unsigned long geek = random();

I recently had to create a number of bootable USB flash drives to install and update systems that don’t have local CD-ROM drives. Of course, I could’ve booted the systems using PXE, but thought using USB would be quicker… How wrong I was.

After struggling for several hours with a flash drive that refused to boot no matter what I did, I discovered an interesting fact – most bootloaders won’t boot from flash drives that have 2048-byte sectors. Of course, the flash drive I was using had 2048-byte sectors… Using a flash drive with 512-byte sectors worked perfectly first time.

Depending on operating system, it may not be that easy to tell the sector size of the flash drive. If using a Unix system, you should see something useful in the kernel ring buffer (displayed by dmesg) when you insert the drive.

A non-bootable drive will display something like:
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] 258687 2048-byte hardware sectors (530 MB)
or
sd0: 505 MB, 126 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 2048 bytes/sect x 258687 sectors

A bootable one will look something like:
sd 11:0:0:0: [sdh] 2061816 512-byte hardware sectors (1056 MB)
or
sd0: 1006 MB, 1006 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2062328 sectors

This week I flew domestically within the UK and encountered British Airways’ strange special meals policy for the first time. According to their website:

Special meal requests cannot be made for travel on any of the following services: all UK Domestic flights, Euro Traveller flights from the UK to Paris, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf, Jersey, Cologne, Amsterdam & Brussels, and passengers travelling on any flight on a stand-by or waitlist basis.

That’s rather poor (and rather strange, if you ask me). Heck, in South Africa BA even have extra vegetarian meals on their domestic flights for those who haven’t requested them in advance. I’m not at all impressed, but unfortunately BA seem to be the only airline that fly from Gatwick to Manchester.

Update: If you ask, they do have vegetarian meals onboard, even if you can’t pre-book one.

I sent this to the rescue list this evening, in response to a discussion about the Microsoft patent infringement claims against open source software:

My feeling is that Microsoft is trying to spread FUD and scare large firms
that are considering FOSS. Companies are going to be dissuaded from using
FOSS if there is a risk that they may have to pay unknown “future
royalties” because the software they’re using violates a Microsoft patent.

I wonder if this will all just mysteriously blow over in a few months,
without Microsoft ever having released the details of the patents
supposedly violated. By which time, of course, enough FUD will be spread in
the market, particularly amongst those who don’t fully understand FOSS,
that Microsoft will have achieved exactly what they wanted to with their
disinformation campaign.

For some reason, I thought it bore reprinting here. Yes, I do love a good conspiracy theory.