AWOL RAM

Published: 19 October 2009

I really hate ordering stuff online because receiving it is always a pain in the ass. I ordered some RAM for my desktop the other day from Newegg and it departed on 10/13. I still haven’t received it and I wondered where on earth it might be, so I checked the tracking info online. DHL handed it over to the USPS in my city on the 15th–that’s four days ago. I suppose it sat around Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, enjoying being ignored. I called my local post office just now, becoming increasingly annoyed as I was put on hold several times, and found out that it should have been delivered today. Really? Seems like even with standard shipping, taking six days is pushing it. Since I already checked my mailbox and found no package, nor a note saying my package was at the post office, the postal worker said it would probably come tomorrow. I’m reminded strongly of Tom Hanks’ line from Cast Away about FedEx’s shipping speed from the US to Russia, I believe: “87 hours? We might as well be the U.S. Mail.”

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stupid Adobe pop-up

Published: 13 October 2009

Adobe Reader, I heart your verbosity:

Adobe Reader blank message

Posted in Techy | Tagged | 2 Comments

how I made my languages professor twitch

Published: 13 October 2009

Today in programming languages, the professor started going over Lisp. I was surprised to learn that function names are case insensitive in Lisp, so if you declare a function called incrementAll, you can invoke it by calling INCREMENTALL, incrementall, or any other case variant. I forgot about this because I’m not used to case insensitive function names in a language, so later when my professor typed incrementall on his laptop, I pointed out that the ‘a’ should be capitalized.

Him: “Oh, that won’t matter, it’s case insensitive.”
Me: “Oh! …So it’s like Visual Basic.”

That made him cringe a bit, being a language purist and a bit of an open source/Linux zealot to boot. Visual Basic was the only other language I could think of though where there’s any kind of case insensitivity, e.g. if expr then is the same as If expr Then in VB.

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Grub Error 13 and 17 together

Published: 12 October 2009

I just encountered a Grub Error 13 and a Grub Error 17 all for seemingly no reason. I fixed the problem, but thought I could save others undue headache.

The Setup

I have Ubuntu Linux installed on one hard drive which fdisk calls /dev/hda and Windows XP installed on a second hard drive called /dev/hdb. To Grub, the mapping is as follows:

  • /dev/hda1 = (hd0, 0)
  • /dev/hdb1 = (hd1, 0)

This works because my BIOS agrees on this mapping.

The Mistake

After shutting down my computer, I unplugged only my Linux drive, which both my BIOS and Grub agreed was the main/first/primary drive, hoping I would somehow still be able to boot into Windows even though Grub is on my Linux drive. Alas, that didn’t work and I got some kind of “Grub configuration error” screen without seeing my Grub boot menu. I figured “oh well, I’ll just plug my Linux drive back in and boot into Windows”.

I shut down my computer, plugged my Linux drive back in, and powered on the computer. The Grub boot menu loaded again, as expected. When I tried to boot into Windows, however, it gave me a Grub Error 13. This was weird, since I hadn’t done anything to the Grub configuration. Exiting back to the Grub boot menu, I tried to load Linux. No luck, but this time it gave me a Grub Error 17. I tried following my own tutorial about error 17, but fdisk reported that /dev/hda1 was a Linux partition, as it should. What was going on?

The Explanation

Reading on the Ubuntu Forums, mbwardle wrote the following:

The error usually happens because Linux and your BIOS detect your hard disks in different orders. GRUB tries to translate between the two using the device.map file in /boot/grub/device.map, which is automatically generated. Chances are, it guessed wrong.

In my case, I have three SATA hard disks.

My BIOS sees them as:
HDD1 – 80 GB – Windows
HDD2 – 80 GB – Linux
HDD3 – 250 GB – Media

Linux sees them as:
/dev/sda – 80 GB – Windows
/dev/sdb – 250 GB – Media
/dev/sdc – 80 GB – Linux
— mbwardle

Aha, your BIOS and Grub are not necessarily talking about the same thing! This was what happened in my case. When I unplugged the Linux drive (which Grub and my BIOS thought of as the first drive) and left only the Windows drive (which Grub and my BIOS thought of as the second drive), I was left with only the second drive, but my BIOS started thinking of that as the first drive since that was the only drive plugged in. Then when I plugged the Linux drive back in, it was thought of as the second drive. Just because my BIOS changed the order, though, doesn’t mean Grub did: it still thought of Linux as #1 and Windows as #2.

The Solution

I shut down my computer, unplugged the Windows drive (the one Grub thinks of as #2), and left the Linux drive (the one Grub thinks of as #1) plugged in. I started my computer, thus making my BIOS think of the Linux drive as #1 again. I was able to boot Linux just fine from the Grub boot screen, though of course Windows was inaccessible because the drive was unplugged.

I shut down my computer again, plugged the Windows drive back in, and kept the Linux drive plugged in too. I started my computer, and then the BIOS saw the Windows drive and began thinking of it as #2, just like Grub does. Now I can boot both Windows and Linux because, once again, Grub and my BIOS agree about what order the drives are in.

Posted in Linux | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

food storage and wife beaters

Published: 12 October 2009

These are a couple of funny stories that I don’t think I’ve shared on here before, involving Jon and me:

Are you saving that for later?

Jon and I were sitting on my couch, each with a helping of some of my home-made cheesecake and peach ice cream (real calorie-counters, us). While we were eating, I looked over at him and saw he had some in his beard. My dad, also quite the beardy person, will remark that he’s “just saving it for later” when someone points out he has food in his beard. I tried to point at the food on Jon and ask “are you saving that for later?” but, creature of infinite grace that I am, I managed to whack the spoonful of cheesecake + ice cream that he was holding and knock it into his shoulder, smearing tastiness all over his shirt. We just stared at it for a minute, then he responded with “No, I’m saving this for later.”

Wife beater

This story is funny entirely because of the American slang term “wife beater“, meaning an A-shirt. Jon was at my place and had gotten something on his shirt, so he wanted to change. I didn’t have any large t-shirts that would work for him, so I offered him one of my wife beaters, explaining that, though small, it would stretch. He was all dubious, saying he’d never fit in the tiny shirt that fits me. I insisted he try it anyway, and I stood next to him as he tried it on. While trying to get his arm through the second sleeve, he managed to punch me in the head. I asked him if he did it “because I burnt the roast.”

Posted in Funny | Tagged | 2 Comments