Vitanuova for 2001 July 5

General

I was up very late and I wrote various things, including a long discussion of privacy.

More questions

• If you were the U.S. Supreme Court, how would you decide:
  • Plessy?
  • Lochner?
  • O'Brien?
  • Miller?
  • Brown v. Board of Education?
  • Barnette?
  • City of Boerne v. Flores?
  • Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah?
  • Employment Division v. Smith?
• Are sit-ins right? Does it matter what those who sit in are protesting for? Does it matter whether they actually want to stop or disrupt something, or just to "send a message"? Does it matter whether they are willing to be arrested? Does it matter whether they try to avoid arrest (by flight or deception, by passive resistance, by fighting or threatening police)? If a person is brought to trial for trespassing as a result of a sit-in, how should that person behave?
• What do you like to do while you're waiting? Anything?

Computer

Duncan brought a new computer by here. I'm not sure what to call it. In the past, I've named computers

• controlbox
• dies-irae
• eleison
• ishmael
• jonas
• kyrie
• pie
• requiem
• sequentia
• zamenhof

(as in a home automation project, as in a requiem, as in a requiem or other mass, as in Moby Dick, as in Klein, as in a requiem or other mass, as in American, as in a requiem, as in a requiem, and as Ludwig, respectively).

Wow

Years later, I managed to recover (using the BBC and this machine from Duncan) the hard drive of requiem, which had been lost in a crash (my fault) in late spring 1998.

What I was most looking for there were a number of poems I wrote in the beginning of 1998, none of which I had saved elsewhere. I've found dozens of these so far, along with old logs, e-mail, source code, and other materials.

What happened was that I tried to plug in a serial mouse or something on my IDE card, when the case was open and I hadn't even screwed in the IDE card. The IDE card came unseated, and that was the end of that hard drive's ability to boot. I saved the hard drive for three years (the accident happened June 29, 1998) and even took it on vacation with me, then carried it along when I moved. I knew that I wanted those poems and other materials. Those poems were very important to me.

Only the Bootable Business Card and this new machine from Duncan gave me a convenient opportunity to rescue the disk. I'm happy to say that the BBC did work extremely well for this task, between things like lde (a Linux clone of Norton Disk Editor), scp, ssh, and dd. I was ultimately able to make a complete image backup of my data partition onto a huge disk on another machine, and then make a backup of that image and then fsck it there. The result was almost all of my files intact, including things I never thought I'd see again.

A valuable piece of advice I got from my first-ever boss: if you have a seriously-corrupted disk containing important data, don't just run your equivalent of Norton Disk Editor or ScanDisk (in the Linux world, lde and e2fsck). Make an image backup of the hard drive onto a separate hard drive first, and then attempt your recovery. Some steps, like fsck, are potentially destructive, and can't be undone (without magnetic force microscopy or other techniques you probably can't afford). This is really valuable advice; keep it in mind for your own future disk crashes. Better safe than sorry.

Those poems are powerful.

I hurt my arms a lot today and thought about that for a while. A lot of fireworks got set off all around our house.