chmod 644

March 1 is quickly approaching and starting Monday, people who are still running the Release Candidate of Windows 7 will start seeing the expiration message. I’ve been running the RC at home since May of last year and knew this time would eventually come, so this past week I purchased the Home Premium upgrade media from Amazon along with some extra RAM for my Dell Inspiron 530 (it had two 512mb chips that I pulled and replaced with two new 1gb chips to bring it up to 4gb total).

Based on my previous experience with the Windows Easy Transfer utility, I used WET to backup my documents and settings to an external hard drive. To be doubly sure I didn’t lose anything, I also just copied my entire user profile folder (C:\Users\<my login>) to the same hard drive. I wanted to do a clean install with the upgrade media (and also go with the 64-bit version), so I made sure I had that external drive with my WET backup attached when I booted from the Win7 DVD. From within the Windows 7 Setup, I formatted my entire 640gb internal drive, completely wiping out the RC partition. Since Setup knew about the WET backup, the Win7 activation process was successful and the rest of the install was smooth.

After booting Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit for the first time and then installing all the outstanding updates, the real fun began. I used WET to restore my files and settings and then began the long process of re-installing and re-configuring all of my applications (64-bit versions where applicable). I had made screenshots of the Programs and Features list before upgrading to facilitate this, so I knew exactly what I meeded to re-install. I had also taken screenshots of my Taskbar and Start Menu so I could put everything back the way I had it under the RC.

So I’m back up and running and have finally joined the world of 64-bit!

What is it with me and hard drive crashes lately? First the drive in my Linux server dies, then this past Sunday the stock 250gb drive in my TiVo Series3 went bad.

The crash first manifested when the TiVo froze with a pinkish tinted picture on the TV. This has happened occasionally in the past, and the pink hue is usually an indicator of an HDMI signal issue so I pulled the plug and let the box reboot. Unfortunately, the TiVo got stuck on the “Welcome” screen and never went to the “Almost there” screen which pointed to a hard drive problem. I figured it was most likely the attached 1TB Western Digital Expander, so I unplugged the expander and let the box reboot again. Same problem, which confirmed it was the internal drive that was bad.

Luckily I had a spare 320gb SATA drive sitting around, so I figured I would just make a backup of the failed drive and restore it onto the spare. I pulled the TiVo out of the home theater stack, opened it up, and connected the drive to my PC. I tried using WinMFS to back up the drive, but discovered that since the drive was “married” to the expander, the software couldn’t make a backup without the expander attached as well. I don’t have an eSATA port on my PC (I’ve since ordered a cable from Monoprice) so that wasn’t going to be an option … I decided to just clone the drive. I connected the old drive and new drive to my PC and then booted the Ultimate Boot CD. From there, I used the EASEUS Disk Copy utility to perform a sector-by-sector copy of the 250gb drive to the 320gb drive.

After about two hours, the copy completed. I put the new drive back into the TiVo, crossed my fingers, and plugged it in. It got to the “Almost there” screen, which meant it was now loading from the hard drive. Then, the Green Screen of Death, which was actually a good sign. The disk copy had indicated 94 read errors, so I knew there were some corrupted sectors on the new drive. Since the GSOD was a sign that the TiVo was attempting to fix these problems, I let it go. Another two hours or so later, the box rebooted (again) and this time loaded all the way to TiVo Central, with all of my recordings preserved. Yes!

Unfortunately I’m missing out on the extra 70gb from the larger internal drive. According to the Drive Expansion FAQ, you can’t expand an internal drive when it’s married to another (the expander in my case). I guess at some point when there’s not a lot of recorded content that I care about, I’ll divorce the expander, clear everything, and then re-do the expansion so I’m able to use all 320gb. For now, though, the Series3 is back up and running.

After a few evenings’ work, I’ve recovered from The Crash and have my server back up and running!

