Alston Grove

I’ve been having problems with my wife’s iMac. It’s the original (1998, revision A) iMac with archaic MacOS 8.1. It crashes a lot, and I frequently have problems sharing printers to it over Appletalk from Linux (using netatalk). My wife complains about it, so I told her I was going to “upgrade” it. So I start checking out Yellow Dog Linux, distributed by Terra Soft. (They also own the singular license to distribute Apple hardware with Linux pre-installed.) There’s even a video on their site with a pretty girl telling me, “My computer is not just a machine, it’s a reflection of who I am,” while techno music plays in the background (image on right). Linux chicks are cool. (more…)

To reboot it, I just shake the screen. Thanks to Mike Kingzett (in background) for the “high tech” toy and to Dean Stautberg for snapping a pic with his Sony Clié handheld.

Old electronics, so-called “e-waste”, is increasingly becoming a problem. Lead, cadmium, mercury and other hazardous materials in electronic devices could leak from landfills into groundwater and endanger public health and the environment. A recent study found 2 to 3 pounds of lead on average in 18-inch TV sets and computer monitors. Some more scary statistics can be found here. Wired reports on some other aspects of the e-waste problem, like exposing prison workers to toxins when forcing them to recycle computers and shipping the junk to China because it’s ten times cheaper than recycling.

So, I had a bunch of broken electronics, and I didn’t want to send it to the landfill. Many of the manufacturers will recycle for you, but they charge a fee for shipping and handling each item. I found the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio website where they announce recycling drives around the city. In addition to household hazardous waste recycling events, they occassional do e-waste events. They made it really easy and it’s free. I just put my electronics in the trunk of my car and drove through a designated parking lot. They picked up my stuff and loaded it in a tractor trailer to transport it for proper recycling and disposal. Which probably means they shipped it to China — but I feel better thinking I tried to do the right thing (j/k).

My main hard disk that stores /home and most of my important stuff recently failed. I went to save a file to a directory, only to find the directory missing. After seeing “IO error” all over the logs, I thought rebooting was needed to clear up a buggy controller or driver. Big mistake! The first sector, the MBR where the boot loader and partition table live, was already bad, making the drive unusable by the OS.

Lesson One: when you notice IO errors, immediately begin copying files to a safe disk.

I reboot, and at this point, I see my OS telling me “drive is unusable.” So I freaked out, thinking about the 16 months of digital pictures, years of e-mail, thousands of hours of source code all lost. I decided I would recover the drive no matter what the cost. I called half a dozen places like OnTrack and Drive Savers and got the bad news: with an 80 gig drive, it’s gonna cost in the range of $1000 to well over $3000. I felt sick, very sick.

Lesson Two: do your research and don’t let people take advantage of you.

So I keep hearing about and seeing web sites for data recovery software that doesn’t require the expensive trip to the clean room. In particular, I find software from R-TT that supports ext2 and is good quality. Unfortunately, the open source programs out there like e2extract are a little scary at alpha level and no documentation.

I was able to recover my data! And I didn’t even have to put my hard disk in the freezer (I’m speaking literally — this apparently works on drives with heads crashed on the platter). It turned out the disk was covered in bad sectors, but I still got 99% of my data back. And I learned a few things about super nodes and block groups along the way.

Lesson Three: backup your data! It’s not “if” your drive will fail, it’s “when.” Hard drives last on average 3-5 years. With 7200 RPM drives, the heat build-up makes them more likely to fail.

So now I am shopping for a RAID-5 controller card with 4 channels. The ATA RAID cards from Promise look very attractive. Maybe a bigger case with lots of fans too.

I was told by someone the other day that I shouldn’t use my cell phone at the gas pump because it could ignite gas fumes. They retold an e-mail they had received describing such an incident. This one comes close to believable, but it smells too much like an urban legend.

Apparently, a number of people believe this to be true. Shell Oil actually released a warning about cell phones, really spurring the issue. There’s even a U.K. law that says ALL battery-operated devices must have a warning label about use in explosive atmospheres. Rather than rewrite manuals for each country, these devices arrive in the U.S. with the same warning labels. Wired has an article that covers all the controversy and clears things up. Let me summarize for you: don’t worry about it.

If you want to worry about explosions, consider the documented occurrences of pump fires that were caused by static electricity. People let the pump run, get in their car, rub their butts on the seat, return to the pump, pull the nozzle, and the static shock ignites the fumes.

Now, there are NO documented reports of cell phones causing gas explosions. My cell phone has, um, maybe 12 volts. Household static electricity commonly has 10,000 volts. A spark occurs when there is an imbalance in charge between two surfaces. Where is this going to happen in my phone? Maybe the switch? So just to be safe, I’ll make sure my cell phone is already on before I fill up.