Post Christmas….

I am a Hindu, so what? I take every opportunity to celebrate. So I went with my dad to one of these eateries that exemplifies the “Today pleasure, tomorrow diarrhoea” category. Well I don’t actually have diarrhoea now but what happened in the morning was … well figure it out.

Later that day my dad came into my room to have a look at what I was doing. I was working on “timepass”, a web application that plans to do many things I am not too sure of (http://launchpad.net/timepass). He showed me an external drive and told me that the he was not allowed to access directories one level below the root directory of the device. He plugged it into his laptop (a gleaming Dell Inspiron) and showed me. I was stumped, FAT32 drives and no permissions ? I remember that something similar had occurred once upon a time with my iPod as well. I decided to work on this. I had two possible ideas about what could go wrong:

1. Drivelocks (we can’t do much apart from call the vendor of the drive and pray that he gives the password to us)

2. Filesystem needs repair. This could be done easily using the command “dosfsck -a <device>”.

I asked my dad about the drive. It was a Toshiba make and was the HD in his previous Compaq laptop. After this I knew what was wrong, drivelocks. I don’t know if drivelocks can be repaired with dosfsck and I decided to give it a try. I plugged it into my laptop (runs Debian remember) and it got mounted. I could even navigate as per my wish!

This leads us to conclude one thing: “Linux doesn’t give a damn about drivelocks”!

I offered my dad to do a direct dump using the dd command. I had a 200 gig maxtor and after a period of more than 15 minutes, the copying was done. I get to keep the new drive and my dad gets the previous drive. He had quite important stuff in there. Most of them pertaining to his work (designs and blah blah).

I don’t know what impact this blog has in the IT world but if Toshiba reads this, they are going to <censored> bricks.

After that I got to look at software my dad uses to design stuff. There was Staad Pro, Tekla Structures XSteel and something called DTH. He was talking about productivity as I saw him swiftly create figures that made no sense to me (he is building a port so I am not expected to have any idea about it).

I am submitting all my essays tomorrow. Man, it really gives me the jitters. There is something about this admissions process that makes me feel like “someone cares”. Is it true? Does someone care if you are a geek at 16. Does someone care if your mouth waters if you look at Apple’s 10 TB storage rack ? Does someone care if you broke both your bones and almost lost your life, prepared for the class 10 boards without going to school for a major part of the year and carried the injury to class 11?

The answer is: yes. Someone cares. Someone really important cares. I am going to click on the “Submit” button tomorrow and I feel priviliged to do so. I really cannot believe that a college from which Claude Shannon graduated is going to read my application, a college where Google finds its roots is going to read my application, or a college where Raj Reddy sits, is going to read my application. It is just too elite to think of. All I can do is thank those who have made this possible, dad, mom etc.

I am getting too emotional now and my blog posts suck if I get too emotional. I will write again later.