T3h Blog

My hard drive died.  Sort of.  It wouldn’t work at all inside my computer.  I put it into my external enclosure, just to see if it was my motherboard/SATA cable, or anything but the HDD.  It worked!  For 20 seconds…  That got me thinking that maybe it was overheating.  How better to cool it than with liquid nitrogen?  I’m at school, anyway…

Well, one empty trash can and a quick trip to the dewar, and I had a deep-frozen hard drive that did absolutely nothing.  It wouldn’t turn on.  I put it aside and went about disposing of the liquid nitrogen.  I poured out about half of it on the floor.  If you’ve never done this, you really should!  It fizzes and little droplets dance around the floor and collect all the dust into little spots.  Well, the drops raced into the hallway and fizzed menacingly.  Nobody was around, thankfully, or I might have had some questions to answer.  I dumped the rest onto chairs – a handy absorptive medium.  Quite the opposite of a hotseat.

Having disposed of the cryo-liquid, I wondered if the hard drive would work again after it had warmed.  These things usually have operating temperatures, and they’re usually not encompassing of liquid nitrogen temperatures.  I tried warming it in my jacket (while wearing it), but it was too cold for me.  I stuck it back in the computer for some heat.  I went off and played games for a while, came back, and had a nice, roughly 5 degree C HDD, which worked perfectly for me to salvage my files.

I don’t recommend trying this yourself.  I’m not really sane, and this wasn’t really safe.  Still, it is cool that it worked…

I run linux at work.  It eases my conscience to not depend on Microshit.  Fedora 9 was released today.  I’ve been a Ubuntu fan for a while now, but some of the software I use for work (IMOD) isn’t easily made to run on Ubuntu.  I know it should be just figuring out the proper paths to tell it, but I wasted a day and decided it wasn’t worth any more time than that.  On to Fedora (8).

Now, with the update today, I tried the preupgrade option.  It’s a cool idea – it downloads updated files, reboots, does whatever changes it needs to, and bam, updated OS.  It stalled at the later stage – 90.0%, something about metadata.  I figured it sounded too good to be true anyway.  I downloaded the new install DVD (thanks kernel.org!), and tried an upgrade install.  It took forever!  Why do these take so much longer?  I know there are more packages to install, and maybe these have to be downloaded.  That’s a valid excuse.  Well, ok, this time it finished.  I rebooted to a pretty unhappy computer – no GUI at all.  The display flickered a bit, and then gave up.  Command prompt time.  I checked into Xorg’s log file – version mismatch on the video driver (radeonhd).  Must not have gotten updated in the upgrade install (why not?)  A quick yum install took care of that, and X came up.  However, none of my desktops would load – not gnome, not KDE, and not enlightenment.  Showstopper.  I rebooted and did a fresh install.  Now things are pretty good.  I had to fight to get Flash working.  I had to feed my Pandora addiction.  For those of you wanting to know how to accomplish this feat, you must sacrifice your first born with a 32-hour old blade under a full moon…

No, really, here’s what you have to do (from http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Desktop.html):

Now sound probably isn’t working yet.  Run these commands next, then restart firefox if you have it running at this point.

su -c "yum -y install libflashsupport-000-0.5.svn20070904.{i386,x86_64}"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Thanks to http://www.derekhildreth.com/blog/how-to-fix-the-no-sound-issue-in-firefox-flash/ for this last bit.

YMMV, but I hope this helps.