nutmeg's blog

As the hard-disk of my PC exhibited its first hard error after months of strange noises I was forced to replace it. This machine dual-boots WinXP (on NTFS) and Debian, Windows' boot manager invokes grub and I absolutely did not want to re-install either Windows or Debian or try to figure how to resurrect a broken WinXP bootmanager.

So I used the the dd-method again:

1. Plugin new disk as hdc
2. dd_rescue -b 512k -A /dev/hda /dev/hdc (I had to use -b 1 for copying the almost broken sectors.)
3. Either re-partion or simply add more partitions at the end. (The new disk is always bigger.) Don't touch the first partition, which is NTFS and take care that the partion containing /boot gets the same partition number/position. - This way grub will grub will continue to work. Use cp -ax to acually copy the data to the new partitions. (cp is dog slow for copying directories containing many files, like ~/mail or ~/.ccache. - Two tar instances talking to each other over a pipe would probably be a lot faster but I cannot remember the 42 options needed to replicate cp -ax behavior.)
4. Power off, switch disks, power on.
5. Verify that your data is still there and clean the old disk, using shred(1) and openssl rand -rand /dev/urandom -out /dev/hdc1 somereallybignumber.

The process would be smoother if I knew of a sane way of copying NTFS (preserving ACLs) and could be bothered to actually remember how I setup grub in the first place. ;-)

Mako asks for a RFID-proof, vegan wallet. This is what I have been using for a couple of years:
I started using it since my maestro/credit/whatever cards broke frequently, being RFID proof is just a nice side effect. The obvious downside is that I need to carry change separately in my pocket, but I wouldn't want a wallet big enough to carry the huge Euro coinage anyway.

good: Kabel1 continues airing Due South (at 3 a.m.).
bad: I have joined the countless mass of of people who are out of fresh episodes of Firefly. Aargh. Well, I have not yet watched the feature film...

Today I had problems trying to fix the versioning information of bug #343593. Neither the correct command notfound 343593 4.2.26-2 nor an unversioned reopen made the bts forget the wrong "found in 4.2.26-2".

Jeroen told me of a heavier boot to kick the bts with: reassigning somewhere else and back again. This worked nicely.

Documented here, so I will be able to look it up later.

Update:
Steinar remarked: You do not actually need two reassigns, just reassign to the same package and all version information is gone.

While browsing through mutt's manual I stumbled upon this:
~H EXPR - messages with a spam attribute matching EXPR.
After reading up on the spam tags I have changed my configuration to include
spam "X-Spam-Score: .*\\(\\+\\+" sa2
set index_format="%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15F (%4c) %?H?[%H] ?%s"


This improves my mail handling a lot. I can limit my view to ~H sa2 to bulk-move the spam in my inbox to the bayes-learn-spam folder. And false positives are easily discernable since possible spam (i.e. something marked with X-Spam-Score: 3.0 (+++)) is tagged with sa2 in the folder index:

  27     Nov 04 jetlik jetlik   (2,8K) [sa2] SpecMoney stock