Good Mood.

[swestrup]

Don't want to jinx it, but my good mood since coming back from California is still with me. I find myself looking at the upside of events rather than the downside, and its amazing how different a small shift in perspective can make things look.



So, I find that I'm looking at my recent trials and tribulations with Linux as a learning experience. Building a Linux up from source using Gentoo is a bit of a pain, but I'm learning many things about how a modern Linux operates. I'm also very pleased to see that some of my complaints about other distros have been tackled by Gentoo (ie, explicit ways to install multiple versions of a library or application). Also, of course, every time I come across some annoyance and manage to figure out enough of the system to fix it, I grow more confident in my abilities.

Also, discovering that there already exists a project in C++ that is aiming to do what my (still not really started) geometric library project does has not phased me. Instead I've noticed that they've only implemented a few of the ideas that I've had so I'm going to cherry-pick their code for good ideas, and have a hard look at the code they claimed to have cherry-picked for their ideas, to see if there's anything they've missed.

After struggling with the idea for some time, I've also recently been making some theoretical progress on another C++ project I want to tackle after the above one. It involves perverting Typed Feature Structures to build a general complex-configuration editor and validator. My main desire is to use it for creating a public-domain replacement for Hero Games Hero Creator (RPG character editor) which is much more flexible. That said, its occured to me that it would also be able to help greatly in the building of consistent kernel configurations and in getting mplayer to transcode videos in the right ways. Basically, any time you come across manual pages that say things like 'option -A must be used in conjuction with one or more of -B, -C and -D, but note that -D is incompatible with -Ax while the combination -A -C -D is incompatible with -X, and -B cannot be used with -C -L'.   At first I had thought I could use just straight TFS parsers/unifiers but it turns out that one of my needs is to be able to handle different sorts of unification than simple agreement, so I'm going to have to extend things a bit.

As for ongoing projects, my attempts to recondition a hard drive for storage use are going well. If it passes the next 40 hours worth of tests as well as its done so far (ie flawlessly) then I'll have no hesitation to use it for my precious files. Once that's done I can see about finishing installing the software to get MythTV up and running.

Finally, I have my data recovery project. Although uppermost in my mind, its the one I have the most trepidation about. Its looking like some of the files I may have lost are all of my RPG notes of the last year. Since I spent a LOT of time this last year building things with Hero Creator, that would NOT be good if I can't recover them. Anyway, the imaging of one partition finished last night, and today I'll see what I can find on it with various forensic tools.

First though, I have to get ready to go shopping with Linda, as we've been avoiding doing it because of the weather, and our cupboards are getting increasingly bare.

Comments

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

I've once managed to recover a failing drive by low-level-formatting it.

[swestrup]

Its been many years since I've found a drive that even gives you that option. That said, I've found that Seagate's free tools for working with Seagate and Maxtor drives can do wonders with them. Now when I have a badly acting drive, (provided its from one of those companies) I turn to them first.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Most drives these days will notice when you try to write to a failing/failed sector, and remap it to one of their internal spare sectors. So yeah, if a low-level format ends up writing to all the sectors, it could totally fix a drive. Of course, by that measure you can just go through the drive, reading each sector then writing it back - that way you only lose the sectors that are actually failing, which is generally a small (but almost always non-zero, even on a working drive) number.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

I have still to get a really clear idea what Feature Structures are, typed or not. In general, though, other things being equal, typed is probably better than not typed.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

Any chance anyone has any of those RPG notes in hard copy? I have a scanner.

[swestrup]

I never successfully printed out any of the RPG notes from last year because I was using an RPG character editor and I never could get it to print correctly.

It turns out that I *did* manage to recover all of my work though, so its not an issue.