It’s been a while since my last blog entry as I’m trying to spend most of my time on trying to understand how the environment I have to work with is structured for the paid job I was given… actually I’m not understanding too much of it and I’m really tempted to reject the job: it’s not PHP coding, it’s a damn RAD environment that I don’t really understand, proprietary, with sucky documentation and it does not respect what the commissioner said it should do. Add to that a particularly depressed personal life, and you have pictured my last days 😛
I wish to thank all the ones who replied to my early post where I asked for a way to recover data out of an NTFS partition. Today my friend gave me the HD to try to restore the data and.. it wasn’t NTFS, it was a FAT32 partition, but the disk was too corrupted to be able to take something out of it, every 4 bytes, 2 were NULL or 0xFFFF. gpart actually was useful, but while being keyworded amd64, 64-bit systems aren’t supported (so I’ve marked it -amd64 now and opened a bug for it, I’m unable to solve the problem atm anyway).
The title of the entry refers to something I thought about while getting a DD image of the disk using the USB enclosure I bought last year. This enclosure, branded “Magnex”, but referred to as ViPowER in lsusb, it’s quite interesting: it’s an IDE to USB 2.0 interface, and it has a rack support that’s exactly the same I was using on my old Defiant box. That’s why I bought that, as I used to have three different HDDs that I wanted to use with it. Unfortunately it never worked that right. It works fine when talking about transfers and it’s actually quite reliable on reading and writing…. after turning it up; unfortunately after 20⁄30 minutes of activity, the HDD is spinning down and produces strange noises, whichever HD I put in it. I originally thought of a power problem, but the power supply comes out of the UPS, and the ac/dc converter seems to work fine (I’ve tested with a multimeter). I thought it might have been heat, but it’s quite cool actually.
I’ll be grateful to whoever has an idea of what the problem is 😛
On another note, I wanted to try again to setup an IME on Linux, as I already have it on Mac OS X. Not like I actually know Japanese enough to use it well, but I’m always interested in learning it when I have time (that’s why I started reading this site while I have nothing to do and I want to relax :P). Last time I tried, not only I wasn’t able to actually make it work, but I was also losing us_intl support.. luckily new versions of scim supports the “dead keys” method too 🙂
I just needed to emerge skim, scim-anthy (found that suggested on some site, doesn’t require a running daemon like canna, seems interesting :P), scim-qtimm (required to rebuild qt with immqt-bc) and setup the environment variables as told by pkg_postinst. Now I can actually write 炎の二目 😉
