Moving and resizing partitions

Earlier today I've migrated all the data from a 80 GB HD to a new one of 250 GB. It was a pleasing surprise to see how far the support for these kinds of things have gone.

The old HD had 4 partitions: The first two for Windows XP on NTFS (not my computer...), the third a small linux swap and the last a ext3 root partition for ubuntu.

The process was quite simple: Set the jumper on the new (samsung) HD, as the motherborad has one of the VIA chipsets without support for the 3Gbps models, connect both of them, boot with an ubuntu live CD, dd everything from the old HD to the new one, disconnect the old HD, boot with the live cd again and finally expand the partitions on the new HD using gparted.

The big surprise came in the last step above: I really didn't expect resizing NTFS partitions through Linux to work, and it went flawless (actually, I had a small glitch on resizing the ext3 filesystem, which forced to run resize2fs by hand with the force [-f] flag, as it kept asking for fsck).

Notice to parents: Please take care of your children

I've been getting more and more irritated by a trend which seems to be developing down there on Brazil (and in particular São Paulo): People have children and don't take care of them; allowing them to do whatever they want.

To illustrate, yesterday I was passing by Higienopolis Avenue (on one of the most rich Bairros of the city), and three women were talking happily while the son of one of them demonstrated how stupid he was by kicking a public trash can!!! Of course, I've approached them and asked them to make their children stop.

Now, WTF guys! It's common sense. If you've children, you're responsible on educating them. You have to teach your son why he can't go around kicking things. If you can't make it or don't wish to spend your time on it just don't have children. Period.

PS: Whenever you go to shopping, please don't let your children roaming around and hitting other people while you eat also. This one is even more wildspread...

Sosaku Gueidan Requios

Yesterday, I've watched an eisa/taiko/shishimai presentation by the Sosaku Gueidan Requios, a group from Okinawa which came to Brazil as part of the comemoration for the 100 years of the Japanese immigration. Along with the singer Hidekatsu Kamei, also from Okinawa, and some local groups, they've made a great show.

Highly recommended ^_^

Anime: Naruto Shippuden Movie

Episodes: 1 Movie
Rating: D
Strong points: None
Weak points: weak plot

It's a known fact that I'm not a fan of Naruto, but even I got really surprised on how they did manage to mess this thing up. This movie is about some stupid guys which are trying to ressurect a (very human looking) monster, which in turn would raise some ghost army (made of golems, not ghosts...) and pwn¹ the word.

Of course, there is one Miko (priestess) which can seal this guy away. Only one. In the entire word. And no one ever thought on teaching the jutsu (technique) to someone else (and they say free software bus factor² is bad...).

And then, to add insult to the injury (hope I got this one right), Konoha just sent the lamest team of Shinobi (ninja) — aka the Naruto team; this time lead by Neji — to escort such irreplaceable person to the ultra dangerous place where she would have to confront and seal the monster's soul. Mix some cliché about premonitions and the old "is there a predefined destiny?" stuff and you got what the movie is about.

And that's all. Not even the fights, which sometimes are good on Naruto, are worth this time. If you really need to watch anything which has Naruto on the name go ahead, otherwise I'm sure you can find better things to do.

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1: pwn is a computer/leetspeak slang to defeat, dominate and similars, derived from own. See more on wikipedia.

2: bus factor is the number of persons which need to be hit by a bus to kill a project.

More RAM 2

Note to self: Whenever adding RAM, besides looking for the correct count on POST, it seems to be a good idea to see also on kernel's boot logs if the kernel found and can use all the available memory.

In this case, I had to recompile the kernel with HIGHMEM enabled. Well, the kernel I had running (2.6.18) was starting to get old anyway, so now I've got 2.6.24.7, which seems to be the latest one on which the nvidia binary drivers will compile.

More RAM

Just added 1GB of RAM on my desktop, which had been crawling with 512MB; just 'cause there should be at least one good news even on bad days.

Hopefully Eclipse will be usable now.

Anime: H2

Episodes: 41
Rating: D

H2 is an old sports anime (from 1995, according to AnimeNFO) which tells the history of three baseball fanatic friends and their quest to go to the Japanese national high school tournament.

The history is mostly your average school sports anime, and it just ends early without really telling what happens. It's not unwatchable, but there are certainly more interesting animes out there.

BTW, even though I'm thankful by the efforts of the ILA fansub team for the release, I must advise anyone who watches it to take the subtitling with a big truck of salt.