Archive for June, 2005

Dodgy Disk Day 2005

Monday, June 27th, 2005

(Yes, I know this event spans several days, but the name was too catchy to pass up on.)

Time to fire up ye olde backup scripts, people. It’s that time of the year again. First, one of my 80 GB disks decided to retire early and take a notable portion of the sectors residing on itself with it. I had a spare disk lying around, though, so I managed to migrate everything over, except for a few files which I could do without. (Who needs those “..” entries anyway, eh?)

Anyway, shortly after,
CyBeR’s disk
joined the party.

Then, to make the start of the new week perfect (even before I had finished my first cup of coffee), a customer of ours’ backup server started complaining about icky filesystem errors. A quick fsck (as quick as fscking 160 GB of bad sectors can be) revealed yet another apostate.

How rude.

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Web page redesign

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

Yes, it’s yet another rewrite of my home page. I’m hoping this will be one of the last ones, though. I’m fairly happy with how it looks so far (yes, I’m a simplicicist), although the menu on the right can use some love. I haven’t converted any of the sub-pages yet either, so there might be some breakage here and there while I’m at it.

Posted in general | 2 Comments »

Firmware upgrading under Cedega

Friday, June 10th, 2005

One of my more dubious stunts in a while;
Flashing my Samsung TS-542A DVD-burner
under Transgaming Cedega.
Silly Samsung thinks everybody is running Windows.
Unfortunately, Cedega isn’t quite free software
either, but at least it runs under Linux.
(And no, I don’t have Windows in my house, and no,
I certainly don’t plan to get it.)
(Plain Wine, which is free, might
have worked too, but I didn’t get around to testing it. And I
don’t want to push my luck, to be honest.)

(There was one minor problem, though. According to the
upgrading instructions, the flasher application has
three buttons in the top left of the window;
one to select a firmware file, one to start flashing, and one
“About”-button. Neither of these buttons showed up while running
under Cedega, but they were easily located by clicking randomly in
the target area.)

The reason was that I recently bought some cheap DVDRs
at Lidl, which my drive promptly spat out, coughing
and wheezing. So I flashed it. It didn’t help.
Oh well. The firmware is up-to-date, if nothing else.

So, now you know it can be done.

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