After moving the 60 GB hard drive to the Linux box, I was able to get a raw copy of all data without errors. If Ghost fails, I will try either 1) formatting the 500 GB hard drive and then copying the data and setting the master boot record or 2) installing a fresh copy of Windows then overwriting the installation with all data from the 60 GB hard drive (I know the problems with that approach). If Ghost and the raw copy approach fail, I will simply start over fresh.
Category: Technology
All things geeky.
The Hard Drive Chronicles
The saga continues. The new Hitachi 500 gb drive tests fine. The old 60 gb drive has been thoroughly exercised with chkdsk /f /r. Clonezilla failed to make the clone off the image I created previously so I tried a disk to disk clone and Clonezilla failed there too. Even ntfsclone –rescue bombs on the bad sector. I can still see all the data on the 60 gb hard drive so I’m mounting it in my Linux box and will copy everything from the hard drive to a backup drive. Next step will be a last ditch attempt using Ghost and then finally I will simply reinstall Windows and my critical applications on the 500 GB hard drive. This ends today.
The Hard Drive Chronicles Continue…
My RMA’d Hitachi 500 GB hard drive was received by Newegg and the replacement drive arrived today. This time they packaged it with great care with the drive wrapped in bubble wrap in a box that was wrapped in crumpled papers within another box. I feel a little like they may have seen my recent picture of their previous package. Using Hitachi’s tools (a live CD) I have inspected the drive and it passes all tests. Now I am using Clonezilla to restore the image of the 60 GB drive that has been my life blood for much of the past decade. Fingers crossed I can resume working in my dungeon in a few hours and my son won’t have to keep loaning me his laptop. (that laptop has spoiled me…I want one!)
Update: Fail. The dreaded 89%. I have access to the data. Nothing is really lost. I’m just faced with reinstalling Windows and a enormous number of applications.
Windows won’t boot past the logo
In trying to clone my 60 gb hard drive to a 500 gb hard drive, I ran some utilities on the 60 gb hard drive to fix bad sectors and find missing data. Apparently in the process, I damaged something in Windows. Right now the drive will not boot beyond the blue screen with the Windows XP logo in regular mode nor in safe mode. I’m documenting my steps here because the usual troubleshooting steps have failed and I need to make sure I’m not repeating the same steps twice. Continue reading Windows won’t boot past the logo
Today’s Technical Feat
Today I am installing openssh server on Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS which is remarkably easy so that I can use Clonezilla to make an image of a hard drive from one machine, across the network, to Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive
The Hard Drive Chronicles
I work on a Frankenstein computer. No, that’s not some geeky brand of elite super computer. It is spare parts held together with bailing wire and dust. It is an new piece of hardware fit into an old case with the help of a Dremel and a cutting blade. It is just enough memory to do what I need but not quite enough to do what I want. And it is a 60 gb hard drive that floats between 500 mb and 2 gb of free space.
I finally squirreled away enough from my budget to purchase a new 500 gb (p)ATA hard drive. (Being honest with myself this was less about budget and more about martyrdom. I buy things for the kids before myself.) Additionally, Newegg had a great special on a USB external drive. Since I vowed to free myself from being bound to a single computer, I jumped on the special with plans to install a bootable OS such as Ubuntu and keep my entire development environment on the USB drive. As such, I should be able to work anywhere on just about any machine with enough memory.
The upgrade plan was simple. Make a backup of my workstation to the usb drive, then clone the 60 gb drive to the 500 gb drive and I’d be done. Unfortunately, the 60 gb drive came dead on arrival and had to be RMA’d. I couldn’t wait so I started the cloning process but ran into read errors. So 2 days of drive testing and using different bootable CDs with a variety of partitioning and cloning software turned into 3 days and then it happened. Everything quit working! I powered down and haven’t had the guts to return since. I could have just potentially lost a significant amount of data related to the success (if you want to call it that) of my freelancing career and the support and operation of my family. No, despite my rhetoric about the importance of backups, particularly offsite backups, I do not practice what I preach. The quantity of data I manage long outgrew my ability to create meaningful backups of every bit and byte. Instead I grab what is viewed as essential and make sure it is in a few places. For instance, I drop a couple of dollars each month to make sure Amazon has a copy of all our family photos in addition to the subset of photos that make it up to Flickr. I am not prepared to lose entire hard drives.
