2012 — 8 March: Thursday

A much improved1 start to the day. The first cuppa is already (08:48) a thing of the past, and I think I shall nip quickly out to my little grocery (etc) shop before breakfast. I have a lunch date, and will also be a bit busy tomorrow morning having my little batch of (I hope) benign cells removed from my cheek much as I performed analogous surgery late last night on an unwanted Trojan buried in a backup file on my chum Christopher's network drive.2 Still, at least I should be able to retrieve all his music files for him.

My digital radio (Take II)

Repeating yesterday's retuning exercise just after midnight fetched three fewer radio channels, and I then left the box on 'soak test' overnight to see if it still wished to continue to switch between radio and TV without my intervention — a potentially fatally annoying new habit that would see it expunged rapidly from my system. So far, so good.

I'm always bemused (no comment) to see quite how much 'stuff' accumulates on a PC. Back from my expotition with a bulging carrier bag, I find BlackBeast just finishing its full malware scan having inspected 981,270 items in just under 80 minutes. Since it was averaging about 10% CPU I assume the process is I/O limited.

There's nothing...

... quite like a good rant. This is an excellent one. Though I do wonder what my Koran-bolstered Pakistani NHS doctor ex-neighbours would have made of it.

And this...

Engineering

... is an excellent T-shirt. (Found via the jocularity here.)

I got fed up...

... of fighting with Christopher's network hard drive, and the less than 6MB/sec data transfer rate — not to mention the regular disappearance from my network — so I decided to take the thing apart and pop the naked drive into my SATA-to-USB cradle. All well and good, but the disk turns out to be a Linux system in miniature with (Brian and I assume) associated Samba magic to make it look like an NTFS drive to its Windows client. That, and the powerful clue that Windows disk management showed four or five active, healthy, basic partitions, but no volume IDs and no trace of data, or any option other than to delete these volumes, persuades me that the best next move is now going to be to plumb it into my Linux PC upstairs and simply inspect the data in (as it were) its natural habitat.

One way or another, I'm going to retrieve this damn' data. But further work will now have to halt while I make my visitor a cuppa and send him on his way. Good grief. It's already 17:11 and the sun is still shining from a blue sky. [Pause] Right; ever onward. [Longer pause] Well, the disk partitions are recognised by the Linux disk utility, but as four pieces (dev/sdf1 through sdf4) of a RAID array, which is a bit worrying. Some things are just too clever for their own good. Still, I'm not yet quite out of options. But I'm taking a well-earned break while I munch a late tea / early supper.

  

Footnotes

1  Sunshine.
2  To be precise, the 'nasty' is still sitting on that (disconnected) drive (in the form of an innocent-looking executable called "survey.exe") but the local copy that BlackBeast's real-time antivirus processes sniffed out promptly kicked it into the long grass for me to zap. The offensive item was a Trojan yclept Win32/Aegrus. I gather it executes commands from an attacker. Double plus ungood.