Department of Redundancy Department

Found an old Redo Backup image of my ThinkPad on my external hard drive.  Decided I wanted the space back, but didn't want to just delete it.  (Pack rats point to me when they want to talk about people who hoard things.)

Didn't want to risk 'bit rot' on the DVD's I burned it too, so I ran Parchive to get Reed-Solomon error-correction files, then burned the Redo files and the *.par files to a set of disks.

But that's not being paranoid enough.

So, I ran DVDisaster on the ISOs that I'd built, then ran Parchive on the resulting ECC files, and made an ISO image from them.  Then I re-ran DVDisaster on that ISO to include as much ECC data as would fit, and burned two copies.

So, if any of the primary DVD's bit-rot, the DVDisaster data should get them back.  If not, I'll restore what I can, then use the PArchive files to get the Redo data back.

I have to admit, I didn't check to see if the Redo files and their Par files are spread out well enough that I can loose an entire DVD without being unable to recover.

Maybe I ought to burn another set...

(That direct link isn't responding right now, so here's the Wikipedia entry for Redo Backup)

Here's another sentence I never thought I'd read

From a recent Linux Weekly News summary of current Linux kernel development:

For S390 users who find the current limit of 3.8TB of RAM to be constraining: 3.3 will add support for four-level page tables and an upper limit of 64TB (for now).

Normally I complain about how absurd such things would have been ten or twenty or whatever years ago.

This one seems absurd now.

And You Thought Linux Wasn't User Friendly?

Been playing with Plan 9 From Bell Labs.

Man is that counter-intuitive. Unix was all about minimalism. BSD and Linux still are, at the kernel level anyway (let's not talk about GUI wars for a moment.)

Plan 9 is even more extreme. Think of a bare X server (no window manager, etc.) and you're close.

No title bars, nothing even vaguely like 'help' or even 'intuitive icons' (or icons of any kind.)

Getting kind of used to it, but I'll never do anything serious, I think. More's the pity.

Take a look for yourself.

Another no-content link post

This is turning into an extremely low-volume geek version of InstaPundit.

Here's an interesting take on "Are threads still a menace?"

Which is itself something of a riff on this other thread-menace post from about ten years ago.

Quote of the Day

The quote for today:

Hobbyists regularly perform unexpected feats of grand but dubious utility: "I wouldn't have thought it was possible to deep-fry kool-aid, but there it is. I'm still trying to figure out if I should sing your praises or set you on fire." They set out to do one thing, and accomplish three others instead.

From http://www.landley.net/

Yet another rant

The fun thing about computers is there is a nearly infinite number of things about them to complain about, and an uncountable number of people who do, usually in the most scatalogical terms.

To wit, this guy.

News You Can Abuse

Kindle Fire review "for those who plan to void the warranty"