The problem started last week on Thursday when I found the server was not responding to pings, none of the services were available, and the fans were cranking at 100%. The server is headless, so I hooked up a monitor to see if anything strange was going on. Unfortunately, there was no video signal … and even the “raising elephants” magic key sequence didn’t do anything. My only option was to hard power off the box and restart it, at which point it seemed back to normal except none of the system logs showed anything that would indicate what the problem was.  A similar thing had also occured back in December while we were up in Cleveland which I had just written off as a random crash, but now this was the second time. I should have known better that Linux just doesn’t crash and sure enough, the box was locked up again Friday morning.

That evening, I pulled the server out of the closet and hooked it up at my desk along with monitor and keyboard so I could interact with it directly instead of over an SSH connection. I figured maybe this way I could see if anything strange was happening that wasn’t being reflected in the logs. It all seemed normal until finally I saw this:

Oh oh … that couldn’t be good. ata1.00 was obviously referring to the hard drive. A quick search on that { UNC } code showed “Uncorrectable error – often due to bad sectors on the disk” so it became apparent that the drive was failing. Presumably there was some bad area of the disk and when the server accessed that area it just locked up. At this point I tried running a disk check and started getting all sorts of I/O errors. Rather than push the drive to complete failure with the scan, I decided to rebuild the server on a spare drive and restore from backup.

The failing drive was an old 120gb and all I had around were older IDE 20gb, 30gb, and 40gb drives (no SATA controller in my “server”). I wasn’t using all 120gb, so moving to a smaller drive was an acceptable solution. My first thought was to make an image of the failing drive using EASEUS  Todo Backup which works great for imaging Windows PCs even when moving to smaller drives. Unfortunately the software doesn’t recognize the Linux file system so it could only do a sector-by-sector copy, which means I could only copy the image to another identical 120gb drive. With the image copy option off the table, I decided to just do a clean install of Karmic on the spare 30gb drive and then restore what I could from my backups. I hadn’t done a clean install of Linux since I put this server together back in 2007, so why not? I spent the rest of weekend re-installing and re-configuring packages to put the server back the way I had it. Luckily I keep good notes of all the changes I make, so between that, being able to pull files (like the MySQL databases and configuration files) from the 120gb drive connected via a USB enclosure, and having the rest of the important stuff backed up on my two NAS devices and in the cloud (via Jungledisk), the restore process was relatively straightforward with no data lost.

Sunday night, I moved the rebuilt server back to its home in the closet. After a quick check to make sure everything was running, I went to bed. The next morning, I heard a loud fan noise coming out of the closet … the server had crashed again! Same  symptoms, not good. I had to get to work so I just shut the server down and left. Monday evening, I started it up again and logged in via SSH (remember, it’s headless when it’s in the closet). As before, there was nothing in the logs to indicate a cause of the crash. The difference now, though, was that the system seemed to be crashing faster. After just a few minutes, it would be locked up like before the disk crash. So I pulled it out of the closet again and hooked it up to a keyboard and monitor so I could watch it crash first-hand … and it didn’t crash.

Google to the rescue! I found this post that seemed to describe my exact problem: a headless server running the latest 2.6.31.x kernel crashed after just 10 minutes. The cause? The screensaver! Or, rather, since the server isn’t running X windows, the screen blanker that turns off the monitor after 10 minutes. Apparently due to some bug in the interaction between the kernel and the basic video driver, when the system tried to turn off the monitor when no monitor was attached, the system would just hang. This is why the system was just fine as I worked on it all weekend, but then crashed as soon as I moved it back into the closet and it was headless again. I added the suggested init script for disabling the screen blanking to my system, rebooted, and waited. 11 minutes later, the server was still running. Eureka!

The server has now been stable for a few days, so I finally seem to be past the problems. What bugs me now is the similarity of the two crashes. Obviously, according to my diagnostic tools, the original hard drive was failing in a bad way. Is it just a coincidence that the second video/screen blanking-related crash exhibited the same symptoms as the failing disk? That seems suspicious, but the server was running for a lot longer in between crashes, not failing after just 10 minutes of uptime. I was using a slightly different version of the 2.6.31 kernel on the old drive (I’m using 2.6.32 now) so maybe it was due to that different revision.

