Deleted lots of work from harddisk

Well, it happened.
I deleted by mistake a directory containing source that did not have back-ups. Then I restored it with git clone, but this was an old version, 4 days old or something like that. The I killed X, unmounted the partition, and did:
reiserfsck –rebuild-tree -S -l /root/recovery.log /dev/sda2 .I stopped it believing it takes too long with -S then
reiserfsck –rebuild-tree -l /root/recovery.log /dev/sda2 .I stopped it realizing that what I actually need it the original command.
reiserfsck –rebuild-tree -S -l /root/recovery.log /dev/sda2

Now most of the files I touched in the last hours/days are corrupted. While originally I only lost 2 source files, which I could probably rewrite in maybe less than 3 hours, now I lost the whole project. I can’t even do a git clone, .git is corrupted too. No more project to submit a homework. So I guess many of my files are now screwed. Some of them are confirmed to be destroyed:
-text files I edited last hours.
-pidgin configuration
-half of kde programs configuration
-amarok config
I hope I won’t realize many more are gone. The fact that .git is corrupted is a strong indicator that not only the files edited in the last hours are gone. My last back-up was one month ago.

The lost+found directoy, which was my hope, is largely useless. I go to sleep now and search again through lost+found in the morning.
The sad thing is that in the last 2 weeks I was really thinkinf of starting real back-up.

I also don’t exactly understand what happened, probably stopping “reiserfsck –rebuild-tree rebuild-tree” is a bad thing. Anyway, these are not tools for the faint of heart. And if you jump the window the first second you see fire you deserve the consequences.
Lesson learned.

Full text search – bachelor’s thesis

Long after the bachelor’s exam I am uploading my bachelor’s thesis project, as I promised some time ago.
It is a desktop text search engine, written entirely in C++ and the Qt libraries, with all the code related to scanning, storing and searching the information written from scratch and only using the basic C++ and Qt data structures.

You may download the torrent (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4538524) and can also find it here, on a thing called sendspace (first upload service that Google revealed, I don’t know if it is working).
I will upload also the paper when I’ll find it, altough that is not a big thing either.

The archive contains:
-Windows executable + Qt libraries
-Linux executable (debug build).
-All the source code.

The scanning speed is CPU bound, and it is incovenient to fix. It toped at around 1MB/s on the old system and 1.5MB/s on the new one. The space overhead tends to around 13% of the scanned contents. The search is fast and can use simple AND, OR and exact phrase combinations. I even used it for a few weeks until going back to Recoll.
The source code is GPL v2+, as Qt requires. There is no license notice on each source file but nobody will die from that. Try the tree viewer as I consider it very nice for the small quantity of time I put into it.

The blatant limitations and defects:
-the scanning speed;
-the inconsistent and unfinished threading + crashes.
-the bad and unfinished user interface;
-the overall usefulness is by far not that of a real program anyway.

It comes so late as I did not have a Windows machine or a cross compiler until now, and I finally installed a Windows copy in VirtualBox. That’s enough for such a small project.
Note:
Remember to add a screenshot tomorrow .

Google alternative

If you want to search on Google for an exact word, without leting the search engine to replace it with another more popular word, all you need to do is to place a + (plus) in front of the word. For example searching for a Romanian and an English word in the same page: +temă +book.
I thank sirrocco for sharing this. This was update no. 3 and the last one.

Today I am trying to search for some obscure terms that goole insists on aproximating with much more popular words. As I don’t know exactly what I am looking for, I can’t make a refined search or create an exact phrase. I don’t know how to instruct the search engine to look for my exact words and not aproximate them.

I tryed with Yahoo search and with the more anonymous Exalead (http://www.exalead.com/search). Yahoo altough is not “rounding” my words, is still not giving me a good order. Exalead on the other hand seems to have an interesting order but it looks like it is not indexing too many pages, and I am afraid my page is too obscure to be found (it exists/existed for sure).

Since someone requested a more serious explanation
Aproximating means that if there are two paronyms (or words that are similar, but from different languages), the least used one may be eclipsed by the most used one as in the artificial examples (I don’t want to share on my blog what I was looking for):
Search terms: movie akelas
Google will show many results with akela’s, movie. Thus it transformed “akelas” in akela’s and akela. That is usually exactly what I want, but not this time (movie-akelas-google-search).
Yahoo will show more results exactly with akelas on the first page, thus being somewhat closer to what I want (movie-akelas-yahoo-search).
Exalead will be even closer (movie-akelas-exalead-search).
From the difficulty of gathering this example, I can tell you that Google does an incredibly good job with most searches.

The situation is not even that bad in this artificial example. What I was actually looking for was non-english words in an english context, the non english words will be aproximated to english ones. Say for example I am looking for the word temă, in an english context, thus, have the search for: temă book going into : tema book.

