When the hard drive from my quite new Dell Latitude D620 was failing on me, I didn't want to go over install Windows and all related programs again - my install was still fresh and I needed to have my system up-and-running as soon as possible. But a direct disk-to-disk copy isn't easy without an laptop drive adapter and an external case to connect one of the drives externally.
A few years ago, there was Norton Ghost for this kind of task, but now there is an open source competitor: partimage. In combination with a rescue disk, (I used SystemRescueCd) it is possible to backup uncompressed, gzipped or bzipped partition images to network locations, back them up on another drive. I used a regular external disk to store the 55.81 GiB partition, which resulted in 6 2GB compressed images - partimage took ~ 35 minutes for the backup part. Restoring took about the same, and the restored partition looked pretty healthy from the rescue system, so I rebooted to start the Windows XP disk, to restore the Windows bootloader.
In my previous experiences, Windows Recovery Console always worked quite well. But this time, I ran into a limitation that is quite annoying: it's only possible to login with a local 'Administrator' account. As I never use it - mostly I'm on a domain managed account which has administrator privileges, I was locked out of my freshly backed up partition! The only viable option I could think of is to reset the local Administrator password on the original partition, and go through the whole process again [in hindsight: I didn't try the default empty password... DOH!].
Because my partition ordering had changed, I also had to fix the boot configuration. bootcfg /rebuild should have worked here, but I fixed boot.ini by hand, verifying it in WRC afterwards.
Btw, my failing Dell disk had one advantage: I got an 80 GB Hitachi Travelstar in return, so I took the opportunity to install Ubuntu on the remaining 20GB.
When I left my previous job, I also left the small and friendly Python world, to go back to Java land. Generally, Python programmers don't like Java. Python is the most elegant language in the world. Who would want to write braces, type casts or iterator.hasNext() ever again, or compile code before running?
Well, I do agree with this assessment when I have to iterate over items in a list or when putting default items in a dictionary - although generics and the new for-loop syntax already make the Java variant less verbose. But once you have to find some obscure function in the standard library the elegance of Python starts to fade. The documentation often lacks clear examples. Batteries included - but the functionality in available modules often seems messy and in general lacks a coherent vision.
Things are getting worse once you start looking for third party libraries in Python. Python programmers love to start projects, so you'll probably find a few orphaned implementations out there - but you often end up writing the functionality yourself. Of course, also Java has its share of abandoned projects, but because of its enormous developer volume and industry adaptation, it's much more likely that you'll find the library you were looking for, in a better shape than its Python counterpart.
This extends to developer tools: I used to write Python in a text editor - Boa or eric3 didn't convince me that their IDEs would would make me more productive. Yet the development that has gone into Eclipse has made it a very viable environment to live in, and I can safely save me lots of key strokes a day!
Not that I'm going to rewrite Aksy in Java, because the C-bindings of Python rule - wouldn't like to replace that with jni. Plus Pydev unites Python and Eclipse in a usable way.
After hours of editing with Ardour, the soundtrack, foley and sound fx are now done - enter the DVD authoring stage. I'm currently digesting the format requirements and utilities for creating a DVD, but need some courage to continue because the first experiments with burning one under Linux left my dvd burner in a, well let's call it 'undefined state'.
Luckily, there is some distraction in the form of Aksy, which I try to wrap up for first (developer) release this week.
The first good news is that Aksy compiles and runs on Ubuntu on a Powerbook (It compiles on MacOSX as well, but I had a problem with linking).
The refactoring to have a generic Sampler object for z48 and s56k samplers is completed, and seems to work.
Current release blockers are failing file transfers, some unexpected sysex replies and a problem with disk list retrieving.
Low-latency lovers exist in four variants: the ignorant, the ricer, the poor man, and the super hero.
The first variant is the guy or gal that thinks that the best thing you can do on your DAW is trying to run at the lowest latency possible, and then shows up on audio forums complaining that he or she cannot get a mixdown of 24 tracks done with loads of effects while running at a latency of 5ms.
The second type is the one that wants to squeeze as much out of his (I have yet to meet a female ricer!) system 'because you can!' and likes to brag about the latency values he manages to achieve. These persons are also more likely to run Gentoo, if they're running Linux.
The poor man has to tune latency, because his cheap sound card introduces so much latency in the convertors that additional latency in the audio path becomes noticable.
The last type - the super hero - has extra-ordinary hearing capabilities that allow him or her to perceive a millisecond latency. The super hero is so sensitive, that when he's playing the electric guitar, he will put his head into the speaker cabinet, and when playing piano, put his head on the piano because the latency introduced by the sound travelling through the air is already unbearable: a one foot distance from a sound source will already introduce 1 ms of latency. When playing live, he will only wear in-ear monitors on stage