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.

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.

First off, I’m an old *nix guy. So if you need an explination of why I would do this, that’s why. My wife users a Doze laptop and wants to be able to play at any computer, like I do.

I play NWN on *nix, so per user settings and games is pretty much the default (yes, there’s a script that does it). So, after geeting fed up with it, I designed this.

I tried to create a script using built-in Doze commands, however, they change between each version of the OS and are far too limited. This script uses the mv command from the Cygwin utilities http://www.cygwin.com. THIS SCRIPT WILL NOT WORK IF YOU DO NOT HAVE CYGWIN INSTALLED. There, is that clear enough.

Standard Disclaimer also applies. I am not responsible for damage done to your system, you, your dog, your girl/boyfriend, etc. by this script. You at your own risk.

@echo off
if exist c:\progra~1\nwn\dmvault goto :FILESEXIST
if exist c:\progra~1\nwn\localvault goto :FILESEXIST
if exist c:\progra~1\nwn\saves goto :FILESEXIST
setlocal
set user=%1
rem ############################################################
rem ### Setup local paths below here
set nwndir=”c:\Program FIles\nwn\”
set cygnwn=/cygdrive/c/Progra~1/nwn
set cyghome=/cygdrive/z/home
set defuser=sonya
rem ### End Setup local paths
rem ############################################################
rem Set a default user
if {%user%}=={} set user=%defuser%
echo User is %user%
echo Moving user files to NWN dir
c:\cygwin\bin\mv %cyghome%/%user%/.nwn/* %cygnwn%/
echo Launching Neverwinter
cd %nwndir%
nwmain.exe
echo Moving User files back to User dir
c:\cygwin\bin\mv %cygnwn%/nwnplayer.ini %cygnwn%/nwn.ini %cygnwn%/dmvault %cygnwn%/localvault %cygnwn%/saves %cyghome%/%user%/.nwn/
endlocal
goto END
:FILESEXIST
echo Files exist. Call somebody to fix this.
pause
:END

There are a couple of variables that can (read:should) be set in this script. I highly recommend that you use 8.3 file notation for paths. I would also set a default user.

Hopefully, someone will pick this up and make it better. Better yet, hopefully Microsoft and application developers will stop designing software without per-user settings. Sorry Bioware, but it’s true.

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.