At any rate, after all of that, the server is finally back. In addition to giving me the “opportunity” to rebuild the server from scratch, this incident also helped to confirm that I’ve got a decent backup strategy in place. Sure, it took me a few days (instead of hours) to get everything back online, which wouldn’t be acceptable in a business situation, but at least I had zero data loss!

The hard drive in my server crashed! I’ve been having problems over the past few days where Ubuntu was just locked up and the server was unpingable. I’m trying to make a backup image of the drive before it completely dies, but for now I’ve got some of the site back up and running with last week’s backup on a spare drive and a clean Ubuntu install. Not everything is back, so there might be some broken links and stuff generally not working correctly.

Fun!

Google’s forthcoming Chromium OS has gotten a lot of buzz recently. My trusty old EeePC 4G Surf has become quite the sandbox for trying out different netbook operating systems, so of course now it is running Chromium. I downloaded the latest of Hexxeh’s Chrome builds, copied the image onto a 1gb thumb drive, and then installed the image onto the SSD in my EeePC. It boots to the signon screen in about 15 seconds:

You login using your Google/Gmail credentials, since this is an OS for the cloud (of course, I had to login with the default ‘facepunch’ from Hexxeh’s FAQ first so I could join the netbook to my wireless network before it could authenticate my Google login).

As you can see from the login screen in my video above, it’s not well suited for the smaller 7″ screen on my EeePC. The settings dialog, for instance, goes off the bottom of the screen and the usual Alt+mouse to drag a window doesn’t seem to work. Also, since this was installed as an image, the SSD drive looks like just a 1gb drive so I’m missing out on the other 3gb for storage. Graphics performance isn’t that great either.

Other than that, I’ve successfully turned my netbook into a almost fully functional Ubuntu machine into a device that only runs a browser. Hmmm. I guess this is the simplicity Google is shooting for, but it’s almost too simple for me.

Oh, and while I’m talking about Google … why won’t they let me put my iGoogle tabs back on top of the page instead of on the left? It’s a ridiculous waste of space, and it’s even worse on the smaller screen of my EeePC.

After over 13 years of using (mostly) PalmOS and (some) Windows Mobile devices as my PDA and/or cell phone, I now own my first device that runs … OS X. Yep, I got an iPhone.

We’re in the early stages of testing the iPhone with our corporate e-mail infrastructure: Microsoft Exchange and GoodLink. Since my AT&T account has been upgrade-eligible for some time (the last time I “officially” upgraded was when my Treo 650 was the hot new device), my boss told me to go ahead and get an iPhone (16gb model, but I paid a little out-of-pocket to get the 32gb one since my current iPod is 30gb). I need to start learning how to use it so I can eventually support it as we roll the device out to other users in the office. It’s been two weeks now since I abandoned my trusty Treo 680 and I had some free time while on vacation last week to really spend some time with the iPhone. Here’re some of my thoughts …

