ddrescue isn't extreme. Extreme is when you have to put the drive in the freezer to get it to run long enough to get more data. I had a coworker put an entire laptop in the refridgerator. Wish I'd taken a picture...

Heh. NP.

It also happens to work pretty well for backups of unencrypted CDROMs and DVD media. (If a DVD has CSS encryption, you can't back up the CSS keys by talking to the DVD-ROM drive as a normal block device.)

Why ntfsclone in this instance? Wouldn't one of the ddrescue variants be more appropriate? (ddrescue, gddrescue, dd_rescue...Hell, I don't know. I think there are two different programs, but the bin name seems to change depending on which distro you use.)

This circumstance feels like the developers were pushed into supporting more circumstances than they wanted to target. My guess is that ntfsclone is targeted more at forensics and filesystem debugging, and that data recovery isn't its primary goal.

Says my boss of my coworker who claims "he never gets sick", "Once he gets sick, he'll be coughing through the whole winter."

Me, I finally got mine after about two years spotless health. Stuck in bed from Saturday morning through Tuesday. First with fever, then with cold and nasty cough. Bleh.

I got a 9650 about a year ago, too, and 8GB of DDR2 1066 to go with it. Problem is, the Phenom II series doesn't support 1066 in the same way, so I'd have to drop it down to 800 if I want to upgrade the processor, and I've seen a significant degradation in performance when running the RAM at PC800 settings vs PC1066.

But, yeah, this box has the Legs. I can do a live transcode of 720p to AVC lossless at a solid minimum 38fps, which is perfect for streaming to a PS3. I also just posted a reply to a blog entry by the guy behind the FFMPEG FATE tests, on parallel build optimizations. My tests wound up compiling ffmpeg in as little as 1m17s, using make -j8 and having the whole thing sitting in a tmpfs mount.

I love it! Funniest thing I've read all week, with the exception of Google Voice's transcription of my own vocal notetaking. (It's not a good idea to burst out laughing at a customer's office when checking your notes.)

I have five DVD-ROM drives that I picked up specifically for the purpose of format shifting. I ripped 96 audio CDs in a about two hours of labor. I need to settle on my target format (I'm streaming to my PS3) before I proceed to rip my DVDs.

The awesome thing about having multiple drives is that you don't get totally stalled when cdparanoia gets hung up on a scratched disc; Your other drive(s) will keep hugging as long as you keep feeding them.

I've been stalked online before (albeit before Facebook; Primarily on Slashdot by an ex-girlfriend*, but also on a couple wikis). Stalkers will forge sockpuppets and new identities, and follow you from site to site. Simple blocking won't suffice. But, yeah, if you're going to get a restraining order, be thorough. Wall off your profile, and be selective about who you add as friends.

* Yeah, yeah. If it makes you feel any better, I haven't had one since.

Will you stop touching me?!

There is nothing I anyone can say that would ease your pain, nor can anyone or I presume to understand yours or your wife's pain. There can be no meaningful condolence without understanding, and so there can be no meaningful condolence, despite the requirements of decorum.

Nevertheless, I sincerely wish you and yours better, and you and your wife will be in my prayers this evening and farther.

...prohibit contracting with anyone who's done business with anyone who's been associated with a PAC. Or, at least, some large percentage of that overall pool.

Talk about finance reform...

Hehe.

I'm amused you thought those commands were for either vi or emacs. Hint: Neither command set was for a text editor...

Ctrl-A S
Ctrl-A C
perldoc -f somefunc

Or, if I happen to be at home using my preferred window manager
MOD-p
xterm
MOD-SHIFT-l
perldoc -f somefunc

Let's see this get past the lameness filter

I haven't done anything in .Net, touched the CLR since trying to assist VB.NET students in college, or even stayed at a Holiday Inn Express recently.

However, it's my understanding that WinForms is fairly analogous to MFC in that they're both supposed to serve as language bindings for Win32 controls like HBUTTON, HWND, etc. They're close enough that Visual Studio's context-sensitive help searches tend to bring up a keyword as it applies to WinForms, rather than as it applies to MFC.

You might find it worthwhile to try implementing in C#+WinForms various simple things that would be a piece of cake for you in C++/MFC. Sadly, I can't recommend Rosetta Code on this one as we've always had a dearth of GUI tasks, and our C# coverage isn't that great, either.