RT @Pete_Brown Blogged: New Ch…
RT @Pete_Brown Blogged: New Channel 9 Video – @rkihm at MIX10 on Aptify RAD http://bit.ly/b3ctIx #silverlight #wcf #ria
The Story of Bottled Water
When Fiji water launched an ad campaign that made fun of Cleveland tap water, the city of Cleveland ran tests comparing its water to Fiji water. “These tests showed a glass of Fiji water is lower quality, it loses taste tests against Cleveland tap water, and costs thousands of times more. This story is typical of what happens when you bottled tap water against tap water.”
The Story of Bottled Water – Boing Boing.
20GB in 1980 vs. 32GB in 2010
I remember getting really excited about my first 1GB hard drive in ’94. Replacing my 250MB drive. That’s 50 mp3′s. And you had to fit the OS on it too. Getting old is weird.
20GB in 1980 vs. 32GB in 2010.
Quantum Physics Leaps Into The Visible World
A friend just shared this with me. Very cool. Sub-atomic quantum properties being visualized in the macro world. If you follow theoretical physics, it’s pretty amazing. It has to do with Schroedinger’s cat, entanglement and all that. Essentially an electron can act as both a particle and a wave at the same time…it becomes one or the other only when we observe it. If you’ve watched the show Flash Forward, they talk about it quite a bit. Love this stuff.
Quantum Physics Leaps Into The Visible World : NPR.
Fixing a broken Ubuntu 9.04 Server w/ LVM disks
Just sharing a fun experience fixing a broken Ubuntu email server. It would fail to boot with the message “mountall main process terminated with status 127″ before you could get to any sort of interaction with the OS. Initial research shows this comes from a bad upgrade of 9.04 to 9.10. Someone performed the upgrade a while ago and didn’t reboot. The Ubuntu Rescue disk was completely useless. When the ESX host server it was on crashed the other day, the Ubuntu virtual server was rebooted and the problem came to light. I don’t know who initiated this upgrade but it wasn’t me!
On to fixing it! An Ubuntu forum tells me we have to run a process off of a LiveCD to fix it. The problem was this particular Ubuntu Server has LVM disks which aren’t supported on the LiveCD. I couldn’t get the LVM modules loaded properly in the LiveCD environment…a buddy claims it’s possible but I couldn’t figure it out. So, I installed Ubuntu Desktop on a new virtual machine, installed support for LVM and then added the disk from the broken Ubuntu Server to my new virtual machine as a secondary disk. Then I followed the procedure below to fix the broken upgrade. I had to do some things not included here, like FTP’ing newly generated menu.lst files out of chroot and back into mounted boot partition, but this is the basics. I then took the disk back to its original virtual machine and booted to OS happiness. Adventures in IT!
Procedure for installing LVM on Ubuntu Desktop and mounting the partitions:
#installs LVM support
sudo apt-get install lvm2
sudo modprobe dm-mod (safe to ignore errors)
#returns VolumeGroupName
sudo vgscan
#activates volume group
sudo vgchange -ay VolumeGroupName
#returns LogicalVolumeName
sudo lvs
sudo mkdir /mnt/rescue
sudo mount /dev/VolumeGroupName/LogicalVolumeName /mnt/rescue
Procedure to chroot partitions from broken server and complete broken upgrade:
sudo su
cd /
#next 4 commands only if you have a separate boot partition (i did)
mkdir /mnt/boot
#lists partitions recognized by the system, determine boot partition on secondary
sfdisk -l
#my boot partition from the old drive was sdb5, use output above to determine
mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt/boot
mount –bind /boot /mnt/boot
#rest of commands are required
mount –bind /proc /mnt/rescue/proc
mount –bind /sys /mnt/rescue/sys
mount –bind /dev /mnt/rescue/dev
chroot /mnt/rescue
#in the chroot session:
dpkg –configure -a
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
dpkg –configure -a
The Secret Origin of Windows
Article by the guy who got Windows 1.0 out the door. Microsoft “burned” through (read: fired) 4 product managers trying to get it done. He tells a pretty fascinating story.
Discovery News- Stephen Hawking is Such a Troublemaker
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- Magnitude 7.1 Quake Rattles New Zealand
- The Great September Gale and the First Days of Hurricane Science
- Tiger Shark Feeding Frenzy Captured on Video
- Hurricane Earl Brushes North Carolina
- School of Underwater Turbines Swim to Fast Currents
- Ancient Nubians Drank Antibiotic-Laced Beer