What I Like

• the design and form factor: the iPhone is truly a beautiful thing to look at given it’s mostly screen and a single home button. Even with my Otterbox impact case on, it still fits comfortably in my pants pocket. I miss having a physical keyboard (see “What I Don’t Like” below) but the buttons that are present make sense.
• it’s a widescreen iPod: when music is playing and a call comes in, the music fades away and then the phone rings. When you’re done with the call, the music fades back in, picking up where you left off. One minor nit here, though, is that if you have the e-mail notification sound enabled, your music will fade briefly to play the mail sound, which isn’t necessary (the notification should just be suppressed). I replaced my old Belkin Tunebase FM with the new version for the iPhone so I can charge the device in my car and still listen to podcasts while driving. It includes a speakerphone for handsfree and a single button that works like the home button on the phone: click once to pause/play, twice to go forward a track, twice and hold for fast forward, three times to back a track, thrice and hold for rewind. I like being able to turn the phone sideways and watch video podcasts in widescreen too (although scrolling through podcasts is uncharacteristically choppy).
• the GPS: using the built-in GPS and compass for location-based/direction-based services is really slick. Pulling up Google Maps and watching the blue dot move along a highway as I drive is like a scene out of a spy movie. Check out Yelp’s monocle feature for a perfect example of augmented reality using these features.
• the camera: I’ve been stuck with the VGA (640×480) camera in my PalmOS devices for so long! It’s great to finally have a mega-pixel camera (with video even!) that takes pretty good pictures. I love the geo-tagging feature too.
• the speaker: being able to play music without headphones or external speakers is a definite plus.
• oh yeah, it’s a phone: when held up to your ear, the screen turns itself off. Take it away from your ear, and the screen fades back into view. You don’t have to navigate through a voice response system to record your voicemail message or retrieve your messages, just tap the buttons on-screen. It’s those little things that continue to impress me. Of course, I haven’t actually used it a lot as a phone since it does so much other cool stuff.

What I Don’t Like

• the keyboard: no one can argue that the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is better than then Treo’s. Typing on glass just isn’t the same. I’m getting better at two-thumbing it, but I still find typing (quickly) a frustrating exercise.
• iTunes: I haven’t looked into this much yet, but having to use iTunes to sync and customize the phone is a pain, especially if you’re using more than one computer. For example I sync my iPhone with my main desktop machine at home. While travelling over Thanksgiving, I had my laptop with me, but could not use iTunes on it to manage my phone. This is really going to be a pain at work when I’m trying to configure multiple iPhones for people in the office. I found the iPhone Configuration Utility but still need to read up on enterprise deployments.
• syncing (or lack thereof): requiring iTunes also makes it difficult for applications to sync their data for backup. Palm had HotSync and conduits which allowed third-party developers to create custom “tunnels” in HotSync that were basically transparent to the user. To sync my eWallet desktop with my iPhone data, I have to open each application (on my PC and the phone), and then start the sync over Wi-Fi (totally outside of iTunes). A kludgy workaround due to Apple’s control freak design. Even the photos and videos you take on the iPhone don’t sync down to your PC through iTunes, instead you have to use the built-in features of your PC since the device appears as a plain storage device (although you can sync certain folders of photos back to the iPhone from your PC if you want to carry a certain collection around).
• I miss the clickwheel: using my iPod in the car without looking was pretty easy with the clickwheel. I was even pretty good at skipping most commercials (half a turn on the wheel was about 30 seconds). The iPhone isn’t as easy since it doesn’t have a lot of buttons. Yes, you can use the home button to skip tracks, or FF/RW, but for more accurate positioning you have to use the on-screen scrubber with your finger, which is pretty dangerous to do while driving.
• lack of customization options: sure I can drag the app icons around to different pages, but I can’t rename them, can’t leave empty spaces on the grid, can only assign a few different options to the home button, etc. Sure, I could mess around with jailbreaking and probably address some of those concerns, but I need to be able to support this device at work so I can’t deviate too much from the delivered experience.
• battery life: forgive me … I’ve been using a Treo on the Edge network for almost 4 years and battery life was pretty darn good. I’d only have to charge it overnight and it was good for all day. 3G and all the other cool stuff I can do on my iPhone really sucks the battery dry quickly. When I had my separate iPod and Treo, it didn’t matter if my iPod died while listening to music during the day since my phone still worked. Now that I have this single device I need to be more careful about making sure I keep it charged. The lack of a user-replaceable battery is a downer too. It’d be nice if I could just buy a new battery and put it in myself instead of having to send the whole phone back to Apple for a “repair.”
• fingerprints: it really sucks that 5 seconds after taking this beautiful shiny piece of technology out of the box it’s covered in my greasy fingerprints. The matte finish screen protectors I got at the AT&T store do a decent job of hiding them, though, and make the screen a lot less reflective and not so glassy to the touch.
• it’s delicate: this will take some time to play out, but the Treos were solid. Not that I drop my phone a lot, but when I do, it’s usually in a bad way. The Treo might have gotten scratched or scuffed, but it kept on working. Little plastic tanks. I’m not so sure about the iPhone. I already dropped it once onto concrete but luckily I have that impact rubber case and it landed screen up. The folks in the office are pretty hard on their devices (based on the drawer full of broken phones in my desk) so it’ll be interesting to see if the iPhone is up to their abuse.

