Aron 2 Blue

Weird post from Scott Adams today. But that's only what lead me here, to Scott's new book , and the really REALLY weird things a few people buy with the book: 96% buy the item featured on this page: Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert 4.6 out of 5 stars ( 32 ) $49.30 2% buy Bliss-Philips Bikini Perfect Deluxe HP6378 Spa-At-Home Grooming System 3.8 out of 5 stars ( 55 ) $49.99 1% buy Panasonic ES8078S Vortex HyrdraClean Wet/Dry Shaving System 4.2 out of 5 stars ( 111 ) $85.19 1% buy Sterling Silver 6mm Round Amethyst Stud Earring and Pendant Set, 18" Really? 2% buy a Bikini wax kit? Really?

Well, I tried. I built a Vista x64 computer, with a new Intel i920, and a nVidia Quadro 5500 (which is 7xxx generation in game cards). It's very nice, but the Western Digital Black Caviar 1 Tb hard drive started to have bad sectors 2 months after first boot. I tried to follow these directions about moving Vista, but I was stymied. Don't get me wrong - it is very cool that you can drop to a command prompt using the Vista install DVD, and run all kinds of tools, diagnostics, and tests. The directions use 'diskpart' and 'robocopy' to move data and a Windows install from an old hard drive to a new one. I installed a Raid 1 array to replace the failing hard drive, and successfully copied the data, but I couldn't get Vista to 'repair' after copying to that Raid array. I put all the lurid details in a comment . Sometimes these examples of someone else succeeding or failing help me out a lot, so I try to contribute to the cloud.

Compelling, disturbing, surprising. It synthesizes a huge amount of information from other publications and documents, and hundreds of interviews by the author to give a clear portrait of Bin Laden and the organization he helped create. I was shocked by the clear presentation of the failure of information sharing between the CIA and FBI, and how a bit more cooperation could have lead the FBI to catch some of the 9/11 terrorists before the event. PBSwap page .

I've been using Emacs 21.3 happily for years. Since 2003 apparently, because I looked at the release dates today when I discovered a new version 22 had been released this year for the first time in a long time. Here's what I found. Happily, the gnuclientw function has been integrated, as emacsclientw, and all that's needed in .emacs is (start server) They recommend setting an environment var for some reason: set ALTERNATE_EDITOR to runemacs.exe Now I can associate files with emacsclientw.exe to open them in my current emacs session. However, add the '-n' argument so it doesn't maintain a link to explorer, and ask you to hit a keystroke to release the editing buffer. A puzzling default behavior. I also had to get rid of 'lazy-lock' and 'resize-minibuffer-mode' from my .emacs, but that was it. I turned off the toolbar, too, of course. Easy, painless upgrade. I was surprised when it was slow to shut down the first time, but it has been much faste...

I found a way to make an exact duplicate of a compact flash card using cygwin. I suspect this method only works with identical flash cards - i.e. both the same capacity, and possibly both from the same manufacturer. Anyhow, based on Reimaging CompactFlash cards tutorial , I looked in Computer Management, Disk Manager, and discovered my compact flash card was 'disk 2' Then, using 'a' for disk 0, and 'c' for disk 2, at the cygwin command prompt: dd if=/dev/sdc of=b2.img It reports this, for a 32Mb flash card: 62592+0 records in 62592+0 records out 32047104 bytes (32 MB) copied, 10.725 s, 3.0 MB/s Then, 'eject' the flash card in explorer, and insert the new one (to be erased and copied over). In cygwin again, note 'if' and 'of' swap: dd of=/dev/sdc if=b2.img 62592+0 records in 62592+0 records out 32047104 bytes (32 MB) copied, 43.448 s, 738 kB/s And it works! It's even bootable. I'm still puzzled by a cygwin list suggestion , which h...

Sometimes these things can be really annoying. Anyhow, good hint here: Handling filenames with spaces in a bash for or while loop. Helps loop over filenames which include spaces. Like most normal people do, nowadays. I also got caught trying to extract substrings. We had the date embedded in the name of some backup files. The substring operator looks like this: ${file:19:8} Get a substring, starting as position 19, 8 chars long. I wanted from the end, so you make the position negative. But you have to use parens, otherwise it looks like the default-val operator ${file:(-19):8} and not ${file:-19:8} Then I found that the year started with a zero, so it was getting treated as octal, and 08 is not a valid octal number. So I ended up with this to extract the 2 digit year into a integer var: # 10# in front says 'use base 10', because the 08 was being interpreted as octal. let file_year="10#${file:(-19):2}" # get days by asking 'date' to convert the date strin...

I voted. I hope Mike Munger , the libertarian candidate for governor in NC, gets his 2%, so he can automatically be on the ballot next time. I think that's the condition....