Back to the blogosphere

It has been a while since I made a post on this blog. I have been busy, with the start of school, and IOI and the ISSC and many other stuff. This year the school work is more intense, so I find myself with a huge backlog of homework :P well.. home work is not as interesting as many other things :P

The IOI was great, but wasn't able to get a medal. The trip was fun. Met old friends from the 2007 IOI, and met Manar in Alexandria, although we didn't went around the Cairo city much, we were able to enjoy the Pyramids :) but sadly, I lost the memory card of my camera :( so most of the photos that I took at the IOI is lost :(.

And finally, after another conversation with Zhasha about arch vs. ubuntu. I switched to Arch. And it was all great. And he also introduced me to the wicd network manager which is also great (Although it doesn't look pretty in KDE).

Most of the accidents lead to interesting stuff.. and I also had an accident like that. I was crawling on my bed, found my laptop opened it, and searched to the power button with my hand, and pressed the Dell "media-direct" button. And, well it booted up the computer, and said that it can't find the media direct partition. So I just turned it off, and pressed the good old power button. And grub started giving out some odd errors. So I booted up the other computer, used dd to write an arch iso to my pendrive, booted the laptop with it, and found out that my entire partition table has been erased, and replaced with the table, that came default out of the box. I was very happy with dell, until then. That media direct (or shall we call it nuke-it-all or destruction direct, like some people in the forums had referred to it) button thing is totally SHIT, and I'm really dissapointed with Dell. Some people tell me that if I dd the drive with /dev/null then the media direct will be gone for good. But that involves lot of work and lots of backups etc. So I found a temporary solution for it, "stick a double sided tape with one side covered over the button". It isn't the best solution. But it works for now. And it's red so it gives a nice WARNING feeling :P

Anyway, I was able to recover my partitions with testdisk. And reinstalled GRUB. But the Arch wasn't booting :( so I'm back with my old Ubuntu instllation. And had to get about 400 MBs worth of updates :S.

I'll be updating my blog more frequently from now on :P (Or at least I hope to do so).