What Apps Do I Use?

There’s an app for everything, right? Another of the big draws of the iPhone is the thousands of applications available in the iTunes App Store. One of the first things I had to do was find iPhone equivalents of the applications I used on a daily basis on my Treo. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

• What I used on the Treo: eWallet
• What I switched to for the iPhone: eWallet ($10 for iPhone, or $20 usable on multiple devices including PC)

Like anyone, I have a lot of passwords, logins, and various personal private information I need to carry around with me. To keep all of this sensitive information secure and portable, I’ve used Ilium Software’s eWallet application for many years. Luckily this switch was easily since Ilium has PalmOS, Windows Mobile, PC, and iPhone versions of  eWallet, and now I’ve used them all. Migrating my data was simple, although synchronization between the desktop and iPhone versions is a little cumbersome since you have to initialize the sync on both devices at the same time over Wi-Fi. Still, being able to access all of my passwords, accounts, and other stuff I store in my wallet on the iPhone is great.

• What I used on the Treo: ListPro
• What I switched to for the iPhone: Evernote (free)

I also keep a lot of random information on my handheld: gift ideas, vacation days, clothes sizes, various house information/measurements, lists of all sorts! So Ilium Software’s ListPro was another application I relied heavily on, using it both on my Treo and desktop PC. Unfortunately, Ilium hasn’t produced an iPhone version of ListPro yet so I had to search for alternatives. I ended up trying Evernote, which has iPhone and PC versions (in addition to many more, including via a web browser). Evernote requires you to create an account on their website, so technically your notes are being stored on their servers and then synced with your different devices. You can store text, images, documents, etc. but keep in mind the only notes you can actually edit on the iPhone have to be plain, unformatted text (so no checkboxes, bullets, etc.). Creating notes on the iPhone has the benefit of automatic location tagging, using the phone’s GPS. The basic free service has a limit on how much you can upload a month, so there’s a premium service you can pay for without those limits and also includes things like extra security. I had to manually copy/paste all of my lists out of ListPro into Evernote, which was a bit of a pain, but it did give me the opportunity to clean up and re-organize some of my lists.

• What I used on the Treo: Tasks (GoodLink)
• What I switched to for the iPhone: iMTasks ($7)

With GoodLink on my Treo, my e-mail, contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes from Outlook were all synchronized in near real-time. The iPhone handles the e-mail, contacts, and calendar, but not the to do list or notes. I am a heavy user of Outlook tasks so I really wanted those synced to my iPhone. For whatever reason, Apple decided not to bake that in. Instead, I had to purchase RERLSoft’s IMTasks app. Once I entered my Exchange information, the app downloaded my to do list and keeps it synchronized (although only while the app is open). Hopefully the forthcoming GoodLink client for the iPhone will include this, but for now this was a must-purchase function for me. RERLSoft has a version that includes Outlook notes synchronization (and also allows you to manage your out-of-office setting), but since I’m using Evernote now I decided to stop using Outlook notes altogether.

• What I used on the Treo: TealAuto
• What I switched to for the iPhone: Gas Cubby ($5, free lite version available)

Some other data I keep on my phone is car information: gas mileage, repair history, etc. On my Treo I used TealPoint’s TealAuto application to store and track fill-ups, repairs, maintenance, etc. Without an iPhone version, I tried out a few of the vehicle apps in the App Store, including the free “lite” version of Gas Cubby and eventually ended up purchasing the full version. Using the Windows version of TealAuto, I was able to export all of my data from my Treo into a CSV file. Then, using App Cubby’s unsupported import feature, I was able to load it all into Gas Cubby. The import only supports gas events, though, not maintenance, so I manually entered our 2009 maintenance events into the app later (not a big deal since there were a lot less of those compared to fill-ups). If you’re a multiple iPhone home and purchase multiple copies of Gas Cubby, you can even keep the data synchronized across devices, which is a cool feature.

