Monthly Archive for July, 2010

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Ubuntu One Subscribed Folders

As followers of my blog know, the hard drive in my laptop recently failed, forcing me to reinstall both Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and Windows 7. Fortunately on the Ubuntu side, I did have Ubuntu One set up with the free 2GB account, which is a cloud-based backup service. However, I found that once I entered my account credentials and expanded the reach of Ubuntu One’s synced folders a bit, only the new folders were syncing: my Documents, Music, and Pictures had the menu option present to sync them on Ubuntu One, but no matter what I did I could not get them to actually sync.

Then, via the Ubuntu One FAQs, I found the key is the command line tools u1sync and u1sdtool. These are both part of the ubuntuone-client-tools package, not installed by default. Continue reading ‘Ubuntu One Subscribed Folders’

Tweets on 2010-07-21

  • Anyone know why my pictures might be uploading multiple times to @miqlive? Also, why @twitter's website is detecting me in northern Dallas? #
  • Just had to "fix" my apartment complex's dryer to finish my laundry. However, my toilet is still leaking all over the place… #

Tweets on 2010-07-20

  • RT @Alyssa_Milano: ~GROUPHUG~

    Get in.
    – I'd be willing to be included in a hug involving @Alyssa_Milano any day! #

  • @smithyincucf This is why I do all my warranty fulfillment at the store… it becomes Not My Problem if they don't want to honor it. in reply to smithyincucf #
  • I liked a YouTube video — Mario and Mr. T Sing by Accident http://youtu.be/2v-v3jh-Cco?a #
  • @JWinterkorn Sounds fun. I'm the only active member on the forums in my store… but at least I finally made sure they all have accounts! in reply to JWinterkorn #
  • No, @Twitter, I'm not in Irving, TX either. Obviously your location services are not detecting my location properly. #
  • Mr. T sings, in the key of "I'm A Night Elf Mohawk" http://youtu.be/2v-v3jh-Cco #
  • Ugh, just woke up to the smell of fresh skunk. Smells like it sprayed the side of the building. #

Hard Drive Saga

As those following my Twitter feed (on Facebook, here or at http://www.twitter.com/mattfast1) know, the hard drive in my laptop failed a couple days ago. The warning signs when it finally failed were pretty impossible to ignore: I had two operating systems installed on the computer. One (Ubuntu LTS 10.04) would not boot at all (“Could not find /sbin/init”), and the other (Windows 7 x64 Ultimate) would boot but was running extremely slowly. It seemed the damage was much more prevalent in the areas that stored the Ubuntu “disk” (really just a file on the Windows NTFS partition), which was quite maddening because I had just downloaded a bunch of songs from Napster.

So I booted a live CD and ran a check on the Ubuntu disk first, in an attempt to salvage some data. Somehow during that process, I lost my /home directory completely, which raises a decent argument for using the Ubuntu One cloud backup service, which was thankfully set up on that PC so I had only lost the most recent downloads. However, the Windows side was a bit more irksome – corrupted files simply wouldn’t let me copy any part of them or interact with the files in any way. Most of that stuff I had backed up somewhere else though.

In the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did lose more than I realize. However, most of the stuff I would have lost that I don’t realize now would have been a holdover from the days of Windows Vista on that laptop, that hasn’t been touched in over a year. I do have the old hard drive, so if need be I can always pop that into a SATA drive reader and attempt to extract more of that drive’s contents. And, now that the whole saga is over, I now have a 640GB hard drive in my laptop (used to be 160GB), so I have plenty of space to ferry anything I need from my home to Liz’s, or to either workplace, or anywhere else I need to go. The new drive has 5 partitions: /dev/sda1 is a 100MB partition the Windows installer put the bootloader on, /dev/sda2 is a 200GB partition for Windows 7′s install, /dev/sda5 is a 784MB partition for Linux swap space, /dev/sda6 is a 24.5GB partition for the Ubuntu install, and /dev/sda7 is a 350GB partition for the /home directories on Ubuntu. Of course it’s all accessible from Ubuntu (read+write), and Windows is extremely happy only being able to access 200GB since it only had ~150 on the other hard drive.

Now, I just have to complete the arduous task of reinstalling all my programs on both operating systems, and getting everything set back up the way I like it.

Tweets on 2010-07-19

  • Two OS installs completed on new laptop drive. Really says something that a fresh install of Windows 7 is taking 75% of the space used… #
  • Grumble… http://twitpic.com/26kcsx #
  • Ran PC-Check on laptop overnight. Confirmed hard drive epic fail. Guess we can add that to the things I will be doing today… #

Tweets on 2010-07-18

  • You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you were looking for. #
  • Yet another pair of Geek Squad pants falls in the line of duty: http://twitpic.com/269582 #
  • Antivirus Programs [Pic]: http://digg.com/d31X31p?t #
  • Ubuntu disk is now accessible – however, /home/matt is now completely missing. I suppose it's a good thing I had Ubuntu One set up… #
  • OK, now my auto-detected location is Carrollton, TX. I'm wondering why I keep being detected as being in the northern suburbs of Dallas. #
  • Copying a copious amount of information from my laptop to my external – it's over 100k files totaling >50GB. Still can't access Ubuntu disk. #
  • Running FSCK on Ubuntu filesystem. Finding TONS of unreadable blocks that are being force rewritten. Good thing I have a journaled FS here! #
  • I have a bad feeling I'm starting to lose the hard drive in my laptop – Ubuntu won't boot and Windows 7 is running slow as hell. #

Why I Blog

Why do I blog?

I’ve asked myself that several times over the years. Most of the time, I don’t get a good answer from my own brain, and I usually forget. However, I’ve been blogging for long enough, I think I have a better answer.