Please excuse the file name, they where automatically given by wordpress, I won’t reupload them to fix this. I already made enough extra effort to describe a problem which I eventually solved (with Yahoo this time).

So no, this is not a message that tells people how bad Google is .

If you have any recommendations please tell me (be it that you know how to instruct Google to search for the exact words, or you know a search engine that works better in this case).

Early update:
Looking with Google for google alternatives (how ironic is this?) I got to Screwgle (http://www.google-sux.com/). I thought is was a Google joke, but is actually links to Ask.com, and the results of the search are not better at all. It does the exact same aproximation of the words. “The Algorithm is not working.”

Using the microphone in Debian – I hope Windows XP works on my laptop

Update: Using the ncurses program “alsamixer” I was able to get decent settings and make the mic. work right. Unlike KMix and Alsamixergui, changes made with alsamixer were applied. It is also keyboard friendly (it’s stupid console in fact, couldn’t be otherwise). I’m still thinking about other OS, this was too big a hassle

VoIP is finally reaching us, and offers prices that are unbelievably good. Buy credit from a VoIP provider (TerraSIP in my case), start a VoIP program (WengoPhone in this Debian case), do some settings to the program and call home. I have mention that quality is also surprising, I guess that in more than half of the case it is better than phone to phone. Being abroad this means very important savings.

And I did this, until Debian sabotaged me. To make the microphone work correctly on this laptop, a fair bit of experimentation is necessary, I did that and everything worked. After some time, with no conscious ALSA related changes on my system, this doesn’t work anymore, and the sound is no longer clear. It now misses all the higher frequency sounds and transforms them in squeaks.

The bad thing is that I don’t know where the problem is coming from, and more, I have no idea how to solve it.

Here’s a picture showing Alsamixergui with the best settings I could get. The program has tons of controls and none of them is explained. Googling didn’t give me too many answers. Some of the controls cannot be used (although KMix uses them, but to no effect), and also the range of possible combinations, without using a manual, is frightening.

So counting the sacrifices done for running Debian:
-no 3d acceleration -> No playing CS with friends. No other interesting gaming. I never got too far with Blender to feel the need for real 3d, but I will.
-problems with opening fancy shit office documents, not using proprietary math software from the university, others like this -> A few bad marks and some time wasted.
-calling at home from abroad with prices as much as 15 times higher than the VoIP ones. Well, this is the hot point, the costs are directly measurable as money. I guess now I have enough reasons to leave the Debian away.

So, where to?
I guess Windows XP/Server 2003. (The Vista saga is also written on this blog, and it is also not happy.) After about 3 years of running Linux on an underpowered desktop (but at least with good sound ), I have to give up goodies like KDE+Kwin, a decent console, nice package management from Debian, easy development with Qt and easy plugging in of external libraries, the Xorg middle click paste and easy switching of users and desktops. The good thing is that Amarok, Kate, Konqueror, KOrganizer and others make their way to Windows, I will be able to use the decent Visual Studio debugger and some others.

There are alternatives, but with shortcomings:
KUbuntu, I’am afraid they will try on me stuff like PulseAudio, the kernel TCP/IP bug (they didn’t release this one after all), and other half working thinks.
SuSE looks attractive, but it seems they said goodbye to KDE 3 and I guess there are not as many programs as with Debian.
Mandriva. My all time favorite, although the lack of proprietary packages (and also free ones) makes it hard to use.
And also, there’s no guarantee the sound problems will go away, while with Windows I have high hopes they will.

Oh, and later random thoughts:
-the man/woman/guy/dude (I didn’t dig to see who he/she is) from linuxhatersblog said he would stop. I still think he knew a lot more about Linux than I do.
-I still hate AMD/ATI for tricking me into buying a laptop with a radeonhd “supported” shit video card. I hope they will get their shit together though, as competition is always good.
-I will ask some help from some ALSA guys before leaving Debian. I would do some coding myself, but it’s a bit beyond my power.
-I think this message has a record number of “shit” words, I think 5 if we include this one. There is no f-word though. I hope there’s none on this whole blog.

Running this recovery DVD will delete all data on your disk

Not long ago, I had to buy my first laptop, and after spending lots of time thinking about the right decision, I made the wrong one.

Finally, I went to the shop and made the decision based on:
-(screen size + memory + hardware performance + warranty) / price;
-looking capable to run Linux;
-having AMD/ATI graphics, as these guys sponsor free video driver development.

