Oh, lots of stuff

As much as I like the "Fixed" theme, I get sick of dark themes very quickly.  I’m also generally sick of sans-serif fonts, and lately I have a newfound appreciation for serif, and for plainness in web design.  So here we are.  This is the new fall theme.  (Of course, there needs to be the usual disclaimer for Internet Explorer users: IE doesn’t adhere to standards when rendering web pages.  The current case in point is my Last 5 Visitors jammie: it doesn’t have any background color, but IE gives it a white background.  As a result, there’s an ugly white block underneath it, on top of this theme’s background image.)

In my music class today, the professor had a slide that contained the phrase "vernacular language."  She stopped and said, "I had not heard this phrase until I got to college, so I want to explain it to you.  How many of you are familiar with this phrase?"  My initial reaction was that she is completely insane; how can a person possibly go through ~18 years of life having never heard the word vernacular??  Then again, this professor had just finished saying that a violin doesn’t require air to make sound, so if that tells you anything...  But here’s the sad part: only about half the class raised their hands.  Now I went to private school, so I can only speculate about what kids have (not) learned in public schools.  I know public schools are not so good with the grammar and language skills (I know that because I interact with society every day), but surely they can’t be SO bad as to never present any kind of lesson involving the idea of vernacular languages... right?  Or so I’d’ve thought.

And on the funny tip, I drove out to the FedEx center to ship a package, and on the way I drove over some speed bumps... except instead of the usual yellow sign that says "BUMP," there were big white letters painted right on the road... and they said "HUMP."  Forgive me, but that’s just too much.

Anyway, in that music class, I sat down behind a guy who had a little Vaio notebook.  I look over his shoulder and I see kismet running.  Kismet?  Couldn’t be.  But I look a little closer, and it turns out he’s running Red Hat.  Sweet.  We talked after class, and it turns out his name is Andrew, he’s big into Linux (works as a Red Hat admin on campus and at a local company -- which is pretty close to my current dream job, by the way), and he drives a Golf.  He’s also done some wardriving (which is the name given to the process of driving around detecting wireless networks), which I just taught my musicbox to do.  All pretty coincidental stuff to me.

And speaking of linux, rsync is an amazing tool.  With a single simple command, you can clone an entire hard disk partition.  And you can do it "incrementally", so that for a backup partition, it only copies the files that were changed/added since the last time you backed it up.

rsync -ax --delete / /mnt/backup-partition

-a is the "clone" switch, which basically says "make /mnt/backup-partition an exact copy of /" ... and -x is the single-filesystem switch, so that any other partitions that you have mounted (usually under /mnt/) are excluded.  And --delete says to remove any file from /mnt/backup-partition that no longer exists on the source (/) partition.

Two things about this are particularly cool: one is that you can take the backup partition and boot it*, and it’s fully functional just like the original (which is something you can only dream of in the Microsoft world, unless you’re using some partition cloning tool that doesn’t actually copy files, and needs to be run as the boot disk to work, and might not work anyway if you move the disk to another system).  Two is that rsync uses some kind of advanced algorithm which allows it to only copy the parts of a file that have changed, so if you’ve got some huge file where you’ve only modified a little bit of it, it won’t need to re-copy the entire huge thing.

Also, / happens to be the root directory on a Linux system, which contains the whole partition... and I happen to have another partition mounted at /mnt/backup-partition/.  But / and /mnt/partition/ are just directories as far as rsync (and Linux in general) are concerned, and rsync can clone any directory to any other directory, even if it’s not the whole partition.

*Of course, the backup partition needs a proper boot sector, so you’ll need to run the lilo command on it once (which takes all of 3 seconds) before it will boot.