Jim's Depository

I have provoked the computer spirits. The P4 I just benchmarked and decided I could live without has suffered a hard disk failure of its primary disk.

The good news is I don't have to fix it because I now know I can live without it.

You saved me many (more) hours of head pounding with this blog entry. I am thoroughly grateful.

At some point in the past I managed to screw up my file server's lenny install in such a way that I ended up with the non-lvm ext2 boot partition commented out of fstab and a separate /boot directory on the lvm root.

I forgot about this incident and went about continuing to run apt-get dist-upgrade periodically. Everything worked until I went to squeeze and rebooted, at which point I made some more poor choices ("Why am I not running the new kernel? I'll just apt-get remove the old one!") and ended up unable to mount ext2 partitions (while still able to boot from one).

After about eight hours of head scratching I found this page and by following your steps had no trouble upgrading to GRUB 2 which booted the new kernel which fixed all the problems, allowing me to get on with my life (such as it is).

You are awesome and so is GRUB 2.

You don't need to echo 1, 2, and 3. As the page you link to makes clear, it's a bit-mask. Echoing 3 alone is succifient after the sync.

Yes, it is that bit of logic that makes the } else if { not work.

Aw nuts, now I need to implement "delete attachment". The 1.3 version adds a little 'flash' badge instead of just a grey box and a way to edit your whitelist.

I've had no problems with this over the weeks I've been using it, in fact it has saved me from canceling my American Express card because their commercial no longer tries to play in my browser when I go to pay the bill.

Oh, I neglected the "// a bunch of code to see if it is in the cache" part. Yeah, don't be afraid of using goto-s. There's nothing wrong with them when used properly.

Why not simply:

if (code == 36) {
   value = 99;
} else if (code_in_cache(code)) {
   value = code_from_cache(code);
} else if (...) {
   // Notice how there is no nesting?
}

Those google ads are nice. I almost never get enticed by an ad, but two of the google ads on this site have lured me into visiting the advertiser. (Google's terms forbid me from clicking, so I have to type in the URL.)

Virtually 100% of the writing on this site is mine, so they have their little demographic cross hairs right on my brain, and it works.

Ack! Google is giving me annoying animated graphic ads. I signed up for "text and image" ads, apparently they consider distracting animations to be an image.

I might mention that there are still some jpegs that will crash the quicktime encoder that are valid according to jpeginfo, but it gets most of them.