Author: Administrator

How to mount a Firewire Drive using an iLink (1394/Firewire) port with Mepis Linux Live CD on a Dell Inspiron 8200


What To Do

  1. Open a root terminal and type in "modprobe ieee1394 ; modprobe ohci1394 ; modprobe sbp2"
  2. Download rescan-scsi-bus.sh and then "sh rescan-scsi-bus.sh".
  3. "Fdisk -l" to get a list of all available drives. You should be able to see the firewire drive listed along with what devices (e.g. /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 or whatever) its partitions have been assigned to.
  4. For each partition you want to mount (e.g. for each /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.) create a directory somewhere to mount to. I created /mnt/sda1, /mnt/sda2, etc. Then run "mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1" where you replace sda1 with the actual device of the partition you want to mount. Repeat for all partitions you want to mount.

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port with Mepis Linux Live CD on a Dell Inspiron 8200

Price Comparisons & Picking Good Sellers

I check prices on just about everything I buy on-line. There are a couple of on-line price comparison services I have found extremely useful.
Books – Best Web Buys (I usually end up buying at Buy.Com)
Restaurants – Zagat (I pay for the on-line membership)
Everything Else – Yahoo Shopping
Random but excellent – Consumer Reports (I pay for an on-line membership here as well)
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Mac and Me

In a classic example of 'too stupid for my own good' I tried something very dangerous during my upgrade to Mandrake 10, the Linux distribution I run, and managed to fry my partition table. Even though the damage was my fault I was sick of driving a car with no seatbelt. I had enough of figuring out how to run Java, or print pictures or deal with install quirks or never figuring out how to get flash running or living in fear of installing non-RPM software lest it toast my system. I really just had enough. So I decided to buy a Macintosh G5.

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WebDAV, DASL, XQUERY and XPATH 2.0

The Web's slow but inexorable movement from a read only to a collaborative environment is increasing WebDAV's success. But WebDAV still has a serious functional outage – search. The DASL community has been keeping hope alive by continuing to work on a search grammar for WebDAV. But much as WebDAV adopted XML both to solve real problems and to ride on the coat tails of XML's success, so DASL could solve a number of serious technical issues and increase its own visibility and leverage the excitement and investment in the XPATH/XQUERY community if it adopted a profile of XPATH 2.0 as its basic search grammar. In the article below I discuss some of the details of how DASL could use XPATH.
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Why LinkedIn is a better fit for me than Orkut

This article compares LinkedIn and Orkut. These are websites that allow you to enter in people you know and then those people can enter in people they know which then lets you perform searches over your entire social 'network'. Orkut focuses primarily on personal relationships while LinkedIn focuses on business relationship. I prefer LinkedIn because it provides tools and features that are extremely useful to me both in hiring people and in putting myself in a better position to be hired if I should need a new job.
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Orkut

Support VerifiedVoting.Org

Electronic voting has been promised as the solution to the 'hanging chad' problems seen in the last presidential election. Of course, anyone who reads Greg Palast's work knows that 'hanging chad' was irrelevant but it made for good head lines. A much more serious threat to the integrity of our voting system are new electronic voting systems that do not include a paper trail. These systems, known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), take one's vote, usually through a touch screen and then record the result in their memory. If that memory or the software that processes it is tampered with or if the software has a bug, there is almost no way to detect it.
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How much charity goes to charity?

Recently I sat down to plan out my giving for the year. I listed all the organizations I wanted to give money to and then stack ranked them to decide who was going to get the most and who was going to get the least. A lot of different factors go into the stack ranking. For example – how important do I think the organization's activities are? Whose work is more important, the CATO Institute or the ACLU Foundation? How effective do I think the organization is? Who is achieving more, the Electronic Privacy Information Center or the Electronic Frontier Foundation? These questions don't lend themselves well to quantitative analysis so one is left with having to trust one's instincts. But one area in which one can get solid information is – how efficiently does the organization spend your money?

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