For the gentoo crowd

The Towel Paradox

Did you ever notice, that towels suck when they don't suck? And conversely that towls don't suck if they suck?

The Naked and Famous

I am a quite compulsive listenener of music: If i find a band or song i really like i am not ashamed to turn on autorepeat and listen to it over and over till I'm sick of it and can again move on with my life.

Recently i found the insanely underrated NZ Synthie Rock band The Naked and Famous and i haven't stopped listening to them for about two weeks. When we had to pull a three day coding spree to meet a deadline this week, i figured this is the end, they won't stay on my play list after this.
To my surprise i listened to them for basically 70 hours straight and they are still keeping me up writing this blog entry just so i have an excuse to stay awake and listen to them.

The single most impressive song is probably Spank. It has a driving rhythm matching driven lyrics. From all i can gather, they are writing about being the victim of abuse, giving me the chills thinking about it. What evil genius possessed them when they wrote it? I don't dare thinking about listening to it while running, this would push me to limits i don't want to go to.

This is the beginning of a long, awesome friendship.

Snakes on a plane

Mother fucking start of the motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane meme.

Saving a Windows partition with dd and getting it to work again.

Situation: I had a failing hdd recently and thus tried to create a backup. There were four partitions, mostly sparse and an already existing secondary partition on the new drive that couldn't be resized. So I didn't have enough space to backup the disk as a whole, and I didn't have enough partitions to copy them one by one and resize them all (gparted). Long story short i ended up doing a
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2
mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/sda3
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/sda1
For two partitions, most importantly the system partition. Now i had a really hard time getting it to boot. Fix: After lots (and lots) of trial and error this is what got me to the finish line:

• I installed a Windows Vista
• mounted this installation in gparted (/media/sdb1), rm -rf everything except files that looked boot related, most importantly /BOOT  (WINDOWS/Boot doesn't seem to be relevant)
• mv  /media/sdb1/BOOT /media/sdb1/BOOT.bak
• mount -o loop /mnt/sda1 /media/sda1 and cp -r /media/sda1/* /media/sdb1/
• rm -rf /media/sdb1/BOOT/; mv /media/sdb1/BOOT.bak /media/sdb1/BOOT 
• reboot into the Windows Vista installation cd and used the fix boot option
• Boot into Windows again and fix drive letters (before you start up the SQLServer!)
• Voila

Overall i was reminded of what a pain Windows can be. If the Fix boot doesn't help try this thread.
If you have the luxury of enough space just do a dd if=/dev/sda /dev/sdb!

What doesn't work:

• dd of the disk image to the disk (blank cursor)
• dd of the disk image to a new partition (blank cursor on boot)
• Creating a partition and installing into it (wrong disk offset => blank cursor)
• Installing Vista and overwriting the partition with a dd (blank cursor)
• Deleting the partition, installing Vista and copying everything into it (Missing winload.exe)
• Installing Vista and copying everything safe for WINDOWS/BOOT (MIssing winload.exe)

It's save to assume I tried a couple  more combinations and that every one of them took 4h's -> annoying holiday. Fuck you Windows!

ams and enumerate (2nd. time round)

The enumeration problem has been nagging on me overnight and thus investigated further. The solution is simple: the enumerate package is plain incompatible with AMS (probably with anything other than standard latex).

As you can see ams changes a lot of widths including parsep, parindent and leftmargin. The enumerate package also changes leftmargin, unfortunately not relative to the one set but absolute, probably calculated from the standard. So don't use enumerate and AMS! I will define my own list environment from now on which looks better.

Amsthm, lists and enumerate.

Problem:
Amsthm has three theorem styles normal, remark and definition, of which only the normal style is set in italics normally. If you use a list within such a theorem (questionable according to some, necessary to me) then the item labels for these lists are italicized as well which doesn't look good.

The advice to correct this was to manually \textup the label in each item. This of course works normally, but i also employ enumerate. In this case i got a warning "The counter will not be printed.", which is due to the fact, that enumerate will not detect counters that are inside braces.
Solution:
\begin{enumerate}[\upshape i)]
\item...
\end{enumerate}
This finally looks good