Amazing - Biggest Hard Drive Crash of All Time

When the space shuttle Challenger blew up on re-entry, one of the fragments recovered was a hard drive that housed data from one of the on-board experiments.

You would think that a massive explosion followed by a hard fall of several miles would render the hard drive useless, but amazingly they were able to recover it.

You can never go wrong with a Seagate drive. I managed to burn one up one time when I was young and stupid. It was completely my fault though.

Link to Story: http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5056

Not So Amazing - BSG Prequel Details

Details are emerging about a pilot for a potential BSG prequel series. They started to bait this during the BSG “Razor” feature. The style and writing will translate well but much of the magic of the current series is around the colossal genocide and religion themes that will just not be possible to match in the setting that they are talking about where there are no humanesque cylons.

Link to Story: Battlestar Galactica Prequel Lands Esai Morales

Last Thursday weather.com changed their XML format. I am not a fan of weather.com however the adeskets weatherforecast desktop widget uses their XML service.

I dug in and fixed the widget. I have submitted the fix to the author but in the meantime if you are desperate you can grab the updated weatherforecast.py file here and copy it to the weatherforecast-0.2.0 directory where you house the desklet.

Update May 13: fixed broken link, sorry! Also the email to the author bounced back so I will submit to the project managers @ sourceforge.

“It’s time to bury that old-style life, papa.” ~ Groove Armada, Lightsonic

Catalysts of Change:

• Imagination
• Irritation
• Inspiration

When I put up the last post on the old site template I was irritated by the lack of space. The content area of the layout was way too narrow. Putting up videos has always required resizing.

I had a really slick idea on a new template and even put it to paper. When I went to actually do it, however, I found that while the CSS “standard” has published the capabilities I was looking for, browser technology has not yet brought them to life.

Then I was browsing a few sites and that spurred the wide-screen transition to plan B, which is what you see now.

I will miss the nice shots of Cincinnati for sure and the shadows. You may not have even noticed - but on the old skin, the shot of town was a day shot if you were here during the day, and a night shot if you came after dark. This was even adjusted for daylight savings time.

I wanted to do something neat with this one as well, so the moon up there is in its proper phase and will wax and wane with the real thing.

Everybody is doing this history thing, so here is mine. I bet someone writes a daemon that tracks this on your machine, sends the info (pseudo-anonymously of course) to a web app that collates and displays the results. clistats.com is available. Anyone?

Work computer:

[bparsons@bpsun ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
132 ls
125 cd
28 sudo
20 cp
19 nano
18 makepkg
17 whois
15 rm
12 w
10 ps
10 more
8 scp
8 mv
7 tar
7 ssh
5 pwd
5 make
5 ./configure

Notebook:

[bparsons@eflat ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
224 sudo
152 cd
87 scp
44 ps
38 ls
23 more
23 dmesg
21 whois
21 nano
20 mount
17 w
17 tar
15 killall
15 cp
14 top
14 rm
14 ffmpeg
12 mutt
10 cat
9 pacman
9 grep
9 /usr/local/bin/mp4ize
8 whereis
8 ifconfig
7 ping
7 iwlist
6 makepkg
6 df
5 audacious

Home Computer:

[bparsons@blackops ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
130 cd
129 ls
42 sudo
18 ps
16 whois
15 more
14 scp
11 w
11 mount
8 nslookup
8 cp
7 nano
6 rm
6 df
5 umount
5 pwd
5 pacman

This server:

[root@server7 ~]# history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn
226 ls
214 cd
76 nano
63 ps
33 whois
33 w
33 more
30 grep
24 tail
22 cp
16 ssh
16 nslookup
12 pwd
12 cat
11 /www/bin/apachectl
11 traceroute
11 top
9 chown
7 rpm
7 ping
6 tar
5 yum
5 mroe
5 diff

Handier than you’d think

Flash on linux has a problem. It is always the top layer. These days many web sites - including my bank and my airline, have flash windows that overlap their design boundaries in the style sheet and they rely on flash being cropped behind the other layers. Its bad design of course but I found a way to solve the issue on my own.

Out of desperation I sought out and found This Firefox extension that disables flash until you click on it. Originally I just needed it to access the Delta site as their flash was blocking the login box - but surprisingly this add-on has proven to be a real improvement - even on Windows.

You should install Flashblock and take it out for a spin. No more flash ads - everything is in its place. Your computer fan doesn’t kick up when you go to a web page that’s overburdened with flash. You really don’t even notice its there, but your browsing experience improves dramatically. If there is a flash thing you want to see (like a YouTube video) you can add YouTube to the whitelist or just click the “f” logo and watch.

You can grab it here.