Just learned a lesson about the Time class in Ruby. If you send for example the message utc to a Time instance, that instance is changed. I thought the method would return a new instance, but apparently this isn't the case.
Time.at(sometime).utc will return a new instance expressing sometime in UTC.
On my laptop running Mac OS X there's 67415 files (including directories) in my home directory. During the past 24 hours 648 of these were modified, as reported by find . -mtime 1 | wc -l.
The new machine I ordered some time ago has finally arrived. At last! (don't ask me why it took so long). I finally settled for a P4 1.8 GHz CPU instead of the AMD, and a 40 GB Seagate Barracuda drive. The disk is extremely quiet which is nice cause I want to keep the machine running at home 24/7.
Anyway, I naturally encountered some problems when installing the operating system, FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE. After the initial slicing and partitioning of the drive, selecting packages etc, I was ready to copy the files to the disk. The disk is full
the installer complained and aborted. Darn, what was that all about?!
I searched the web for a document describing the problem. I actually had an idea already: the disk geometry. The BIOS - AMIBIOS 1.50a - reported 19158 cylinders, 16 heads and 255 sectors, while FreeBSD found 4xxx/255/63 or something like that. I'm not at the machine right now so I can't give you the exact numbers.
I tried to force the geometry reported by the BIOS to fdisk but in vain. Then I took a long shot and disabled LBA mode for the drive in the BIOS. I know I've read about it sometime, somewhere, in another context. Don't ask me where. I tried to install again and what do you know, the installation went on smoothly.
Except for booting...
After all kinds of thoughts and experiments I decided to reinstall a different OS. I have an OpenBSD CD at home and I gave it a try. Same problem; the disk geometry reported by the OpenBSD installer was the same as for FreeBSD; the installation went on nicely but the machine couldn't boot from the disk.
I followed my friend Urban's example and downloaded Mandrake Linux. Same problem. The same strange disk geometry reported. The smooth installation process. But no booting (btw, the FreeBSD and OpenBSD developers really should take a look at the installers provided by their Linux brethren - the BSD installers fade in comparison).
This was saturday night. Sunday I decided to give it another try. I found an old Win98 boot floppy, ran the Windows fdisk and created a small, 10 MB primary DOS partition at the beginning of the disk. Then I tried to install FreeBSD again telling it to leave the MBR alone. It worked, booting included. Strangeness.
I installed again (to partition the freebsd slice the way I wanted) this time including the FreeBSD boot manager. It also worked. I don't want nor have the time to investigate the problem further, as it all seems to work now. If there's something with my current setup that is obviously faulty or perhaps even dangerous please let me know, cause I don't have a clue.
Now, it seems I just have to rebuild the kernel to enable the IPDIVERT option so that I can use the NAT daemon (I wonder why it isn't in there by default). But that's another story...
