Checksum Arcanius

I have never been particularly happy with the way users and groups are normally used in Linux. They work well enough for people who know what they are doing, but the fact of the matter is, most people don’t know what they are doing. So, the default should be for the “right” thing to happen by default – that is, the thing the user most likely wants to happen, or to say it differently, the thing that will produce the result the user most likely wants, regardless of how exactly it does that. If that makes sense.

Anyway, a while ago, I came across this suggestion of an alternate standard to set up the security system in Linux. Its called “User Private Groups,” and it struck a chord with me. So yesterday, I changed the directories in which users put their files (/home and /sf2 in my case) over the the UPG system. We’ll see how it goes.

Just finished watching the BYU vs. BSU game. It was a bit disappointing watching BYU come so close, just to loose on a missed Matt Payne field goal – which is a pretty rare event from a solid player. Life goes on, though.

I met Amy at IS today at 4:30 to load the two robots headed for the Seattle Center. We quickly got the robots loaded, tripping over the boxes and debris spread thorughout the room (that was supposed to be cleaned out several weeks ago). Somehow, we got working on cleaning the place up, and didn’t leave until just after 7:00. The room looks pretty good now. I wouldn’t quite say spetacular yet – but comparitively, it is pretty incredible. I wonder what the clubmembers will say when they see it. A hack session at the school is growing to be closer and closer to reality.

I decided to upgrade to Thunderbird 0.8 yesterday, since I like doing things like that to keep my life exciting. I was not having any problems with having with 0.7, nor were there any features I needed in 0.8. The universal inbox sounded like it might be worthwhile, although it wasn’t really neccesary, since I do all my email collapsing via aliases before it reaches my server. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of clutter removal, and the unused “Comcast Email” and “Local Folders” did bother me a little bit.

The installation of Thunderbird went very smoothly – much better than the 0.6 -> 0.7 upgrade, which saw me uninstall the new version twice, and then install it again, to get things working correctly (like the about box, which insisted it was version 0.6 for a while after the initial install).

The trouble began when I thought I’d make an experiment out of transfering all my mail from my main account to my local folders. Well, you can’t select multiple folders, so either I had to drag them one by one (or – I didn’t realize this at the time – I could have dragged the entire inbox). Well, after the inbox and all the folders that come with it, I decided to move my sent folder as well – a gargantuan 100mb worth, I later found out. But then I got cold feet, realizing that I would have to edit all my settings, and everything was working fone, so there was really no need. So, I decided to move everything back. Now, dragging folders copies them, apparently, but dragging messages moves them. To only the contents of the root level inbox and my sent items folder, and my deleted items, did I need to drag back. Somehow, I missed the sent items, and after I deleted them from the Local Folders, I realized that they were also gone from my main email account folders – I just just misplaced over 100 millions bytes of data that I didn’t want to loose.

So I began searching for the undelete button. There is no reason they can’t have one, it turns out – all the messages are still there in a very readable form until you “Compact” the folder after deleting the message. But there is no undelete option. Can anyone say “feature request.” But hope was not lost. After all, I’m a TRC h4x0r, and I can deal with this kind of stuff.

After some more searching through the very readable mbox format “Sent” file in my Thudnerbird appication data directory on my computer and on searching for corresponding terms on Google, I came across this little gem of a page: Mozilla X-Mozilla-Status explained.

From this, I learned that deleted (“expunged”) is just a flag set on the message. 0x0008, in fact. So, I subtract 8 from the X-Mozilla-Status header for each message in my Sent folder, and all of the messages undelete. Like magic. Except that I suck at regular expressions (although I’m fairly certain there would be a way to do this one with regular expressions). Instead, I did it a little more manually, finding all the combinations of the X-Mozilla-Status that had the 0x0008 flag set, and replacing it with the same Satus, just not expunged.

Upon restarting Thunderbird and navigating to the Sent folder, Thunderbird had to spend a good amount of time – maybe 30 seconds – rebuilding the contents of the folder. But then, voila, all my email (as far as I can tell) reappeared, just like before.

I think its about time that I started actually backing up some on my data.

Today, the TRC had an excellent FIRST Lego League interest meeting, due to a large application of luck and some good ol’ hard work. A special shout out to Gabby for her last-minute arrangement of a staff contact, without which we would have been genuinely screwed.

A huge shout out to Erik, of FreedomDown.net for a link to an article on Slashdot, where Libertarian Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik tells us all what’s up.

Seriously, how can anyone doubt that this is the best way to run things?

“Politics, in my view, should be as unimportant as possible — but where it’s important, it has to value freedom, remain rooted in principle and be forward-looking.”
–Michael Badnarik

I now have five 80 gb hard drives. four of which I plan to put into my desktop (which currently hosts two) into a RAID-5, RAID-0, RAID-1+0, or RAID-0+1 configuration. The other will be kept as a backup in case one of the drives fails, and in teh meantime may serve as backup for my 100gb external drive, which stores most of my worthwhiel data, and will soon hopefully hold at least a copy of all of my worthwhile data. Backing that up seems like it would be a good idea, since I’ve been a really long time without suffering any drive failures. Not that the amount of time statistically matteres, but it sure feels like I’m pressing my luck…