Comming Soon, New Site

Say Wha? Elliott's actually going to have a site rather than just a blog? Well, yea. I've accumulated a bunch of little projects that I want to share with the world. Little hacks, essays, and resources. For example, just a few minutes ago I put together a search bar for UW-Madison's MadCat.

So, the blog will be staying at http://blog.elliottrezny.com and the new site will be at http://www.elliottrezny.com, which previously redirected to the blog.

Identi.ca? Pretty Cool

Just took the time to familiarize myself with identi.ca. For the uninformed, it's an implementation of an open source microblogging service called StatusNet. Different sites can have their own setup and link them to other sites. I'm interested in the idea of a house StatusNet. The goal would be to connect every appliance in the house to it. As long as the implementation is fast enough, it could provide useful updates like "Cloths dry. Laundry ready to be cycled." or "Front door unlocked" with a picture of course. Right now, it could be a cool way to connect different app based computers around the house. How about a MythTV box that tweets when it records a new show? Of course, hosting your own would keep the info private.

Look me up, http://identi.ca/erezny

Folding@Home

Over the summer I went on a Folding@Home rampage to become the top contributer of the UW-Madison Team. I was in 2nd place with 100,000 points after about 2 years, and the first place person had 200,000 points. In about 2 months, I had 200,000 points. After the 3rd month, I had 300,000 points. I laughed at how the person probably never even cared about points, and I had just used all of my computing reasources to beat them. That first place person has not contributed since. I feel kind of bad, but not really. I think they were a sore looser.

Elliott not in good mood

So I've just wasted my Monday night on the seemingly simple task of upgrading my laptop's hard drive. Now, granted, I did not go the normal route and find a hard drive with software included or go to bestbuy or DOIT to have it upgraded - although if DOIT does do that, it would have been a decent decision. WARNING: sarcastic geek talk to follow

But oh no, I had heard about PartImage, the magical GPL partition backup program! It comes as a ready to burn cd image that boots the computer into partition backup goodness. So, most of us computer techs have suffered through the loss of the floppy drive in modern computers which rendered some pretty awesome bootdisks powerless, but how about not having a cdrom drive? Yea, yea, it's expected nowadays, but really, I'm using a laptop. When was the last time you put anything but a movie or a music cd into your laptop? That's what I figured when I decided to save the $250 and skip the internal cd drive. At the time i found a nice dvd burner for $90! (find internal ones for $20 now)

Ok, so I have my nifty cheapo Memorex brand external one. So i get the disk, burn it, restart my computer... windows. Wait 3 minutes for boot up, 3 minutes for shutdown, try again. Change bios settings, try again. Pretty soon 30 minutes fly by. No problem. I have hours. I'll just make a ubcd and put the image on there. 30 minute download. Realize that ubcd really doesn't like booting cd images. Find out that my motherboard HATES usb drives. It would only boot it every 2nd or 3rd try. You can see where this is getting me. Finally, I figure out how to get the PartImage cd directly on the usbdrive. Doesn't work. WHAT THE HECK! 95% of the docs I've looked at today were wonderfully out of date. A little manual set up later, I have partimage going, backing up my hard drive at the balmy speed of .3 gigs per minute. At 60 gigabytes, that's about 3.5 hours. No problem, it's 7pm still (only 4 hours after I started trying). So i make myself dinner, start working on a network boot server so i never have this problem again, and make some cookies to keep me happy and occupied.

Now fast forward to 11:30. I have the new hard drive imaged. Oh, but there has to be another problem. I need to make a Master Boot Record. Oh, well that's easy, I'll just pop in my vista install cd and use recovery mode... Ohh, cool, partimage copies the mbr for me! Copy over mbr... Wait a second, I forgot that the mbr holds the partition information, which means i just threw myself back to 10:30, and it's midnight.

So here I am, some time past 1am, and I cant help but to think of all of the things that went wrong. Who can I blame it on?? Here's what I think:
1) Good ol' FOSS evangelizing me. Sad part is that ubcd isn't even foss. Why the heck to I depend on programs i have never used before???
2) Toshiba. It's been over a year since their last bios update, and the bios is still a p-o-s (not the kind that i sell). Why the heck can't it boot from usb cdrom drives, and why does it hate usbdrives? Half the time trying to boot from usb it screwed up so bad that it forgot about the hard drive and tried to pxe boot!
3)Pepsi and sugar cookies. Who am I kidding, I wouldn't have tried half the stupid things I did if i didn't have my sweets to keep me through it. I dedicate this post to the 3 pepsis and 7 cookies (soon to be 8) that kept me going.
4) Why does the most out of date stuff wind up at the top of google? Half way through I realized i was following instructions for v0.4.5 when i had v1.1.5. That's a pretty big difference. I guess I go in this category too, because I didn't bother taking the time to fix anything or point out any changes.
5) Stupid antiviruses. This is at least the 3rd project that my anti-virus has foiled me on. Hows this for an idea, when i give a program admin rights to install something, don't try to stop it!!

Whoo-ee. Thank goodness i have this place to rant where I can get it all out and know that it doesn't matter because nobody will probably read this all the way through anyways. BTW, I'm still not done with this stupid mbr thing. ubcd4win was my next try but my antivirus software is pissing me off. So I think I'm going to try hooking up the hard drive in my desktop computer where i can run the vista cd and fix the mbr from there. wish me luck