• What I used on the Treo: iSilo
• What I switched to for the iPhone: Stanza (free)

If you read this blog you know I do a lot of reading on my PDA. There’s not a version of iSilo for the iPhone so I had to try out a few free e-readers. I settled on Stanza. Using the desktop version, I was able to convert the book I’m reading from the Baen free library from HTML into a format for the Stanza reader and transfer it to my iPhone. Having the larger, higher resolution screen on the device is great for reading. Plus you can change font sizes, colors, and themes (black on white, white on black, textured, etc.). I’ve also installed Amazon’s Kindle Reader (free), in case I decide to purchase some new e-books. No need for a Kindle now! Interesting, though, that Stanza is actually owned by Amazon. I wonder if eventually they’ll combine these apps?

• What I used on the Treo: tussh
• What I switched to for the iPhone: iSSH ($5), iRdesktop (free)

Why do I like remoting into my Linux server from my phone? Because I can, of course! iSSH let’s me login to my Ubuntu box at home via command-line or tunnelled VNC. The free iRdesktop utility lets me connect to my Windows servers at work when I have my iPhone connected to the VPN. Amazing. There’s even a free Citrix client (but I haven’t gotten it to work properly yet).

• What I used on the Treo: iRogue
• What I switched to for the iPhone: Rogue (free)

My daughter loves playing iRogue on my Treo and I like it too, so of course I needed the iPhone version!

Some other apps I’ve purchased/installed include:

• iEmergency+ ($1) allows you to store your emergency contact information (phone numbers, medical info, etc.) in a single place and also has a helpful utility for adding ICE information to your iPhone’s lock screen.
• Using VIP Access (free) means I don’t need to carry around my PayPal football or VeriSign Secure Card since my iPhone can now act as my security token.
• The iPhone doesn’t allow for multiple e-mail signatures when you use multiple e-mail accounts. JohnHancock ($2) lets you create and switch between as many as you need. There doesn’t seem to be an elegant solution, but this app at least provides one.
• RedLaser ($2) is an amazing barcode scanning application. Point your iPhone’s camera at any barcode and the app will pull up a list of prices from other stores. The latest update even uses the GPS to find local prices. If nothing else, it’s fun to play with.
• Chess with Friends (free) and Words with Friends (free) from New Toy, Inc. are basically chess and Scrabble games you can play “online” with other iPhone users. Really cool for playing with friends or relatives who live far away. We used both of these games in the car on our recent Thanksgiving holiday trip to play games without having to pass a single iPhone back and forth.

What Do I Think?

The iPhone is a really slick device. The first few days were rough for me, since I was really set in my ways with my Treo and doing things in a certain way. Over the past two weeks, though, as I’ve had time to get better acquainted with my new shiny toy business tool, I have to admit it is a well engineered piece of hardware and software. Now I have a single device that really covers all the bases. Pretty incredible.

Got any other must-have/must-try apps for me, or other iPhone advice, tips, or tricks? Leave me a comment!

While I continue to wait for the delivery of my FitBit I picked up Wii Fit Plus last weekend.

Wii Fit Plus is basically an upgrade to the original Wii Fit that came with the balance board: it contains all of the original games and activities, then adds a bunch of new games (Training Plus) and features. It will automatically import all of your data from Wii Fit so you won’t even need your old disc anymore. So, what’s new and cool?

First off, you can now create profiles for babies and pets. Why? Well, I guess if you want to be able to track the weight of those smaller members of your household it can come in handy. Like in Wii Fit, the balance board weighs you first, and then you holding your dog, cat, or baby to calculate the difference. It’s kinda cute to see our dogs in the Wii Fit Plaza.