Next immediate plan of action: Determine damage-Test components individually. If neither drive works by itself, assume the IDE controller fried and test in another machine. If I can show the drives are both good and pass a chkdsk, then I have one more big gun of a partitioning program and an equally big gun of a cloning program that I have not tried. I expect them to be successful and this debacle to be over. Oh..but I have to watch Warehouse 13 first!
Update: My 60 gb drive has been confirmed functional with data. My current suspicion is that the primary ide controller has failed. This could be a good excuse to buy a new computer 🙂
Update: 60 gb drive okay but no longer boots. IDE controller is fine. 500 gb drive approved for RMA. Next step, clone the 60 gb drive to some backup space then tinker with the master boot record to see if I can get the drive booting again.
Becoming a Google Advertising Professional
Today I’m going to learn more about Google Adwords, tweak my current Adwords campaigns, and study for the GAP exam.
Tweetlejuice, Tweetlejuice, Tweetlejuice!
Kill A Programmer!
Does your programmer frustrate you? Do the words "two weeks" rolling off his/her tongue make you want to strangle that programmer? Well, now, just like every time to you clap your hands a fairy dies..is that right?..clapping? and fairies? There’s something about hands and kittens dying too. Neither here nor there because now you can kill a programmer! To date, 46479 have been eradicated. Yes, with just the click of the mouse, you can fry one of those frustrating nerds! Or you can just ask them a question.
Becoming a Google Adwords Professional
In 2000 or 2001, I was working with a company that needed an advertisement campaign manager. I stayed awake for fours days straight drinking gallons of coffee and taking only power naps to write an ad campaign manager from scratch using ColdFusion and MS SQL. This was before the days of keywords so instead ads were organized by categories. Each ad could be categorized and subcategorized. Campaigns could be scheduled for date ranges with multiple ads meeting IAB industry standards and the particular place on the page could be dynamically specified. Personally, I was pretty proud of the end product and impressed with how it turned out for being built so rapidly.
The experience of writing an ad campaign manager helped me appreciate the complexity of such an endeavor but nothing prepared me for the awe inspiring product that is Google Adwords! Prior to yesterday, I thought Google Adwords was just the name Google used for selling ads that appeared on sites of publishers using Google’s Adsense and in search results. Google’s Adwords is such a complex product that they offer a certification exam for people wanting to become Google Advertising Professionals. I spent yesterday reading, reading, and reading, and watching video after video after video to learn as much about running efficient campaigns as possible. There is definitely an art to writing an effective Adwords campaign and not wasting money.
I was going to give an overview of what I learned yesterday but I have so much more to learn and Les Jones has does an excellent job already. Read Les Jones’ post My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords.
WordPress 2.8.3 broken! Upgrade to 2.8.4 immediately!
In case you missed it, WordPress 2.8.3 has a programming error which allows anyone to reset your administrative password and takeover your WordPress blog. With administrative access, the hacker could destroy your content, lock you out, and repurpose your website for wrong doing, spamming, pornography, slander, or whatever they want. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 immediately! Learn more at darknet.org.uk.
This vulnerability could be prevented by securing the /wp-admin directory.
BlogSecurity has recommended before that the /wp-admin/* directory should be password protected or restricted to IP address. This would mitigate this problem. See our advisory here for details. [Source, BlogSecurity, WordPress <= 2.8.3 Reset Admin Password Vulnerability]
See details of the exploit at milw0rm.
Taking Google Adwords Advice
Today I am becoming an expert on Google Adwords campaigns. I am welcome your advice and input.
