My English Weblog

Fuck Intrepid Ibex – or how I lost my MBR

Jonatan Hägglund — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:48:37 +0000

A couple of days ago, I had finally managed to get the least (not to mention most incorrectly) documented camera system of all time.

As I had noted running the Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Live CD, there was finally support for my MacBook’s wireless card (MB version 2,1). Since I had this 12 GiB partition unused (once holding ubuntu, now unable to unify my hard drive withput wiping my Tiger installation) lying around I decided to reinstall this new version knowing I would not have to spend hours remembering how to do the wireless config (or, for that matter, the correct commands).

After installation and reboot it did not – boot that is. Just a blinking question marked folder. I don’t usually curse, but something similar to the title went through my mind soon enough. Not only did it not identify any of my OS:es (Live CD:s working, though), but OS X installation disk does not recognise my OS X partition, only the GNU/Linux partitions (I could mount Local HD in Ubuntu, so I knew it wasn’t gone)! Thus no repair

Managed to install Ubuntu 7.04 from an old CD, and got it to boot.

Perhaps a rEFIt problem? Nope, boots from Live-CD and lists Ubuntu partition.

Won’t mount from GRUB, or I am lacking 1337 skillz…

Reads that apparently this is due to some bug in the Ubuntu installer somewhere, starting to get a tad angry.

Spends countless hours trying to mount it RW to get full access to the partition, hopeful to change som setting from there or reinstall some faulty component – whatever. No avail.

Tries to set up SAMBA or NFS connection between my MacBook and the iMac my dad borrowed me, can’t get this to work for some reason, and don’t have patience for this anyway. Finds Cross Soft FTP Server (great, nearly done – yay). Only avilable as JNLP (Java Web Start), which for whatever reason does not work for me, neither does NetX. VSFTP won’t work properly either

Set up the Cross Soft FTP Server with Web Start from Leopard on the iMac, and sets up an account with write permission. Reaches it from MacBook with Filezilla – yay!

Only setback: for some reason FileZilla prefers to not put things in their respective directories on the iMac, but dumps every thing at root – but what the heck, I get my crucial data back, and only files lost in the process is some prefpane or plist

I even got my BankID (electronic identification card system) files ported and working, and I have installed most of my Open Source Apps on the iMac – I even think I will be able to import my mboxes!!!

To do: reformat MacBook and get Tiger on there again, perhaps port back all my stuff (or start from scratch, haven’t decided yet)…

And of course sort the wonderful mess FileZilla left me (yes, that’s probably my own fault)…

Update

I lost remarkably little data during this by-proxy migration:

I lost my Battle for Wesnoth save files (or at least were unable to locate them), which is annoying considering myself being halfway through a gargantuous campaign
I lost my Firefox bookmarks, but I backed them up to del.icio.us some time ago, so only partly damaged
Finally, the thing that actually hurt – my Thunderbird mboxes! All my mail gone, hopefully most of it has been relayed by Gmail, backing me up by mere luck :-/

My MacBook now hold a fresh install of Tiger, and I’m setting it up with my core share of free utilities…

The tale of the spontaneous reanimation of my MacBook battery

Jonatan Hägglund — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:37:49 +0000

This is one of the few really strange things that has happened to me since I wnat from Windows to the happy land of Macintosh (apart from the fact that you cannot change anything more advanced than your wallpaper unless you have go through the über-maczealot licen$ing programme).

One evening my wife was surfing of my (unplugged) computer. After quite some time she asks me why there is a warning that the computer will shutdown in five minutes – and I tell her to connect it to the power outlet. And everything is fine. Until I realize a few hours later, that not only will it not recharge, it will not recognize the battery at all!

The battery has been near depletion a few times earlier, so it shouldn’t be that, but knowing that this is sometimes an issue – among other things – I let it rest for some time. Then I zapped both the PRAM and NVRAM or whatever they call them, everything there is to do according to the general tips out in the forums. I also installed some battery updates just in case. No effect at all.

This had been much less of a nuisance if it hadn’t proved to be almost impossible to work with a mac with a MagSafe connector without a battery as support for whenever you sneezed or breathed or something else making it temporarily disconnect. I finally glued the darn this to my mac, and it has never worked better…

Before commencing with the glueing together of parts I called Apples service people who noted that:

My insurance policy was since two or three month expired (bummer)
The only thing to do was donating a kidney to afford a replacement battery.

Since I’ve grown quite fond of my interior, I hence decided to test the gluing together my MagSafe components (violating my void insurance). It worked like a dream.

Now there was only left the strange shutdowns not related to the power cable – did I mention the Apple Software update shortly before this whole battery incident?

After a recent ITunes update in combination with the disconnection of the MacBook from due to an imminent power failure – and forgetting to telling my wife about it – the computer then ran on batteries for quite some time until I noticed both that the power percentometer was back (recognition of the battery, yay), and the disconected power cable.

I left it alone to recharge, and now it seems to have never happened.

So, was this the hands of the Lord – or a sign that Apple should start rehiring to having enough competent personnel to work o both the iPhone and OS X..?

Steampunk Star Wars

Jonatan Hägglund — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:09:08 +0000

Star wars characters re imagined in steam punk style:
I consider myself a fan of the steam-punkier side of fiction, and I do believe it is a wonderful idea – yet I am not as excited over the design as I could have.
It seems like some very standard steam punk design ideas have been mashed together to form a frame for some of the more unconventional characters of modern fiction.

A word from s:t Augustine

Jonatan Hägglund — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:35:18 +0000

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

Esperanto

Jonatan Hägglund — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:50:48 +0000

A language freely available, deserving more attention that it has been given….

Another fine day of research…not

Jonatan Hägglund — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:45:07 +0000

I have, however, put some thought into this dynamic lying business I have in mind for my Distributed Systems II project…

Tomorrow I’ll try to draft the papes given to me, as well as line-out the basic algorithms design.