Blogging from Linux

This blog is brought to you by Ubuntu Linux 4.0, courtesy of a failed hard disk and a strange concatenation of circumstances, which will be explained in excruciating detail below.

For the past few days, I've been having problems starting up my computer. It's been rather like a game of Russian Roulette, since I never could tell which startup attempt would result in the blue screen of death. When this insanity finally started affecting Firefox and assorted other applications, I decided it was time to reinstall Windows.

Now, for some reason my dad lives under the mistaken impression that the techs who handle his office comps know a bit more about these things than I do. Evidence to the contrary fails to change his mind, even when presented with innumerable situations like this:

Me: The comp is busted. I'll just do x and fix y.
Dad: No no, I'll call one of the techs over. Let them decide.
(A few days later, the tech arrives. After a long examination...)
Tech: The comp is busted. You need to do x and fix y.
Dad: Go ahead.

At this point, I usually struggle to keep from saying "I told you so", with limited success.

Over time, I've gotten used to this sort of thing. At the very least, it saves me some donkey work, though sometimes I get impatient and take matters into my own hands.

This time, I began to suspect hard disk problems when a scandisk informed me that there were bad sectors on my disk, followed by a barrage of blue screens and disk i/o errors. My dad thought there was a virus, and then proceeded to blame games, chat programs, P2P, and so forth. I stopped listening to these improbable ideas years ago, but they're still faintly amusing. It's interesting to note how non-technical people just don't seem to have any sense of context when it comes to these things. Come to think of it, that's often true of technical people too...

Anyway, I didn't have another hard disk to backup my data(grrr....) so I was forced to wait for the chap to come over from dad's office. He turned up and said that a simple reinstall could fix things. No need to format, though naturally most applications would stop working and would need to be reinstalled. He proceeded to do just that.

It worked like a charm for about half a day. I'd already begun to believe that it was just a case of some program crashing and corrupting some system files or something, when out of the blue, it crashed again. *Sigh*...

So yesterday the tech turned up, figured out that it was a disk problem, and left me a temporary hard disk on which he hastily installed windows. Thankfully the old HD is still under warranty, so I should get a replacement pretty soon.

Hawk eyed readers will have noticed my usage of the word 'hastily' in the previous paragraph. Translation: he installed Windows on a 2GB partition, leaving only about 17 megs of free space on that partition. The others, of course, were huge in comparison, and he told me to install new stuff there. Fine, I said. Turns out I spoke too soon.

Some time after it was done, I started installing my ISP's download client. Now these buggers have a strange policy of installing a tiny antivirus prog along with their dialer. Slightly annoying, but not a big problem by any standards. The real WTF is the useless programming of their installer. Not only does it insist on installing to the windows partition, it attemps to install the antivirus there too! There isn't even an option to change the install location, and when you run out of disk space, it's too dumb to tell you. Yeesh. If you wanna do something right, you've gotta do it yourself...

The obvious solution is to use Partition Magic, and resize the partitions. And here we run into the Catch-22 for the day, viz. how the hell am I supposed to download partition magic if I can't get on the internet?!

There are dozens of other solutions, but one I liked presented itself this morning, when I remembered the old Ubuntu CD lying in my drawer. I proceeded to install this, and voila - i was on the net again!

Now I just have to wait until my new hard disk turns up. Until then, vive Linux! And when it does, vive Linux again! For some reason, the feel of Linux is really conducive to coding. I'll be doing my next SRM from Linux, just to see if it helps.

Code4Bill update: I'll be flying to Bangalore this Friday, with Arijit and Vishwesh. Nishant will fly Indian Airlines, since he gets free tickets. He'll be meeting us in Bangalore. It's turning into a MU TopCoder's meet, really. Microsoft is kinda taking a back seat in my mind, and I don't have any illusions about being one of the final twenty with my lack of MS specific skills. The smart money is on Arijit, who seems to know every technology under the sun, and Nishant, who can do it on sheer brain power alone.

And now, I shall go and take a nice warm shower. Toodle-oo, people.