Looks More Like a Puma

Having completed my backup and burned a dvd with the win7 iso, my next step was to create a hd partition to install windows on. Booting from an Ubuntu flash drive and adding the extra partition with gparted worked great. It was time for the riskiest step.

I put in the Windows  dvd and booted it.

The install process was actually not a pain in the rear. Microsoft even sprung for some  aesthetic dialogs and progress bars. It did not take too  long before I was running Windows 7.

Of course Microsoft still has no respect for other operating systems, so it scrapped my boot menu in favor of assuming I would always want Windows. Getting this fixed turned out to be quite a pain. It was quite easy to find instructions for restoring grub; unfortunately none of them worked. Finally I discovered the super grub disk. Its menus were certainly confusing, and I’m still not sure exactly what I did, but it seems to have worked.
So, as I write this blog entry with Chrome in Windows 7, there’s a few  things that have jumped out at me about the new os.

• I click on the wireless icon, and I get a list of available wireless networks. How natural…
• Fast boot
• It took me a long time to figure out how to open more than one instance of the file explorer.
• It still astonishes me to install an os that only fits on a dvd, and when I’m done the only useful program is IE (which I replaced anyway)

Well it was a fun project, and now I have a windows to fiddle with in my spare time.

Since I have a little  time to screw  around, I thought I would look into setting up the Windows 7 Release Candidate somewhere so I could play around with it. Downloading, of course, was a piece of cake. Luckily I was able to remember my MS account information so I didn’t have to create a new one. While I was poking around the website I did find the answer to a question I’d had: how do they plan to keep people from just using the release candidate instead  of buying the finished os?

Watch the calendar. The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010. You’ll also need to install the programs and data that you want to use. (Learn more about installing Windows.)

They thought about having a warning dialog to the effect of “Your Operating System will expire in only 3 month(s)”, but decided forcibly shutting down the computer every 2 hours would better prove  their dedication to customer satisfaction.

While the download was running, I started  thinking about where  I wanted to put the os. I considered a virtual machine, but that  didn’t work so great when I tried the Windows 7 Beta and they’re really slow. Meanwhile I’ve got 113 unused  gigs on my harddrive. I figured I could spare 20 or so for a Windows partition.

That decided, I didn’t like the idea of partitioning my hd and installing a windows without having my stuff backed up. Because I loaned out my external harddrive, I elected to back up stuff to the hd of my old laptop. Curiously, that machine balked on boot, claiming a disk read error. Since I currently have my flash drive  set up as a bootable Ubuntu 9.04 stick, I just stuck that in and booted it.

I didn’t really expect the wireless to work out of the box and was preparing to go digging for an ethernet cable, but when I tried the network manager, it connected without any finagling at all. Sharing on the harddrive was not quite as  easy. It took me a little while to realize that I couldn’t see the computer on the lan because it  didn’t have any shared folders. When I tried to share a folder, Ubuntu told me I needed to install samba. Luckily I had some space on the usb  stick, so that was done with a click. Next, it told me  that I couldn’t share a folder  I didn’t own. That is, I couldn’t do that unless I added a line to the config file that said I could. That too was quickly accomplished, and I was shortly able to find my destination folder on the lan.

With that, I am copying 41.6GB which Nautilus tells me will take 12 more  hours at 1000KB/s.

To  be   continued…

Poking around some Navy websites today, I discovered that for all our technological superiority, we have crappy websites. Most of them have invalid security certificates; some are completely broken; some start blaring Anchors Aweigh when you arrive; and some look pretty ok. The last one was my favorite, however, when I discovered links like this one:

There’s nothing else I can say about that.

Here’s some old stories I wrote a while back. I pulled them out of mothballs a few weeks ago and actually got a pretty good reception, so if you’ve never read ‘em, here you go:

Occasionally subtle, usually slapstick, ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to present for your reading pleasure the Bombastic Pirates of Yammssabor V!

BPOYV Episode 1: The Iron Contra Affair

BPOYV Episode 11: The Next Thing that Happened

From my first day of notes in this Biology class:

Life is…

A. Made of Cells
B. Interconnected
C. Diverse

Maybe it’s just me, but that last point strikes me as patentable nonsense. My immediate response was “Compared to what?”. The word diverse is fundamentally a relative one. It’s just like the word big. When I say elephants are big, I mean that elephants are bigger than most other animals. To say that life in this universe is diverse without having any other universes to compare it to robs the term of all meaning.

In fact, the only analysis I could come up with leads to exactly the opposite conclusion. The one thing we can say is that the number of species that could potentially exist but don’t is greater than the  number of species that could potentially not exist but do (making the very reasonable assumption that the set of all possible species of living things is infinite). By that logic, life on earth is not diverse. (Admittedly, such would be the case for every universe with a finite number of species).

.

.

.

.

.

(I also think it’s funny when people say PIN number)