Learning Curves.

Well, best laid schemes, and all that. Today both of my current projects (which I'm pursuing concurrently as they each have large wait times) ran off of the rails.

First of all, I discovered that having made images of BOTH of the drives I need to repair, I no longer have enough disk space to do so. It also appears that I did not make the images in the best way I could have for what I am going to attempt. So I wiped out my images (one of which, you will recall, took 5 days to create) and started over. Knowing more about the process this time I'm optimistic that the imaging time will be much reduced. However I won't know for sure until I've finished with the first image which I am making now, as it was fast to image the first time and contains the least valuable data. I figure it will be the drive I learn to do forensics on, rather than my more valuable drive.

Secondly, I realized that 8GB is not enough space these days for a Gentoo system partition, even if the only thing the box is going to do is be a TV and file server. Since 8GB was the full size of the drive I was using, I'm going to have to use a bigger drive (I also have a spare 20GB drive laying around). At first I thought I would have to start from scratch, but I then realized that I can make an image of the 8GB partition and copy it to the 20GB. With a little luck I can then swap drives and all will work. (modulo a possible need to rerun grub). This could get tricky, but the worse thing that can happen is that I find myself needing to redo the last 4 days work building my MythTV box.

And Thirdly, I discovered an empty 80GB drive I had laying around appears to have some bad sectors. All looks fixable, but I'm now somewhat paranoid about data loss so I'm going to momentarily rededicate my MythTV box to doing extensive drive and sector tests. They should take 2 or 3 days and, should the drive pass, I'll be willing to use it for storage. Otherwise I guess I'll just have to trash it.

Is it not an exiting life I lead?

Good Mood.

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.

( Click for example )

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.