Parted Magic : USB Flash Disk Savior

A day ago, my sister woke me up around 3 am. She was having a problem with her Pendrive 256MB USB Flash Disk. She complains that she could not save her work on it. On Windows XP, it could not be accessed for some weird reason. So, as the resident tech support at home (as always), I have to find a way to fix it. I tried to access the pen drive on my Zenwalk system the day after. I found out that it had 2 partitions, one is accessible, the other is not. I suspected that the other partition (and the largest) got corrupt for some unexplained reason. So, I booted up Parted Magic 1.8, which is a LiveCD graphical partitioner, plugged in the flash disk, and fired up GParted. It seem my hunch was correct, for GParted shows that there is an unknown partition, which is usually a sign of a corrupt partition. I deleted it and was successful. Creating a new FAT32 partition is kind of a different story. At my first attempt, the FAT32 partition failed to create, beats me. I tried again, this time using a new disk label. Alas, Success!!! I rebooted to my Zenwalk system again to try out the “fixed” flash disk. Yes, every things went great. Reading and writing of data to the new FAT32 partition went out find without problems. Goes to show that Parted Magic is a great USB flash disk tool

Analog Aunt

Don’t you just hate it when you got a household member that so, well, old-fashioned?! I’m putting this entry as sort of venting of frustration. I just got pissed because of my sister told me to stop my Linux session (to check my Gmail and the SLUGPhils forum page). It’s brought about by my old maid of an aunt that wish to restrict us from using the PC. It basically of a electricity issue. But to tell you the truth, I already reduced my PC usage considerably. WHAT DOES SHE WANTS ME TO DO?! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD?! I can’t hit the tube, because there’s nothing good on it, just stupid local dramas and game shows!!! I wish we had Cable TV!!! Sorry, my kind of entertainment is interactive, so I just play Urban Terror 4.0 via net play most of the time (but not that much now). Pretty much my life is on my PC. I’m sorry if I don’t share her analog view of the world, no way. Life with my analog aunt pretty much sucks. If I could replace my analog aunt, I would…

The ZTE Broadband Deal

When I heard that the Philippine Government entered in a national broadband contract to be facilitated by a Chinese telecom company named ZTE Corporation, I was pretty enraged. Here, again, is a classic example of using technology as a front to government corruption. Technology should be used for the greater service of the Filipino People. This deal clearly is not. The broadband contract is severely and anomalously overpriced based on TV reports I have seen. Also, doesn’t the Philippine Government a “Filipino First” policy? My head is going in circles on finding a reason why give the contract to a foreign telecom company when local ones can handle the job. It seems to me that we have a “idiocracy” rather than a democracy. Government should be for the people, not for the money…  (Sigh)

OOXML Fails ISO Certification

Yeah! A great news to start up my day! Poor Micro$oft, When will it ever learn to play along with others? It’s a good thing, because how is it an open standard if it has some undocumented stuff? M$ should have just adopt the Open Document Format but, nooooo…. it’s so fool hearty.