A new “multi-player” feature is available from the Wii Fit Plaza which allows a bunch of people to alternate playing the mini-games, but none of it counts towards Wii Fit credits. I guess it’s just a way to allow your guests to try out the games without needing to create a profile, get weighed in, etc.

One new feature I was looking forward to was the addition of routines, basically “playlists” of activities that was supposed to streamline performing multiple exercises in a row without all of the pausing and clicking. Unfortunately, you can only add Strength Training and Yoga activities to a routine, not any of the Aerobics or Balance activities. Also, you’re limited to a certain number of reps. For example, instead of having the option to add 5, 10, or 20 push-up and side-plank reps, you can only choose 6 at a time. To work around this you’d have to add multiples of the 6-rep activities in a row:

Once you do have the routine set up, though, it definitely makes performing multiple activities more efficient. You don’t need to keep clicking the A button a bunch of times to move on, you just see a brief checklist and then the next activity starts.

Wii Fit Plus also assigns METs (Metabolic Equivalents) to activities so in addition to showing you the number of minutes you’ve exercised (Wii Fit credits) it will also calculate the number of calories you’ve burned. New options in the Activity Log also let you track your waist size and the number of steps you’ve taken during the day (assuming you have a pedometer to track that data for you … this is where my FitBit will eventually come into play).

The new Training Plus games are a lot of fun too! Cycling, Segway riding, snowball fights, the obstacle course, and many more new additions can really get you back into Wii Fit if you’ve been getting bored with the old activities.

So, if you bought Wii Fit give Wii Fit Plus a try … it’s definitely worth the $20 (or less, if you shop around).

Last week, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was officially released so over this past weekend I went ahead and upgraded my server to the new version. As with my prior upgrades, I ran the process remotely over SSH (my server is a headless box sitting in a closet) and it was very smooth. The only minor problem I had was the initial download of the required packages failed, but I suspect that was because the Ubuntu site was being slammed with everyone downloading the new software. I restarted the upgrade several hours later, the downloads completed and the upgrade proceeded. After the release upgrade was done, I only had to put back a few minor tweaks and customizations (such as disabling IPv6), do a quick reboot, and the box was back in business.

I also grabbed the release version of the Netbook Remix since I had installed the beta on my EeePC earlier last month. I wasn’t able to get it to install, however: the system booted just fine from the USB drive where I extracted the ISO, but the installer would crash almost immediately with the following error: “Cannot mount /dev/loop1 on /cow.” I found this thread on the EeeUser Forums that seemed to think it was a problem using Ubuntu’s own USB creator utility to “burn” the image onto the thumb drive. So I used unetbootin to re-image the drive and that fixed the problem! Strange that Ubuntu’s own utility would have a problem like that.

My little sister will turn 30 next year on 10/10/10, which is pretty cool on a number (no pun intended) of levels, mainly 10 + 10 + 10 = 30. This got me to thinking that being born on the first day of October, I’ve never really had one of those cool birthdays like 01/02/03, 07/07/07, etc. When the first two numbers you have to work with are 10/01, what cool thing can you possibly come up with?

Being a programmer, the first thing that struck me is that my birthday is all binary digits (1001). I already missed 10/01/01 so looking ahead I determined I’ve got two more binaries birthdays coming up in 2010 and 2011. Check this out … I’m 37 now, so that means on my next two birthdays, the 8-bit binary representation of my birthday will match my age!

10/01/2010 = 00100110 = 38

10/01/2011 = 00100111 = 39

That’s some serious geek cred right there.

Jolicloud just wasn’t cutting it for me, so now that the beta of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released, I’ve put it on my EeePC 4G Surf (the fourth distro I’ve run on that netbook this year). Ooooo, pretty:

I haven’t had a lot of time to play/tweak, but so far all the important stuff (wireless, Fn keys, sound, etc.) is working.