The though point:
1.The recovery DVD from Asus.
Later after buying the laptop I erased the vfat recovery partion and made the C: smaller. This was a mistake, as now Windows is not booting anymore (I only found out today). I can imagine some reasons, but from the point of view of the stupid user, this is a Microsoft screw-up. If the Windows partition is bootable by itself, why does it need to find information about anything else?. This was a strong point of other Windows versions: just select the partition, and bang, it works. As somewhat experienced luser, I am able to repair a Linux boot, which used to be somewhat hard, but I have no idea how to repair the Windows one.

With the laptop I also received a recovery DVD. I ran it thinking that in 2 minutes I will have Windows repaired with no other complications. Here comes the big blow: “All the data on your partition(s) will be deleted. Asus shall not be held liable…”. This text was written on the _second_ paragraph of some long enough message. My mouse left button was already pressing the “Next” button, waiting for the release that would go to the next step. Only some masochistist curiosity for reading long messages made me skim through the text that predicted havoc.
Thank you Asus for such a lovely experience.

The rest:
1. Beginning, partitioning and Vista from Asus.
I knew that the laptop comes only with 32 bit Windows Vista, I tried not to pay for the OS, but I did not manage to do that, I’m too lazy to ask for a OS refund, I might try a refund for the entire laptop though, and you’ll se why.
The first surprise was partitioning, 20 GiB vfat partition for recovery, around 120 GiB C: with Vista. This only left me around 90 GiB for other stuff. What was worse, is that the Debian installer was not able to resize the oversize C:, so I had to accept the situation and go with small Linux partition for my data. This will come and punish me in part 3.
The other thing is that the OS was configured such that the Antivirus + Security Manager (Symantec crap I think) was always asking me to register, had an unkillable window and kept asked things I found difficult to answer. There where also other programs that started with the computer and made the disk seek like mad and keep the computer slow for minutes after startup. Also, I think was not entirely Asus’s fault, as the OS was also doing huge unknown jobs on its own.
The good thing is that the OS came with disk burning software preinstalled.

2. Linux support.
2.1)Video. “This comes with modern discrete ATI graphics card, Radeonhd will sure do.” False. Radeonhd does not work on my laptop at the moment. Radeonhd is the only driver that does not work.
Fglrx makes 2D feel slow, takes ages to start Xorg, and hard crashes the computer at each logout. Only the open source ATI (2D only) driver works fine.
The Debian installer left me with the vesa driver, that only gave me small resolutions, anything better was on my own. It was good though, as X worked from the beginning, unlike other installs. So I had to do xorg.conf configuration by myself until I got the right results.
At the moment Nvidia is a dream for me. I don’t know what they do, but their shit works.

2.2)Wi-Fi. “Linux is the Chuch Norris of Wi-Fi.” False. I had to do good googling to find out that I need to install (from the repository, fortunately) some firmware. Also worth bo be said, NetworkManager seems to take longer than Vista to connect to wireless networks and it does always simply work. There are two graphical interfaces to NM: KNetworkManager that is not always working correctly; nm-applet, which works correctly, but looks like shit and does give me enough control. NM is strange anyway.

2.3)Sound. “Everyone does sound.” False. a)The internal speakers do not mute when inserting headsets. b)I had to trial and error flip the switches in the ALSA control panel until I got working microphone. c)Not all programs are able to access the microphone as they should. Some get the full volume, others only inaudible volumes, no matter what I do. Skype seems to be the only that will get good quality sound, for reasond I don’t know.

2.4)Suspend to ram. “That’s a done deal, long ago.” False. Does not work, I can’t say why, but at wake-up it used to reboot, after some update it goes to a hard crash.

2.5)Others.
Included camera. Not very important, but that is not working with most programs either.
Blutetooth. I was not able to get that working. I would have a use for it, but not important now., and I didn’t even know the laptop was capable when I bought it, so this is only and unreachable bonus.

Liberation Sans – what a nice surprise

I have long been a fan of non antialiased Tahoma fonts for the desktop, but the times have changed. Currently I am workingon a laptop, which has a slightly larger DPI than the average LCD screen. On this laptop screen I like Liberation Sans better than good old Tahoma. This is a really nice surprise.

Another change that came with working with another computer is that now I can use the Plastik theme for KDE 3 instead of Keramik, as on this more powerfull computer the Plastik performance hit is not noticeable. I like Keramik a lot, as it looks so much alive, but it has many squary edges.

Will come back with screenshots, stories about doctors that don’t look at me if I don’t seem to be really ill, the Pesenka lyrics that ang posted on my blog and how to these Russian lyrics. I also prepared a list of things I don’t like about Timișoara (people who know me are probably already bored of this subject) but that would seem unapropriate now that I am leaving the country for a long time.

Transcend

Today I tryed a new game named Transcend (found it when I was browsing the Debian packages with Synaptic).

Transcend is very coloured, as can bee been in the snapshot, and the images remind me of a kaleidoscope. Even more, these kaleidoscopic shapes metamorphose in very spectacular ways. Also it has a very interesting music.

