Linux a better Windows partition manager

My inlaws were in town to help Liz through her surgery. They brought their machines to me for repair One of the machines had a full disk so I upgraded the 20GB to a 250GB drive.

1. made the 20GB drive a slave
2. installed the 250GB drive as the master
3. booted Fedora Live CD
4. create a partition of the same size on the new disk
5. copy the master boot record (MBR) using dd
6. copy the partition using dd
7. shutdown
8. remove power from the slave (old 20GB) drive
9. reboot to Windows, verify things look ok.

For detailed instructions visit:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

I stopped at the “Resizing the Partition”.

The best part of all this was I never knew the power of dd, ntfsresize, and fdisk. I was originally looking for a copy of PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost. Linux is far better than any of that.

Once I finished the dd, I shutdown, and removed power from the slave drive. I rebooted and Windows came up on the new 250GB but still appeared as a 20GB drive. Now I had to resize it.

The oddest part was resizing the partition, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the “delete the partition” then recreate. The delete part threw me off as I was afraid to lose the data. But it was an in memory operation so it didn’t affect it. WHEW! Then I ran ntfsresize -n -s 250G /dev/sda1, then rebooted back to Windows. After a chkdsk, I was all done!

So Linux is a better Windows partition tool than Windows
http://darkstar.ucd.ie/timosh/links/ntfsresize.html#cli

Iron Man weekend

This morning, Grandpop, Grandma, the kids & I went strawberry picking at Vollmer Farm in Bunn, NC. We came home with 3 buckets full. The berries are plump, red and sweet!

This afternoon, Grandpop Frank & I took the boys to see Iron Man. Usually I don’t see movies the weekend they have been released, but I promised the boys I’d take them today.  The movie was AWESOME! Adan & Marco loved it, as did I.

Then finally this evening, I drove the Trans Am to it’s new owner at RDU.

twitter

I’ve joined the twitter crowd. Here’s my RSS feed.

sm-photo-tool 1.13 released

Tonight I released version 1.13 of sm-photo-tool. Download it here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=179298

iPod + Banshee + Amazon = AWESOME!

I think I’ve found my iTunes replacement: Amazon’s MP3 store + Banshee + iPod is an awesome combination. The only thing that is missing is integration between Banshee and Amazon, now that would be an iTunes killer!
Hrm I smell a project Just another example of how Fedora can make a great desktop.

Anniversary

Today marks my 4 year anniversary at work. I can’t believe it has been that long already, I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

Sirius satellite radio and AUX input? NOT!

The Mazdaspeed3 has an AUX input in the arm rest for use with digital audio players like my iPod. The car also has Sirius satellite radio (though I have not and do not plan to activate it). I bought a cool Monster iCarCharger and an audio cable for the AUX input. I connect it all up this morning and I get NADA! NOTHING! ZILCH! I break open the manual and follow the instructions. Still nothing.

I checked my connection and noticed the big white sticker in the arm rest that clearly states “This vehicle is equipped with Sirius satellite radio, …. AUX input has been disabled… Call your local Mazda dealer for part number TD13-79-CFZ”.

That’s when I had the “You’ve got to be $!#!#*& kidding me!” This is definitely a feature created by a business guy “Hey I know how we can get more money, let’s upsell them the AUX input” because no engineer worth their weight in gold would EVER do something as stupid as this (at least not without pressure from managers and business folks).

So I call up Capital Mazda of Cary and they said the part is $142 + tax!!! That’s BULLSH*T! If I’m going to pay that much for audio parts I’m going to Crutchfield not the Mazda dealer.

A quick google search reveals a few forums all with the same problem:

• Aux input / media button
• AUX Input / Media Button Problems
• Media button on Bose stereo does not seem to work
• NoGo on my iPod and my CX-9

doodles

During a meeting on Monday, I zoned out and starting drawing. Here’s a drawing of the parking garage outside the conference room:

Python the next Java

While doing my daily blog reading, this post by Kushal Das made me laugh:

How to write better Java code ?
/Me and kart_ was discussing on this and the answer came out:
Don’t write Java, write Python

2007 Mazda Mazdaspeed3

Tonight I bought a used 2007 Mazda Mazdaspeed3. I finally got the last bit of life out of my 1995 Pontiac Trans Am, 12 years for an American car is great, in my opinion. But then again the one thing American car makers do well is make good V-8’s (not the juice) and it probably would’ve been fine a bit longer if I didn’t have the accident back in 2004.

The Mazda has both performance and practicality, the latter is something the Trans Am had none of. I haven’t driven a different stick shift in a long time so it took a bit of getting used to the Mazdaspeed’s clutch and brakes, very touchy and it moves too.

Here are some pictures (I took them from the dealer’s website):

For more pictures check out my flickr set: 2007 Mazdaspeed3. Ok off to go read the manual to see what all the things can do. Yes I read car manuals, there are a lot of little jewels you can find in them sometimes features you didn’t know the car had.