If you’re sleepy, just sleep, don’t do your work.

I was so damn sleepy last night that I could hardly remember what I did before I went off to bed, but I do remember one thing – I switched off my external hdd without checking if I have safely unmount it from Windows. Actually I was too lazy to check and I forced myself to believe that I have unmounted it.

Back in the office this morning I plugged in the hdd, and surprise, surprise.. Ubuntu recognized only one of the partition (I have two, ‘Work’ and ‘Personal’). It gave me an error stating that it failed to mount due to unclean shutdown.

I remember having the similar error with the same hdd, even worse actually since both partitions failed to be mounted. But that happened after I borrowed my hdd to a colleague who is running on Vista, and it is pretty common to have that error once you try to boot it back on any *nix system. Back then I was using freebsd, and I normally mount it manually using the “mount -t ntfs /dev/da0s5 /mnt/hdd” command. ntfsfix didn’t solve the error, but ntfs-3g worked like a charm.

And so I tried to mount it manually on Ubuntu using ntfs-3g command, but it gave me this error:
fuse: mount failed: Invalid argument

I installed ntfsprogs and tried to fix with ntfsfix. It completed successfully, but my attempt to mount the partition still failed.

I mounted it back on Windows, and checked on the disk management. While it recognized my ‘Work’ partition as ntfs, my ‘Personal’ partition was recognized as raw and unlabeled. So I labeled it, and run chkdsk against the volume. Mount it back on Ubuntu, and it worked! Yay

Moral of the story is - Don’t work when you’re sleepy.

I do take free stuff.

Finally managed to get the flash-plugin to work on Opera. I recently installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my lappie replacing FreeBSD 6.2 to fulfill the training’s requirement I attended last week (but ended up I used the desktop provided). So back to flash, it was pretty annoying to get it working on Opera. I don’t remember having this kinda problem back when I used Edge. Even linux-opera’s flash plugin works out of the box in freebsd.

The solution is, use flash 7, it’ll work like a charm. Forget about flash 9.

Several times I was asked why do I use unix/linux and not windows. Most of the time I’d give them the easiest and fundamental answer – it’s free.

Logically, why would anyone opt for something that is expensive, when there are better products that come for free? It never really came across my mind before that one wouldn’t use linux because it’s free until I read this article. Funny, weird, but somehow it does make sense afterall.

On a different note, I tried vixta on my vm. First try and it didn’t work out well. Some of the buttons weren’t functioning, but yea it does look like vista. Prolly it behaves like one too