We Can Learn From Iraqis

Look at these two pictures. Can you guess which one is Americans celebrating a Lakers NBA title and which is Iraqi expatriates in Dearborn celebrating the hanging of Saddam?

Stories here and here.

A Whoopin'

One of the more enjoyable things in life is the Eagles beating the Cowboys. It's even better when they whoop them and even better still when they do so on a nationally televised game. Yes, I know I wrote the Eagles off before I wrote the Phillies off but, hey, I'm glad I was wrong.

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I finally did something that I had be meaning to do for a few years. I wrote down all my usernames and passwords that I use for various things on the Internet. I had a few scribbled down here and there but most I kept in my head. Initially, I came up with 25 logins and 16 different passwords; yes, 16, and no dictionary words or proper nouns either. I am proud that I can recall almost all of them at will. I thought of a few more after a while but decided not to worry about them because I rarely log into those.

When I used to work in tech support you can't imagine the customers who would say to me "my password is _______. I use the same one for everything." People love to volunteer information.

Thanks to bugmenot.com, I don't register at newspaper sites. Before I heard of Bugmenot, I did register with the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. I've been using the Bugmenot Bookmarklet for Firefox for a few years now and it really comes in handy.

I am fairly good at remembering things like passwords, along with phone numbers, addresses, and most numbers I encounter but, like addresses and phone numbers, I figured it was time to write my logins down. Some sites like Linux.org or the Linux Counter I rarely log in to but now I know where my login information is. Like I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, I am pretty sure there are about another 10 or so I didn't write down but those are sites that I have no interest in anymore so why bother.

I am guessing that my 25 is above the average. I would guess the norm is around 15. With emails, Ebay, Paypal, Amazon.com, sites people use for work, I think 15 is a good guess. Hopefully, they aren't using the same password for everything and, if they are, hopefully it's not a dictionary word or pet's name. It is difficult to remember all this stuff but it's wise to mix up the passwords.

Fubared x2

As luck would have it, I had two hard drives go bad on me in the past month. One is a 60 GB Maxtor that is two years old and the other is an old Seagate 6.4 GB that was probably five years old when I got it 2-3 years ago. I'm irked about the Maxtor as it's so new and the other isn't that big of a loss. However, upon looking into what was on them, they were the only two drives that had some of Beck's backups AND most of the pictures I took this year, including pictures from the Pittsburgh Air Show and our trip to South Dakota. The Maxtor won't even boot and just clicks and clacks. The Seagate would boot, only with a boot floppy, and force fsck and give loads of errors. Eventually it would come up but I couldn't mount anything nor would it load any modules. Thus, I could not mount an NFS and copy over to another machine nor could I mount a USB drive and copy files over to that.

Luckily, I was able to use Knoppix to boot the system and see the data on the drive. I then copied over the backups and pictures to my USB drive. With Knoppix, you need to enable your USB device to be writable and that's easy to do: just left click on the device shortcut and select 'Actions' from the menu. From there you'll find where you can change the permissions. Yeah, I like the command-line for most stuff like this but the GUI way was what turned up when Allthewebbing.

So, I got what I needed and now I need to consider whether or not I'm going to ever buy a Maxtor drive again. Maxtor has since been acquired by Seagate so I don't know if the Maxtor name will disappear. I'd hate to buy a Seagate and find out it's a Maxtor with Seagate labeling. Maybe I'll give Western Digital another look next time I need a new hard drive.

NTLDR is missing

I ran across that error recently on a Windows 2000 machine. There are several reasons this may happen and you can Alltheweb for them and the myriad of possible solutions. I'll summarize what worked for me.

The system in question was missing the ntdetect.com and ntldr files under C:\. Of course, there is no way to know that until you actually get back into the system. I guess it's a real crapshoot to find the right fix for the machine you're working on. Anyway, what I did was copied the two of the three necessary files - ntldr and ntdetect.com from a working W2K system onto a floppy which already had boot.ini (I left that on there from some tool I tried previously; before I knew I had access to another working W2K machine) on it and tried to boot; same error. So I looked at the boot.ini file and on the disk I had and it looked like so:

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

The only thing that looked unusual to me was the timeout set at 0. So I changed it to 10 and then tried to boot the system in question again. Presto. So I copied over the ntldr and ntdetect.com into C:\, boot.ini was already there, and the system now booted fine without errors and the aid of the floppy. I don't know why changing timeout from 0 to 10 worked but it did. From using LILO all these years I always thought timeout was just the delay before it booted to the default choice. Maybe it means something else in boot.ini. Regardless, it worked.