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 the