Louwrentius

So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most debated drawbacks is that it lacks support for Adobe Flash. The iPhone does not support Flash either, and since the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, this should not come as a surprise.

Now many people see this as a serious problem. There are a slew of websites that cannot be viewed on an iPad for this reason.

However, the thing is this: Flash sucks. It is a proprietary technology under the control of Adobe and the only reason it is currently popular is that it provides a kind of standard for video playback across all browsers and operating systems. But it still sucks. It crashes. It is shit.

The iPhone is immensely popular, despite the lack of flash. The iPhone user base is huge. By using Flash in your website, you are excluding a large population of potential visitors. So this is what will happen: websites will start dumping Flash. The iPhone and the iPad will together kill Flash.

And that is a good thing for everybody, especially for proponents of open standards and open formats. Oh irony, that it will take a closed proprietary platform to do so.

provides-the-ultimate

You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular disk. You must know where the partition starts on the disk. So first, you need to get the partition table with sfdisk:

sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd

The output is something like:

Disk /mnt/image/image_file.dd: 9729 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
for C/H/S=*/240/63 (instead of 9729/255/63).

For this listing I'll assume that geometry.

Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System

/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img1 63 8497439 8497377 b W95 FAT32
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img2 * 8497440 156280319 147782880 7 HPFS/NTFS
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty

Next, we need to calculate the actual starting point of the partition. The sector number is in sectors, which contain 512 bytes. So in this case, the starting point of the NTFS partition is 8497440 x 512 = 4350689280.

To mount the image, enter the following command, using the calculated offset:

mount -o loop,offset=4350689280 /mnt/image/disk_image.dd /mnt/disk

Source:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2005-April/013444.html

graphic, representation

To get a visual representation of hard drive temperatures, I wrote a small script. The output of this script looks like this:

This output is tailored to the exact disk lay-out of my storage server. However, it is also usable for other servers. You have to edit the lay-out depending on the system.

This script assumes that you have smartmontools installed on your system. It uses smartctl to obtain the drive temperatures.

The script can be found here or here in tgz format.