Jay McGavren's Journal

Linux is a jealous OS...

My Ubuntu install has gone very well so far, with one major hiccup - it rendered my Windows installation unbootable.

During the setup process, while it was installing a boot loader (which lets you choose an OS and loads it up), it informed me that it “should be OK” to place the loader on the Master Boot Record (the first place on a disk that gets accessed when booting). Not knowing enough to say otherwise, I let it do so. It was only later that I found out that Windows refuses to boot from any partition except the MBR. >:( (I’m just as mad at Windows as I am at Ubuntu.)

So my Windows install is nuked, and I can’t restore it unless I wipe the hard drive clean.

Now I have two choices. One, I can spend the next week backing up my 90 GB media partition so I can clear my hard drive, then reinstall Windows and try to reconfigure it. Two, I can try to learn the guts of Linux well enough to configure that.

None of this would be a problem if I didn’t have a vacation coming up in two weeks that I was planning to spend developing. Halo 2 will be taking up all my free time this week, leaving just one week to learn an OS, configure it so it’s suitable for development work, refresh myself on Java, and learn the Java Web Services framework, or risk wasting the whole vacation. Tough to do when you only have hours of free time each week.

P.S.: Linux is much faster than Windows. I do think this will all be for the best in the long run.

U.S. Army tests battlefield robot armed with pump action shotgun; bring on the Terminators!

Favorite quote: [Bush and Cheney] might as well have said, “We’re going to invade Iraq because they have too much sand.” And 50% of the American people would have believed that, pitching in to help redistribute the sand to the other sand-poor nations of the world, most notably Canada, which has almost no sand whatsoever but still somehow manages to remain calm.

QA...

After an initial glitch with the installation (which we’ve fixed), our testing department has reported only one defect with my new application, and that was just a so-called security risk (an offer to remember passwords) generated by Internet Explorer. 117 tests down, 50 or so to go.

Either testing isn’t doing their job (which is possible), or we did our job pretty darn well.

Some of you may remember my post last year from my short-lived Linux installation. Well, here’s the sequel, and I think this installation will stick around a bit longer. I just installed the new Ubuntu Linux, and I have to say I’m fairly impressed. Not only are there now drivers for my existing hardware (I bought a cheap but all-new PC to run the prior installation), the whole distribution is much cleaner and well thought out. And most importantly, it runs faster than Win2K, which is nice on my aging hardware.

Don’t worry, I’ve still got Windows on dual-boot, so my friends and I can still play games if we ever get around to it again.

God help us...

So not only is Bush re-elected, the Republicans have expanded their majority in the Senate. Conservative groups are telling the press they expect the administration will pursue a more conservative agenda this term, and more aggressively than before. (Well, duh, but it’s even scarier when you see it in print.)

I expect the draconian copyright laws, tax cuts for the rich, and public surveillance measures to start flowing any day now. I’ll do what I can to fight them (and I hope my like-minded friends will too), but I fear a few letters to Congress won’t stop this administration from making life miserable for America’s middle class for decades to come.