Update: Les Jones offers some sage advice and Google has an excellent Adwords Learning Center. Google even offers the ability to become a Google Advertising Professional complete with a certification exam.
WordPress 2.8.3 upgrade bizarreness
I decided to take some time to make sure that all of our blogs and websites relying on WordPress were brought up to version 2.8.3. Everything seemed to be going well until we started testing Cathy’s blog Domestic Psychology. She can post but cannot add tags. Categories work find but clicking in the "Add new tag" tag box acts like it is disabled. She can type words in the box but the Add button does not function. Tags do not get saved to the post.
So I jump over to Reality Me to see if it exhibits the same behavior. On Reality Me, I can create a post with tags with no problem. But on the dashboard under Incoming Links, Plugins, and WordPress Development Blog, I get a fatal error:
Fatal error: Please call SimplePie_Cache::create() instead of the constructor in /home/www/htdocs/realityme_net/wp-includes/class-feed.php on line 13
I have not tested the other blogs and sites yet. For both Reality Me and Domestic Psychology, I went back and deleted almost all files with the exception of the wp-content directory, the robots.txt, and the .htaccess. I rebuilt the WordPress installation and yes cache directories were removed. WP-Cache is not used. I also repaired and optimized all database tables. Active plugins on Reality Me: Audio Player, Seesmic, ShareThis, SimpleLife, Spam Karma 2, Subscribe to Comments, WordPress.com Stats, and WordPress XHTML Validator. Active plugins on Domestic Psychology: Audio player, Get Recent Comments, Lifestream, ShareThis, Spam Karma 2, Subscribe to Comments, and WordPress.com Stats.
In typing this, I realize that the SimpleLife plugin uses SimplePie and is likely to be the root cause for the Reality Me problem.
Update: Deactivating SimpleLife fixed the Reality Me problem.
Update: Disabling all plugins on Domestic Psychology did not change the fact that Post Tags could not be added to to the post.
Update: I’ve narrowed it down to Cathy’s theme. None of the active plugins on Domesticp Psychology are causing the problem. She is using a Woo theme called irresistible. Disabling this theme fixes lets her use tags with posts again. Time to see if Woo Themes has posted a fix. Yes. irrestible 2.0.0 fixes the post tag problem.
Hitler Response to the FriendFeed Sale
Dave Winer Hits One Home
From the beginning I’ve described social media (mostly under the guise of Twitter) as a large party. You enter the scene. You hear a lot of noise. You focus on some conversations and it gets exciting. You still hear a lot of noise. You make some friends. You bond. You make some people angry with flippant remarks. You lose some friends. You shout at the crowd. Everyone talks about you. You step off your soapbox and rejoin the conversation. Everyone forgets you. You step out of the room to go to the bathroom. When you return, you find the conversation continued without you. You try to get people to tell you what you missed. Eventually you figure out you just have to pickup where you left off. You learn that you cannot follow everyone in the room. You realize that even though you aren’t following everyone in the room some of those people are still listening to you. Some people get to stand on the stage and everyone follows them. You think it is unfair that you aren’t on the stage. You meet some of the right people but still aren’t lucky enough to get on the stage. You don’t understand. You resent the people on the stage. You decide to ignore them. The conversation goes on. Eventually you follow the people on the stage again because everyone else is talking about what they said. The conversation goes on. Eventually we all return home.
Dave Winer, you know, the guy who brought us RSS, explains here.
So what is, what was, FriendFeed? Let’s say FriendFeed was that room at the party were the people who started the party hung out and other party goers would look in the room and see that it was different but couldn’t really grasp if it was different good or different bad and most would never really enter that room. In the words of Eric Rice, "the punk rock indie era is over." Facebook bought FriendFeed today. I won’t comment further but to say I agree with Think Jose that Facebook bought the staff, not the software. But this was about Dave Winer’s post to Robert Scoble.
Btw, you should follow me on Twitter here.
ps. Not great words of assurance:
What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. [Source, FriendFeed Blog, FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request]