The game is quite simple: grab object pressing ‘d’ and take them to the center of the plane(where that line ombilical points to) and then press ‘d’. After having an object in the center you can start shooting (with the space key) the colourfull enemies. The enemies will try to take your objects away, the more object you have the more powerfull your missiles (bullets or whatever you name them, they are abstract shapes anyway). After you have shot enough missiles in the biggest enemy, it will dissapear and you can go to the next level.

Unfortunately the game does not have enough diversity to make you play it too much, and after 3 levels I got to the first level again (or one that looked like it).

You can find the games page at http://transcend.sourceforge.net/. I will sure take a look on the sources.

What if the KDE project adopted Emacs… :D

I have always looked at Emacs like it is some mysterious charmed software able to do magic on text, but not magic enough to really learn it. I gave it 3-4 hours tries a few times but I never found it convincing enough (it may be that it is not that magic?! ). The first problem with it is the interface, until lately it simulated all user interface with some ugly and hard to use widgets or whatever shit toolkit from the 1980’s. Now it has more normal widgets, provided by GTK but this is still not enough. The status thing is still text and artificial, the user interface is still too different, etc.

The biggest problem is that it doesn’t invite me to learn. I mean, the software should be able to meet my small needs no mather how stupid and untrained I am at the beginning. Like the Kate thing, it is always a text editor. You have lots of shortcuts and options, you may learn them as you use the software, but it is at any time able to function like a most basic editor.

Example using Emacs: by default it has a most annoyng setting to beep the computer integrated speaker whenever you scrolled and got to the end of the buffer, or any other error. I needed to do a search on google, and then edit some weird, LISP like, .emacs file multiple times until I placed piece of code in the correct region of that configuration file. Then there’s the brace matching that many editors signal for no mather what file type, emacs only does it when you type the character, for anything else I need to go through the multi-level menu galore (and I didn’t find it until today), good that they are breaking menus, at least.

So, what I was thinking is that someone (not me) wrote a KDE port of Emacs. Think of that: some Emacs that actually looks good and is usable by normal non-tech+Emacs PhD people. This learn step by step thing is something I like about software from the KDE suite, the software may be some unexplored teritory, but you learn it little by little, this applies for example to the whole KDEPIM suite, the first PIM suite I ever used (and the best). Probably the rule would be to make it simple enough to help anyone do their job, and featured and configurable enough to keep the advanced users happy.

I didn’t come back to edit the LyX article, I will do it next time.

Trăiască LyX!!

Scriu un post mai complet despre el mai tîrziu. Pe moment sunt foarte bucuros că am scos la capăt licenţa. După ce am scris o pagină în OpenOffice mi-am dat seama că o să mor încet şi nu termin nici la anul toate formatările şi numerotările şi ce rahat o mai fi de făcut în office în general. Iar de folosit template-urile era greu înţeles ca naiba.
După 3 ore de făcut tutorialul de LyX am prins o viteză la scris cum n-aş fi sperat vreodată în viaţă cu OpenOffice sau Word (başca că la ăsta trebuia să-i caut crack şi să-l pun în Wine sau ceva).
Deci tre să dau o bere la developeri.

“Vote for Bug” and “Privacy Concerns Two (as in ACTA)”

1. Please go to the KDE bugs page and vote for one of the most stupid bugs the Linux desktop has: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149676
It seems to me that having this written here is the most polite way of people get interested with this bug (as long as I am not able to provide a solution myself), as other means had no effect.

2. The most outrageous idea ever is brought to our attention by LWN. Customs police should have the right (and obligation ?) to search through a traveller’s electronic documents to see if he carries pirated multimedia. This shit seemed has a name: ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and a wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement . Of the fears:
-for one right (copyright) you negate many others. The most important. Why should someone look through my files.
-makes for spying.
-looks like 1984 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four) is coming to us very fast.

Too good that we don’t have yet technologies to guess what’s in ones mind (with our current understanding it looks imposible to copy a man’s mind without touching it somehow by mechanisms of the observer’s effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principle).

Aside the important stories:
The second part of my message has changes to make it to a new article, as it goes very well my last post. By the way, since then: I bought a USB flash; I changed the server through which I send my e-mails, it’s google no more; and from time to time I use the Yahoo search engine.

Of course, at this moment Yahoo looks very good to me, as managers had the guts to refuse Microsoft, altough may not bring the most of profit to the shareholders. It’s refreshing to see that you can hold a business for other reasons than making maximum profits (though it may not be the case for Yahoo). I hope to see times when Romanian companies will try to solve other problems than having the maximum of profit.

Continuation of the first “Privacy concerns” article http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/my-privacy-concerns/.