I started blogging in early 2002. At the time, I was a simple freshman at Arapahoe High School. As anyone who’s attended high school knows, this is an incredibly tumultuous time in everyone’s life, full of loathing, self-doubt, and racked with the pain of isolation, no matter how many friends you have. I had plenty of friends, but none who could help me with my issues; their brand of “help”, just like many males in their early teenage years, would have been to make fun of me. I was tired of bottling things up so I signed up for a fledgling service named LiveJournal, where my account still lives but gathers quite a bit of dust.

During my high school career that ended in May 2005, I had many different blogs besides the one on LiveJournal. Many of them were on Blogger, and served some sort of specialty purpose that was eventually abandoned. Around the time Google was making financial passes at Blogger, my mother signed up for a web hosting service for her family history website, and I self-hosted a WordPress blog there while the software was still in beta. This blog did have all my posts and many comments from the LiveJournal and Blogger days, but inevitably there were some things lost during the transition.

Right after I left high school, I got a job and found a different host for my blog – DreamHost – that offered a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth at very reasonable rates. One of the first things to be set up was the move from http://matt.vandusens.us/blog/ to http://blog.mattfast1.com/. Even today, accessing the former will take you straight to the latter – meaning anyone following the old links could be assured of getting new content.

Today, I would say the main purpose of my blogging is therapeutic. It allows me to get my thoughts out into the open on any subject I wish. Blogging also allows me to express the thoughts I can’t express in 140 characters or less, that probably need to be better explained. As I spent the day yesterday reviewing posts from over 5 years ago that are now marked private, I would say that was the point all along. I’m pretty sure I’ve grown both as a writer and as a person during the past 8 years blogging, and I intend to keep that trend going. During these 8 years, blogging has been about the only constant in my life: jobs, schools, homes, cars, relationships, and friends are all examples of what have come and gone since I started (virtually) penning my thoughts. I’ve had things to regret, and things to celebrate.

Let’s see what the next 8 years bring…

Tweets on 2010-07-17

  • Hey @itunes: Your application does NOT need to steal focus every few seconds while updating library files after updating. Seriously. #
  • Today seems like a good day to update my desktop PC, something that has languished the past few months since losing home broadband service. #
  • For anyone out of the loop: @rstephens, founder of The Geek Squad, is now the Chief Technology Officer of @bestbuy.

    This can only be epic. #

Blog Cleanup & Consolidation

Those who follow my blog may remember back in February 2009, when I cleaned up many of the posts on this blog by making many of them private. Today, I’ve laid most of the groundwork to finish bringing this blog back to the forefront of my digital life.

Yesterday, I installed Twitter Tools. This brings better Twitter integration to my blog, allowing it to publish tweets about new entries to Twitter automatically. I’ve also installed Creative Commons Configurator to give each page on my blog a proper license, and reconfigured Contextual Related Posts so it won’t try to put itself on all the asides on individual post pages. Google Sitemap Generator has been re-enabled so popular search engines can index things a bit better again, and I’ve added the PHP Code Widget plugin to make some items easier to work with. Finally, I’ve put in a Follow Me link on the right side of the page, that links to my Facebook, Last.FM, Twitter, Google Buzz, Flickr, and the central aggregator.

Users who make comments will be allowed to subscribe via email to new comments made in response to theirs now. I’ve updated a few elements of a couple REALLY old plugins that were not completely compatible with the newer versions of WordPress, but none of those have quite made it out of the lab yet.

I’ve removed the cherished Vader styling for K2. For now, it has been replaced with Jolie 3.0 by van blogzor. However, I’m still on the fence about this styling and will probably change to a different theme that allows what I need it to. With the Vader theme discontinued and not working properly on the latest version of K2, I just needed something temporarily that will work.

The future should hold a different theme, a few more links added to the Follow Me feature, and probably a few more tricks thrown in to make things a little more interesting around here. As stated before, the last time I seriously looked at new theming and plugins was 2007, and this blog was starting to show its age. It’s hard to believe I’ve been blogging for a little over 8 years now… Seems like just yesterday when I started.

Tweets on 2010-07-16

  • That does it. I simply require more cooling than my 1 fan can provide. Time to go shopping… #
  • It occurs to me that I've tweeted to @sprint, @sprintcares, and @htc at least 3 times with no response. @oldspice has it right though! #
  • For some reason, the Twitter website detected my location as Richardson, TX on my desktop. I think it's trying to tell me something… #

StickyBits

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You are currently browsing the The Random Ramblings of mattfast1 weblog archives for the month July, 2010.

Snippets:

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That’s odd. I just noticed, Twitter Tools is putting the wrong date on my tweets. Today already has a post created, and today’s posts will show as tomorrow. That is, unless I change something. So, I just tweaked the settings so Twitter Tools will fire off the digest of my tweets at 11:59 PM, rather than 12:00 AM. Hopefully, that will address the problem. If not, I’ll have to find a different solution.

In other news, I’ve also added a script to my hosting account that will automatically loop through the database and close comments (but leave pingbacks open) on all Twitter Tools postings. All I get on those is comment spam anyway, easily weeded out by Spam Karma & Akismet.

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A wireless headset has many advantages over a wired one. One of which is the ability to hit the head late at night with other people in the house trying to sleep, but still rock out.

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Thanks to TweetDeck Support posterous for getting my issue with a blank TweetDeck after a fresh install fixed!

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My pages have apparently all reverted to posts with the latest database upgrade… please stand by while this problem is fixed.

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If you want to hear something bizarre, simply play Rhianna’s Disturbia over ICP’s Let’s Go All The Way. Weird.

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