Yesterday I decided to use one of those nifty installation images that we have in the internal network to perform an OS upgrade on my machine. The only problem is that the images we have on the network are designed for quick-installs: no questions asked. A tiny bit of information that escaped me as I live life in the fast lane.
This time I avoided spilling the coffee on the keyboard, but I was a few seconds too late to unplug the power and remove the battery of the computer when I saw the message that said `Formatting hard drive'. I was expecting an upgrade, and I got a reinstall image.
Anyways, I managed to recover my partition setup by using a nifty tool called gpart which guesses my partitions (Linux, swap and Windows). But some data was corrupted, after running fsck on the file system, tons of files ended up in lost+found, all kind of very scary error messages were shown up, and many files on my machine ended up with large blobs of zeros in the middle.
Happy for me, I had done a backup of the anonymous method support for MCS, which has not been checked in into CVS, but plenty of e-mail and images that I had not copied to my server got corrupted.
For now, I have decided to install on a separate hard drive and machine.
Jon has posted an update to the baning of his web site from Google advertisement: The Google Freedom of Information Act. His site has some updates on Google inconsistency here
Very nice development platform for GUI applications, which happens to generate code that will run on the Flash Player VM. The widget set is very flash-like, and has the standard set of components you would expect from a widget set, and the components are tied together with their implementation of ECMA Script.
Since the VM is the same across all platforms the code runs on Linux, Windows and the Mac unmodified, I am pleasantly surprised by the results.
Microsoft's Avalon is doing something very similar to this, but the Macromedia markup is not only simpler, but also cross platform from the client to the server.
Posted on 13 Jul 2004