Carelessness fuels perserverence...

So very near the end of Hitomi's visit, it occurred to someone that maybe it would be nice to take some pictures. Having an iPhone at hand made this a very simple procedure, and several pictures were taken in succession of Hitomi with Shiloh and Thumper.

But when it came to taking a group picture of Hitomi, Galina, and me, I wasn't quite sure I could get either Shiloh or Thumper to keep the phone steady long enough while they took the picture (not to mention aiming it in the first place). So I went upstairs to grab my trusty Canon PowerShot, and using its timer feature, the appropriate image was made.

Before taking the picture, however, I took the time to make sure the SD card used to store the photos was working properly, as I had used it (unsuccessfully) in my experiments to dd a copy of Debian "wheezy" onto it for the Raspberry Pi, and then formatted it back for use with the FAT file system.

So before starting work, I fired up Picasa, imported the photos from my iPhone, and then drag-n-dropped the photo from the SD card. Everything looked good.

Then I got to thinking about how long it had been since I've checked to see if a version of CHDK had been created that would work on my Canon model (CHDK is a hack that allows some Canon cameras to load software with many more features than what is offered by the firmware). It had, but it required me to upgrade the firmware.

When I attempted to copy the firmware file onto the SD card (basically, a simple file copy procedure), Windows threw an I/O error. With the group photo staring at me from the Picasa interface, I removed and reseated the SD card, at which point Windows informed me that the card was unformatted, and would I like to format it now? When I double-clicked on the photo in Picasa, Picasa effectively asked me, "What photo?"

Grrr.

I removed the SD card, fired up my Linux laptop and mounted the card, which came up as showing a 1.9-GB file system with all of the right directories... for a Linux system.

And then it hit me.

The dd operation to write a bootable SD card for the Raspberry Pi creates two partitions: a small FAT partition (of about 57 MB, if memory serves) and a larger Linux partition. The smaller FAT partition either no longer existed in the card's partition table or was being ignored by my Linux laptop.

To make what is by now a long story just a bit shorter, a little research on the Web revealed the existence of a forensic tool called Foremost that is capable of recovering files from media formatted using a number of filesystems. I set it to work on the SD card and—mirabile dictu—it recovered quite a number of files, including the group shot of Hitomi, Galina, and me.

When I get a chance, however, I am curious to find out where a number of other shots came from, because, well... I never took them.

But that's for later. For now, to work!

Cheers...

Absolute and utter craziness...

I got thrown for a loop today when "too many files" showed up for a package of documents officially in "revision 9" (but which underwent a few revisions earlier that were never formally numbered, but hey! that's all in the past). The extra files were meant to be helpful, but only succeeded in raising blood pressure and delaying the ultimate delivery of the final product.

As much as I am impressed with Sputnik, development on the project has been moribund for quite some time and the amount of explanatory information available just doesn't float my boat. So, I started looking around for something with a bit more oomph! than the original WikiWikiWeb, but didn't require a database (e.g., MySQL), which would slow things down considerably, since I plan to host the thing on a Raspberry Pi. I'm now looking at dokuwiki, which requires PHP (already preinstalled on the Pi) and has a built-in capability for uploading files (graphics and data). Testing, as my old boss used to say, has commenced.

Cheers...