Hugh's Worthless Blog

A new Ubuntu Linux version only shows up every six months, and this one will prove to be a more significant one with the appearance of version 11.04 , the Natty Narwhal. Canonical has dropped Gnome as the default window manager to use a customized version of Unity instead, and I have had it installed on my laptop while still running 10.04 (the latest LTS version.) I still use gnome as my default desktop, but I set Unity as the default for my son's account as well as for another account which I aptly named "hughnity". I will have to admit to having used Gnome now for years I am accustomed to it and find unity a bit confining. However, Unity seems to be easy enough for a 13 year old middle school boy to navigate (a Mac zealot at that), so it can't be too bad. I have him learning to program Java on my laptop using Judo , so perhaps he is not your typical middle school child since he is comfortable navigating on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. His goal is to learn to p...

Today one of the faculty members in our department had a hard drive failure on a PC in his lab so I had to go check it out. He had purchased two Dell Studio desktop systems a little over a year ago, and the first one had a hard drive failure a few weeks ago, and now the second one did as well. I find it amazing how often these drives die just a few months after their warranties expire. Sure enough, the PC BIOS did not even recognize the drive was there, so I yanked it out (a Western Digital WD5000AAKS from November 2009) to check it with my trusty $12 USB SATA/IDE hard drive adapter I had purchased from Geeks.com . The WD drive gave three little spinning noises (no clicks) and then just sat there. My Ubuntu Linux system created a drive device in /dev but nothing for any partitions (i.e. /dev/sde but no /dev/sde1 or /dev/sde2.) I tried running fdisk on /dev/sde and it did not find anything and decided the 500 GB drive was really a 2GB drive. That is the same problem the drive on ...

Since it has been a while since I commented on the real estate situation in mid St. Louis County, I thought it was time to chime in with my latest thoughts. I notice the house on Lawn and High School in Brentwood is still for sale, and they have dropped the price all the way down to $599K . That may still seem like a lot for a house in that section of Brentwood, (our favorite agent,  Mary Cella , has a house for sale for $269K just a couple hundred feet away), but this is a recent teardown that originally sold for over $900K back at the market peak in 2005 before the economy tanked. That is less than 2/3 of what they originally paid for it. Ouch! In our own neighborhood on the other side of the highway, there are not any interesting homes for sale, but I have been watching the slow deconstruction of a home that sold last year . It was a nice looking painted brick ranch which they have been tearing down in slow pieces, keeping the large, mature trees in place. As of right now ...