare drive or partition that you frequently blow away and replace what’s on it with the latest fun toy, as I do.  I don’t know how many distros are doing this with the UUID so far, but I suspect that Fedora does and I know that Ubuntu and Mandriva are now doing it.  So, what happens if you are tired of what you’ve been testing and you want to install something new? As soon as you format the drive, the UUID will change.  How do you reference the drive in your /etc/fstab, so that you can either find it when you want to mount it, or when you want to boot from the new distro? The first “U” is for “unique”, and they are! Here’s what’s currently in my /boot/grub/menu.lst for the Mandrake alpha 2 that I’m playing with: root=UUID=b414e306-0582-4572-926d-a8c113bf34bb.

That’s not exactly the stuff of memorization, and, in a few hours, it’ll be different, as I’m going to hose it and reinstall it with a totally different configuration (I wanna try KDE 4!!!).  So, how do I get the new volume ID to put in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst? With Ubuntu, you have a command called vol_id that you can run as root to determine various things about the volumes that are accessible to your computer.

The command is vol_id.  So, the command to find a volume ID is:

sudo vol_id -u device

where device is the /dev entry for the partition you want to know about.  for example,

sudo vol_id -u /dev/hdc3

would yield the long scary output that you need to enter into your files.

I hope that this helps all you distro hoppers out there as much as it has me.

I’ve tried this recently and it does actually work. Thanks to Ed Labonte’s mention of this trick in his podcast The Linux Install Podcast. If you have a computer that has become unresponsive, you can make it reboot if you have to without hitting the power switch by doing the following:

Hold down the “ALT” key and the “Print Screen|SysReq” key. Then, type, ensuring that you definitely type the right letters distinctly. The letters you type, while still holding down those two keys, is “R” “E” “I” “S” “U” “B”. This should give your system back to you.

Good luck with that.