post-meridian, est
Lying bloggo
I'm not much of a one for diaries or journals or
blogs, but I need to get more of my brain on
distributed media. So for now I'll continue to
use Advogato, but I'll probably be moving to a
more personal-type blog that I can fail to update
more efficiently.
ApacheCon
Well, ApacheCon 2002 US
has come and gone in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I'm personally
pretty pleased with the way it turned out. The content
seemed good, the delegates seemed satisfied and happy,
and the sponsors likewise. I'm still waiting for some
numbers to find out what colour the ink is on the balance
sheet, and the final tally of attendance.
Disk woes
Feh. First the disk in my laptop started making a
high-pitched whining noise. No problem; under warranty.
IBM shipped a replacement, and I purchased a SuperBay
disk adapter so I could have both disks in the machine
at once, and I made the copy with a
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=<m> count=<n>
I found that a little scary, but it worked a treat.
So now the /usr drive in one of my Linux
systems at home has started logging bad blocks. Hoo
boy, does it have bad blocks! And they're not
getting any better, either; every boot shows errors
and forces an fsck, which in turn whittles
away from the partition's usefulness as the blocks
are found in directory inodes. So I got a replacement
disk from Maxtor (had to special-request getting the
replacement before sending in the busted one,
and I have to pay the postage on the return shipment --
IBM is much better about this stuff), and
tried the dd trick. No joy; large values
of bs result in massive amounts of non-copied data.
So I fired it up with bs=512 to do a
sector-by-sector copy (took all night!) so each bad sector
would only account for a single uncopied sector.
The result was a new disk with a huge bad-block inode
and an even less usable filesystem than the original.
So now I've got the original back in the system, and
I'm cataloguing what's on it so I know which packages
to install and which custom stuff to try to
save by copying it to another filesystem. I'm pretty
sure I'm going to have to do a complete re-install.
Bah.
And this experience tickled a peeve about Red Hat's
up2date tool: it checks to see if the requested
packages are already installed, and ignores them if so --
which means you can't download an RPM if you've already
installed it. Nor the source. I need to work on a
patch for that..
Spackle
I've had some recent brainstorms for Spackle,
like adding support for groups, customised
Subject:s for commit messages, et cetera.
Going to be ready for a beta release soon; some of this
is functionality I haven't seen in any CVS repository.
(Don't know if Subversion has similar features; for
a future investigation..)
Apache Cookbook
Well, after much non-activity, the Cookbook project is
back on track. DrBacchus has joined me as a co-author.
Apache-Land
Fun doings inside the ASF, including a new project
for bringing new packages and communities into the Apache
fold, and providing info for Apache developers about the
philosophy and infrastructure.