Go fsck yourself, part duh

You remember last time, when I said, "I'm writing this blog entry on the same disk image that was giving me nightmares just 7 hours ago"? Hahaha, well, that was then, and this is now.

It's four hours later, and this time, I'm writing from the laptop.

Go fsck yourself

Interesting experience today.

My daily use machine has a SATA disk drive, and it would not boot this morning. GRUB would begin, and then fail saying it could not find any initrd or kernel.

I was able to boot using a Live CD, but several of the ones I have didn't work. Time to purge my "rescue disk" collection, download the latest Trinity Rescue and Knoppix, etc.

The one that did work would not recognize that the HD even existed. So no fdisk, no mounting the partitions for backup, nothing. Doomed, I thought. Fried disk. Right.

VoIP and some agonies of E.164 or, Forward Into The Past!

Does anyone else remember CompuServe accounts, which were all numbers? Mine was 72125,1424. Or ICQ, which was fun to guess just when the other person signed up by the numeric value of their ICQ account. I'm glad to see ICQ is still operating, which maybe I should have noticed before. I wonder if my old number still works?

Now people use names for their email, in a standard and well understood form that works seamlessly between different service providers. Me@example.com is far more understandable than 72125,1424 ever was.

Abandon Skype all ye who enter here

With the purchase of Skype by Microsoft, there's a question that has been bugging me for quite a while.

Why Skype?

What properties made Skype the 800lbs gorilla of software phones?

I think I have a few ideas.

1) Video. Even though it took a while to get video working on Linux, it does work and works pretty well.

Looking up old friends.

Recently, I have thought about looking up old friends. Like from highschool. Or early girlfriends. People like that.

What has been very hard to keep in mind is that I have made no secret of my identity on the "interwebs". My existence on the 'Net has been rather obvious, from early posts on NANOG and Rec.Motorcycles to the present.

This creates a conflict of interest, of sorts.

Microsoft devours Skype

Skype has been purchased by Microsoft, for $8.5 Billion.

I have used Skype for years on Linux, even though Skype treated their Linux client as something like a red-headed step-child. Features like video chat were always included in the Linux client long after they were in the Windows version, bug fixes were slow, stuff like that.

But, and here's the biggest thing: It worked.

Windows Is Not Free

Three years ago, I read one of the finest articles on the issues concerning the difficulties faced by the advocates of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS or FOSS), and the endless efforts to get people to give F/OSS an opportunity to work for them.

The article is "Windows Is Free: The Impact of Pirated Software on Free Software", along with the follow up article by the same author, "No Really - Windows Is Free."