Blyeah!

I got up at 6 am today after a late night and if the day so far is any indication, I'm in a heap of trouble.

The major malfunction of the day has been Word's dogged persistence in the "something has gone wrong, sorry" department when it came to cutting, pasting, and saving work. The result has been numerous lockups and abnormal shutdowns, during which I routinely forget to uncheck the "recover my work" checkbox, so I've end up with something like a dozen recovered copies of the same broken file.

However, my experience, in a previous lifetime, as a software engineer came in handy as I more-than-doggedly tried the same thing over and over (get Word to open the file without blowing chunks, so to speak, and with minor variations, natch) until I got a different result. So, after three hours, I now have a file that (seems) stable.

In other news, it finally dawned on me that there was something funny about a data processing center (информационно-вычислительный центр, which I assumed to be the expansion of the abbreviation ИВЦ) doing work more appropriate for a engineering constrution firm. My mind must've been dialed back some years, where it was common to find companies in Russia either working outside their expertise, or simply expanding in new directions (then again, expanding into new areas is something Western companies do all the time with their brand names, for example: the entry, into the pesticide business, of Bayer, the people who make aspirin).

Anyway, it occurred to me to double-check the acronym and - by golly - for the company I'm dealing with, the abbreviation expands to инженерно-внедренческий центр (engineering and startup center), which makes a lot more sense, given the context.

Back to the face! (I have 15 pages left!)

Cheers...

Two more pages!

Call it the odds kicking in or the intercession of St. Jerome, but the last ten pages of the document contain two copies of the same report, with a lot of repetition inside of each report, so most of the work has consisted of proofreading to (a) make sure I got things right, and (b) editing numbers. As it stands right now, there are two pages left to do, neither of which has much text on it, but there is formatting to consider.

I felt confident enough about my ability to finish the job and review a chunk of it before the night is out to go out shopping earlier with Galina, and we just got back after replenishing our stores of food.

Dinner will be ready soon, perhaps one of the two remaining pages will be ready sooner?

Cheers...

UPDATE (8:00 pm): The last two pages are completed. I think I will just make an effort to get up early tomorrow for the pre-delivery review. I'm bushed and not really in the mood to push the envelope.

William F. Buckley, Jr. - RIP

From time to time over the years, I've run into diatribes critical of Bill Buckley, and it has always seemed to me that, the more feverish and scathing the criticism, the more it would sound as if the writer had actually never read anything Buckley wrote, and that their only knowledge of this highbrow, well-spoken conservative had been gleaned from the side of a cereal box.

I never met Buckley or saw him in person, but I did have the pleasure of corresponding with him brefly through an email system run by MCI back in the '80s. How, exactly, that correspondence came about I don't recall, but I believe it had to do with something he had written in early 1989 about the Russian term for dog-and-pony show, показуха (pokazukha).

In addition to whatever it was I said about that subject, I suppose I must've shoehorned in an article query by mentioning that I was a fairly regular writer for computer magazines and that I had written an opinion piece that might be the kind of thing his journal, National Review, would be interested in publishing.

My screed was a blast directed toward some environmental wingnuts who had come out publicly to denounce the possibility of desktop fusion power sources, the prospect of which had briefly hit the public's consciousness as a result of an announcement - premature as it turned out - that a pair of scientists by the name of Pons and Fleischmann had demonstrated a phenomenon called "cold fusion." I was not amused by the claim that making clean, non-polluting energy sources widely available to people in the developing world was an an invitation to environmental disaster.

Buckley's reply was pretty conversational and brief, the kind of thing you'd expect someone to compose while waiting for a plane, or something. (I seem to recall WFB used a Model 100 at the time.) In fact, some years ago, I ran across a printout of that email, which was part of a dump of various notes from my NEC 8201 (basically OEMed from the same source as the Model 100), and there, sandwiched in between a trip report for a boiler expert system job and a BASIC program listing, was the email, whose last line read:

Send your piece to John O'Sullivan and note on it that although I haven't seen it I encouraged you to do so.

Now, for all I knew, Buckely's suggestion may have been a nice way to send a coded message to O'Sullivan to immediately deposit whatever I sent in the trash, but the response I got was positive, and within a few months, I had been asked to write a couple of book reviews, both of which were accepted and published.

Each payment check was accompanied by an index-card-sized memo imprinted with the name and address of the magazine, with a short personal note from "WFB" (which, I was to later learn, was the way he signed such notes). "A fine effort," read one card. "Nice job," said the other.

My old man thought very highly of Buckley, subscribed to the magazine, and watched Buckley's Firing Line television show on a regular basis. In fact, my first real introduction to WFB came while watching him discuss capital punishment on his show with none other than comedian Steve Allen. I was impressed with Buckley's style; that he could disagree without being disagreeable. I started to read the magazine, and read a number of his books and columns but never found myself in much agreement with conservatives on social issues.

Buckley's passing will, I think leave a void that really needs to be filled, because too many of the voices on the right, as on the left, seem to have their sights set on that much-abused quantity, the lowest common denominator.

Cheers...

Background processing...

Recent studies say that multitasking is not the way to go, and there is probably something to that. Yesterday, in the middle of trying to achieve closure on the OCR portion of the current job, I was completing a backup of the contents of my previous VAIO, which in its day went by the name of proust, a worthy successor to yet another VAIO, ellroy.

My trusty proust had, like Humpty Dumpty, suffered a great fall literally on the eve of a trip to Baikonur, giving me a mandate to immediately go and buy its replacement, webster, which still performs yeoman duty as my day-to-day computer. At the time, it wasn't clear what in the damaged VAIO worked and what didn't, but having the unit around later gave me the confidence to risk junking the hidden 5-GB "recovery" partition to use the freed real estate to install Ubunu Linux.

One of the things I had done with proust upon taking it out of the box was to partition the hard disk so that there would be a C: drive for the system and program installation files, and a D: drive for data. Unfortunately, my seat-of-the-pants partition resulted in a chronic space problem on the C: drive that always stuck in my craw.

While I was doing the backup, I decided that what really needed to happen to bring proust back into the ranks of usable machines was the following:

• delete the deadwood files


• resize D to make it smaller, and move it "away" from C


• resize C to make it larger


• leave something left over for a new Linux partition, because the old system was stifling in its 5-GB hovel

What I learned in the process, carried out on my way in and out the door to my office, was this:

• Partition Magic 8.0 doesn't grok Linux partitions


• Gparted does


• the Knoppix LiveCD apparently activates any Linux swap partition it finds on a hard disk


• you must deactivate active Linux swap partitions inside of extended partitions before you'll be allowed to do anything with said partitions


• you can't move a resized D it if it is enclosed in an extended partition


• extended partitions don't move


• grub is actually easy to use


• UUIDs are a good thing to know about when dealing with grub and fstab

So what I now have is a machine whose hard disk is about equally divided between Windows XP and Linux, with the /usr partition mounted on the smaller ext3 Linux partition, and the rest of the directories in the new ext3 partition. After restoring the D files to the newly created and formatted extended partition, everything seems to work.

Now I just have to hope that the keyboard doesn't fall apart. :^)

Cheers...