When your distro-upgrade past comes back to haunt you...

A long, long time ago, I messed up while updating my (Arch) work box, and ended-up deleting /etc/fstab. Oops. Having to get back to work, I just hacked the two lines absolutely necessary to boot the box---the mounts for /home and /---and made a mental note to fix it properly later. I should have known better.

Predictably enough, I ended up never doing it---until now. Why? Well, because I use stable, and for a long time there had been no kernel updates---until now. Because /boot was unmounted, from the update process' point of view, it was a regular folder, so all the files that were modified were just dumped in there. Worse, because the /boot line did not exist in /etc/fstab, the system had no idea that /boot is where the boot partition is supposed to be mounted---otherwise during the upgrade process a very visible warning would have been displayed (I confirmed this specifically re-testing this scenario). And the day after, I turn on the box, only to discover that it boots just fine, but that's about it. After booting, in X, no keyboard, no mouse, no anything---because the system has the wrong modules loaded! (it has the ones that correspond to the kernel in the /boot folder, rather than the /boot partition, which is the one that is actually running, i.e. loaded during the boot process).

And so I had to borrow 5 minutes at a colleague's computer, to browse for the solution, so I can boot, so I can downgrade the kernel, fix fstab, re-upgrade the kernel, and finally get back to work. Murphy, I effing hate you!

Why (he) blogs

In mid-2007, when I started blogging over there, I detailed the reason why I was doing it: in essence, I had some free time, and decided to give blogging a try. Never really thought I'd stick to it. But it turns out I did stick to it, and the reason is simple: writing---instead of just "thinking"---forces you to discipline and organize your thought. The reason I'm getting back at this right now, is because I found a great blog post that gives you a great couple of other reasons to blog. Following the one I already mentioned, here's the one that most resonated with me:

Blogging is a bit like public speaking, and people are scared of it for good reason. You are really putting yourself out there. 

If you do it right, you will stay stupid things every now and then. You will piss people off.  It's scary at first to hit Publish and push your ideas into the public sphere. 

In the process though you will learn how to live with a thick skin and how to confidently state your opinion. You will also come to be more zen about putting yourself out there in general. In my opinion, these skills are essential for good entrepreneur and hard to learn elsewhere.

Have fun reading.

GPU toaster!

So, to make a long story short, I finally decided to try to make my desktop computer jet engine a bit more quiet. Much to my astonishment, I discovered, with the help of the folks at MBit, that the cause of the jet engine noise was my no longer manufactured Asus nVidia Geforce 9500GT. Or more precisely, its smaller-than-a-cookie fan. Seriously. So I flipped my mental insanity bit to logical 1, and decided to turn it off (I did add another larger fan on the lateral wall of my case).

The result? My GPU's idle temperature is now at a nice and cool 77ºC :P Watching a 20 minute anime raised it to 83ºC. Well, at least now I have a pc that's much, MUCH more silent! Anyway, if anyone knows a silent, (preferably fanless) nVidia GPU with enough horsepower to play FullHD movies, feel free to drop a comment ;-)

Note: I'm not a gamer, so basic 3D render and FullHD is about all I require from a GPU.

EDIT TO ADD: the way to discover where the noise is coming from, is to stop each fan, one at a time, and see which one yields the biggest noise reduction.  The proper way to stop a fan is to press your finger against its central spindle, until it stops. It's painless, for both the fan and your finger! ;-)