The Noblesvillain

With everyone commenting on the Michael Jackson trial, I cannot resist a post.  MJ's had my musical attention beginning with Thriller.  (In searching for an appropriate blog image, I ran across this image of Andrew Jackson, worth a visit)  I recall traipsing across the Wyoming wastelands listening to 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'' and 'Billy Jean' on cassette (my recollection of the cassette cover has a lighter background though).

Years later in Rostov Russia, my Russian roommate takes me across town (Rostov's a big city, 1.5MM people) to his parent's private home.  After watching a little Michael Jordan on VHS (I could hear English commentary under the unintelligible Russian) for a while, my roommate starts to play some Michael Jackson.  He asked me to help with the lyrics.  Dangerous was the current album.  I'm not sure whether decoding lyrics or helping make sense of English grammar rules contains the greater challenge.

Today nearly any over-produced album catches my attention.  This can lead to some embarrassing attachments.  I'll avoid mentioning any specifics here, but 'Production Quality' need not be at odds with 'Good Music.'  It may be in tension with 'sophisticated music' but there's room in my mind for all this stuff.... 

While this site hasn't been plagued by unwanted comments and trackbacks, other sites have.  To prevent this from starting, dasBlog author Ormar Shahine has added a new feature to this blogging software.  These contributions create clutter at a minimum and certainly cause concern for anyone looking for a clean, creative site.  While these features are not yet on this site, they will come and I rest easier knowing that folks like Omar are looking out for us.

Speaking of Knoppix (see today's other post), it is a nifty solution that's worth investigating if your computer has the time to download some 700mb files.

Knoppix allows you to boot from a CD and run a full version of Linux.  The CD recognizes your hardware (I've used it with an old eMachines computer, a high-end Dell laptop, and a home-built PC and all hardware has been recognized and used), beeps a couple of times, and gives you a Windows-like desktop with over 100 pre-installed programs.  This can be useful in a number of circumstances--I've mainly used it to recover lost files from a hard drive that Windows will no longer read.  More casual usage would include playing the games that are installed, having a full-fledged C++ and Java development environment, or just playing with Linux to learn about it.

You can download Knoppix from

http://www.knoppix.net/get.php

1. Choose a site close to you
2. Click on FTP or HTTP
3. Accept the Agreement
4. and download a file that has EN in the title (to get an English language version) and ends in .ISO (such as KNOPPIX_V3.9-2005-05-27-EN.iso) warning, the file is very large ~730MB
5. Burn the .iso to CD (start your CD writing program and select an option that will be similar to 'Burn Image' or 'Load Image')

You can now boot

A nice treatment of the topic appears on Tom's Hardware site.

Other flavors of Knoppix exist:

• Games Knoppix is chuck-full of games (from board games to shoot-em-up types)
• KnoppiXMAME is an old-style arcade game simulator (you'll have to add the games yourself)
• KnopMyth helps to turn your computer into a PVR
• Bioknoppix includes all the tools you need for your molecular biology lab
• Knoppix-STD a security-based distribution
• Penguin Slueth Kit is another security distribution

There's a bunch more--link your favorite in the comments.

I've ignored this space for too long.  This post comes from my resurrected laptop (work-provided) which underwent a hard drive crash 5/25.  Nothing demonstrates the how much of a technophile I am until my main tool goes away!  On the other hand, some pleasant surprises met me along the way.  Checking email from my old developer box (how a test web server) allowed me to keep current on both my Lotus Notes and Outlook emails.  As a supervisor/manager, what more do I need, right?

Returning to my notebook has shown how nicely optimized my workspace has become.  Using Maxthon for browsing gives me tabs, pop-up blocking, add blocking, and the ability to open a group of websites at once.  Typing text into a 1920x1200 crisp screen is taking some getting used to again (fitting 1920 pixels into 13" makes for some small text!).

The narration of the recovery of my drive is worth a mention.  My old drive experienced a 'glitch' in March and I rebuilt my system from scratch.  Installing tools like Visual Studio.Net, email, Office, and Photoshop (with numerous plugins), takes a week or so (if done intermittently).  Imagine my dismay at a hard drive crash in May after mostly getting my machine back to where I wanted it to be!  While I had a backup of all important files, I wouldn't be able to restore the programs and settings from a backup.  I had banked on the law of averages keeping me safe for a bit longer until I could make a solid backup...

The hard drive experienced physical damage and couldn't be read from Microsoft XP.  I have an external enclosure I could use to use the drive from other machines but all Microsoft OS's would hang once I plugged in the drive.  What is a techno-geek to do?!  Look at Linux, of course.  Knoppix came to my rescue. "Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots and runs completely from cd."^[1]   Booting from CD I could view the contents of my files and copy them to a new location.  After obtaining a new hard drive and installing a base Windows XP, I copied all the files onto the new drive and am back in business.  (This tale has been edited to remove all dead ends and wrong turns.)

Typing on my laptop again (and listening to some Johnny Cash) lifts a huge weight.

¹ Knoppix.net