Persiflage and Piffle

I have to admit that I cringe at every new person I see using climate change to justify some change or decision. Sure there are some things that may have a real and direct impact on the environment, but it’s a very complex and emotive issue. The thing is, you just know deep down that many ideas and announcements are just people and corporations jumping on the ‘climate change’ bandwagon.

So, here we have it - green software.

I just can’t help myself… I’m off to bang my head against a brick wall.

Today I received an utterly abusive email from someone I don’t know. I’m not going to put the content here because it’s just too abusive.

The person is easily traceable; it’s from their own domain, it’s clear who it’s hosted by, and the mail headers are consistent with that information. Essentially, it seems that they have received a spam email where it would appear to be “from” me. I’m not going to report them though because it’s clear that this person hasn’t got the faintest idea how easy it is for spammers to fake the “from” email address in a message.

My rant really is to vent my feeling that, if you reply to a spam email where the “from” email address has been harvested off the internet and is being used fraudulently, you have become the lowest of the low - you are now a spammer yourself.

Just take a deep breath and delete any spam email without replying to it (and preferably without even bothering to read it).

Martin Fowler’s recently blogged about a poor experience with eclipse update; specifically about poor dependency management. Now, Eclipse certainly is capable of handling and resolving dependencies, it’s just a shame that Martin used OpenArchitectureWare as his first experience of the tool.

It’s not that I’m against oAW per-se, not at all; it’s just that even with my experience of using and developing for Eclipse (about 6 years), I had problems myself.

So come on chaps; get it sorted - you’re giving the tool a bad name!

I’ve not disappeared completely, just been busy. My hard disk failure caused me to re-evaluate my development O/S and (after purchasing a couple of new HDs) I’m up and running with Ubuntu. I never bothered to re-install XP; getting all my stuff up and running was a breeze. That includes things like Eclipse development tools, importing MySQL databases to get my private wiki running, Bugzilla, Subversion, et.al.

I’ve not completely binned Microsoft, I’ve got Vista running on another machine; but here’s another Microsoft bug bear. I tried to use the Vista backup utility to store data to a SAMBA share on Linux; unfortunately it doesn’t work.

There’s an article about it on the Samba mail lists here. I can write to the shares from Vista using normal (e.g. explorer, word, notepad, etc.) mechanisms. For info: I’ve not got a domain setup, just a workgroup and so the creds are not sync’d between the two machines.

If anyone’s got any bright ideas (other than re-compiling Samba) I’d be very interested to hear them.

So here´s the bummer; I got an error message on my machine yesterday warning me that a file was corrupt. ¨Excellent¨ I thought; no, not excellent that a file´s corrupt - excellent that I now know and can do something about it. Since the O/S was Windows XP, I nipped into the event log and saw lots of NTFS errors… oh-no… bad sectors. So foolishly I did what a lot of people would do - I ran chkdsk. Although not my boot partition, the drive was in use by a number of services I run and so chkdsk needed to perform a boot time check - so I foolishly let it.

So here I am, writing this blog entry from Ubuntu… why? Because chkdsk ´fixed´ my disk is such a way that Windows can no longer read it - at all!

I threw an Ubuntu installation disk into my DVD drive (burned a few weeks earlier from a downloaded ISO image) and let it start up a running Ubuntu installation. So that´s the first nice thing about Linux; a lot of the distributions let to ´try before you buy´ … well ok, ´try before you install´ actually.

It auto-mounted my external USB drive but not my other hard drives. The faulty partition is on a SATA disk, but even so, a quick ¨mount /dev/sda6 /media/ddrive¨ and my old supposedly inaccessible D: appeared. So thanks to Ubuntu I have now copied off the last few bits of information that I´d forgotten to backup (with only the occasional ¨Cannot stat: Input/output error¨ to slow me down )

If only Windows were able to read its own partition as easily!