Liquid Salt

It’s hard to believe the last post I wrote was in April. It seems that since that time there has been a never ending stream of emergencies and the like. I still can’t believe it’s been that long.

So, here’s what’s been going on. Sonya and I have made several trips to Georgia to take care of her parents. They live north of Atlanta so it takes awhile to get there and back. On one of the trips we enlisted the help of a coupe in our small group. They were a huge help and we owe them forever. We do manage to eat ourselves across the town whenever we’re up there though, so I definitely haven’t lost any weight.

I have been reading. I know it looks like I haven’t but I have. I’ve stopped reading 12 books at a time; it seems my mind just can’t keep up anymore. I will change the Now Reading list soon – I promise.

Sonya site is coming along well. I fixed the problem with her images not showing up and now, hopefully, she’ll find time to post more too.

I’m not happy with the look and feel of the TAG site, so at some point soon I’m going to have to change it out. I’ve neglected it before and it bit me, but I’ll probably end up changing the CMS engine. XOOPS is a great engine, but lacks some ease-of-use and ease-of-upgrade I’m looking for. WordPress is easy. I wish they all were, but security is hard; if it weren’t everybody would do it. Feel free to comment if you have an opinion of what to use.

I’ve been testing Drupal for some time now, but the upgrade path seems to be a little dicey … “Don’t upgrade your database twice as it may cause problems.” OK, that scares me.

As far as the real premise of this site, I think it is evolving. This is still “One man’s journey to follow Man One,” but I feel as though I need to share more and less about me at the same time. My studies have become more deep and personal (hence why I haven’t published any lately). And quite a few could use more fleshing out.

So, I will be back, but I’ll be posting more about everything, though they may be shorter.

Tags: Site News, Technology, Travel by jon
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MBR stands for Master Boot Record. It is the part of your hard drive that tells where the partitions on that drive are located. It is also the part of your drive that becomes worthless if you try to install Windows on your hard drive after Linux. Of course, i have never done this … more than twice.

So i came across a poor soul that had done this and wished he had kept a backup of his MBR and it got me thinking “i could automate that,” because I hate to do something like this more than once. So I wrote a quick bash script to handle the issue.

#!/bin/sh

SAVETO=”/etc”

# Do ATA drives
for DRIVE in `ls -l /dev/hd* 2>/dev/null | grep -v [0-9]$ | grep disk | cut -d”/” -f3`
do
dd if=/dev/$DRIVE of=$SAVETO/mbr-$DRIVE bs=512 count=1
done

# Do SCSI drives
for DRIVE in `ls -l /dev/sd* 2>/dev/null | grep -v [0-9]$ | grep disk | cut -d”/” -f3`
do
dd if=/dev/$DRIVE of=$SAVETO/mbr-$DRIVE bs=512 count=1
done

Obviously, there is a whole lot that could be done to improve the script (error checking, user notification, overkill), but if you aren’t already backing up your MBR, start here. Throw it into a cronjob and forget it – cron.monthly not cron.hourly.

Download it here.

Tags: Linux by jon
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This is a copy of the original post I put on the NWN forums. I post it here because it’s my code.

[Read more →]

Tags: Technology, Video Games by jon
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Why in the world do I need a blog? There are millions of them out there, some of them are even good. So why do I need a blog?

Like everyone else, I have something to say. At this point I’m not sure what that “something” is though.

And like everyone else, what I have to say is different, even in the most miniscule way, from what everybody else is saying.

So, I expect that I will post on here programs and scripts that I create, usually for Linux, though I have one of those boxes here too. I expect that I will post my views on society, which I have found rapidly changing lately. I’m positive that I will post my views on God and religion (they aren’t the same you know) as well.

I’m also hoping that my wife will post her thoughts and pictures here as well.

If that interests you, check back and comment. If not, that’s OK too.

Tags: Linux, Relationship, Society, Technology by jon
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