Jan-Piet Mens

I'm not familiar with Wixer, but in the German language the word, though spelled differently, is pronounced quite similarly.

It has, however, a very different meaning.

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We have a huge pipe to the Internet, but IBM apparently doesn't:

100%[=====================>] 201,781,477 21.0K/s   in 88m 30s

Almost ninety minutes to download just 200MB of Symphony? I wonder what it was like before IBM improved download performance...

Accessing WikiPedia is easy when you're online, but have you ever wanted to take it along with you for off-line situations? I have, and there is a lovely program to do so for Windows: WikiTaxi. You don't have to install the program; just extract it from its 7zip archive and put it in a convenient location somewhere on your Windows drive.

After downloading one of the page dumps from Wikimedia, you convert (to SQLite) the compressed page dump file (e.g. enwiki-.....-pages-articles.xml.bz2) to WikiTaxi's format with the included importer program, which takes a while: on my system the converter ran for just over an hour to translate the full WikiPedia compressed XML source (3.3GB) to WikiTaxi's format, resulting in a 5.89 GB file.

WikiTaxi is well documented, and it is fun to use. The only thing missing are WikiPedia's images, but those are difficult to acquire.

Two upgrades performed since yesterday: one on a ReadyNAS NV, and the other on SafeBoot.

First the good: I upgraded my ReadyNAS NV+ from its web interface to RAIDiator 4.00c1-p2, which was completely painless and works as advertised, directly from the FrontView web interface.

One reboot later, the system was up and running. Beautiful.

Then the bad and the ugly: I wanted to upgrade my SafeBoot installation from version 4.2 to version 5 because the speed of hibernation has increased thirty-fold in the newer version. No problem, thought we; install the new version, reboot and bob is your uncle.

The reboot looked promising and the hibernation really is very much faster. What the program doesn't tell you though, is that it totally fucks up the partition table. Now that is one bit of miserable software (I mean the partition table. Oh, and I also mean any software that screws with it). Not that it deletes partitions, but SafeBoot sort of moved some sectors around. Not much mind you:

the situation "before":

/dev/sda4 : start=128744910, size=105691635, Id= f
/dev/sda5 : start=128744973, size=105691572, Id=8e

the situation "after":

/dev/sda4 : start=128680650, size=105755895, Id=8e

You'll see some bits missing (duh!) and a little bit of "movement" in the sizes and starting sectors of the partition.

Now, might that be a reason why my Centos doesn't want to start up any more?

About seventy two reboots later, after having uninstalled SafeBoot (meaning two hours for decryption), the system was back to normal. Oh yes, we called support, after all that is why you have a corporate support contract, isn't it? Their answer: "it appears that the partitions have been changed. Reinstall the system". Good thing, a support contract; we wouldn't have otherwise known… Damn them!

I'm back to SafeBoot 4.2. Thanks for fifteen billable hours wasted!

dude, they are just going to do what they are going to do, and there is nothing that we can do about it.

It doesn't make it any better.

ZDNet writes:

Anyone who actually wanted Vista already has it.

Who wants to get one of these as a holiday gift, anyway?

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My whatmon extension or add-on for Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird has had a small update.

If you prefer to download it from the official Mozilla addons site you'll have to wait until it has been processed off the queue, but you can already get the current version chez moi.

Enjoy.