More On The Crash

Thankfully, I had a USB stick which had a minimalist version of Ubuntu Linux on it, called Lubuntu -a contraction of "light" and "Ubuntu," I believe.

Bourbon Street passes the "at least 10 people test."

This allowed me to boot the laptop up using the stick. At that point, I could find the hard drive, which was listed as being 100% full.

I suspect that the latest Audacity which is version 3.3 or something, has some kind of bug whereby it doesn't delete the temporary files stored on the hard drive when it is done with them. An example would be, if you are adding reverberation to a track, it will store the original in a temporary file; in case you change your mind and undo the reverb, so it can resort back to the original. My theory is that these were not being deleted when Audacity was closed. My hard drive began filling up as I used Audacity.

I had purposefully moved a bunch of stuff off the drive and onto USB sticks so as to give myself a "workspace" of about 16 gigabytes. This should have been plenty space to work on files that were one twentieth that size, even if they needed to be duplicated a bunch of times to allow for undoing actions.

I will be patient with the drive, for there are several ways to skin a cat...oops, Harold just read that last line over my shoulder and is under the bed now...

There is a hard drive repair utility that can be downloaded and must be placed on a USB stick, then the computer is booted off that stick so that the suspect hard drive can be worked on.

One of the error messages I got was something like "An attempt was made to write outside the disk." That doesn't sound like something the operating system would attempt to do; and so I suspect there is a bug in the brand new version of Audacity.

I will have to find the "boot repair" program and put it on a stick. Then maybe I can get a more comprehensive diagnostic message, hopefully telling me that some file was corrupted and I will be able to re-write the boot up sectors of the drive, including that file, and once again access the whole thing.

Funny how, as I pondered just what it means to have one's whole hard drive wiped out, it occurred to me just how most of the stuff had gotten on there; which was from being downloaded off the Internet.

The "Documents" directory was mostly a bunch of Wikipedia pages on things that I planned upon reading. There was a "Perl" subsection that had all of my programming stuff that was going into my text formatting thing that I was attempting to upgrade.

That was the script that I could run these blog posts through, and it would render the paragraphs in different colors, after enlarging the first 3 words of each. It would boldface all the nouns, such as persons places and things that start with capital letters. Then, at the end it would give a word count; as in: "You have just read 1,749 words," or something.

Then, the second "module" of it was the dictionary creating part. That would go word by word through the text and check to see if each one was already in the "dictionary." The dictionary would, thus, become a dictionary of my vocabulary, with an entry for every word that I have ever used, based upon me feeding all my blog posts, going back to 2006, through the script.

I was up to the point where I was trying to get the program to reject all the XML type stuff that the Blogger "feeds" come in.

These "markups" always include characters that aren't alpha-numeric; and so getting the program to not recognize these as things I have written was about the point I was at when the hard drive crashed.

But, in recent conversations with my childhood friend, Dave, I learned that he makes his six figure salary by working with Python, and not Perl, which I was writing my script in. He said that he could offer me all kinds of help in Python, and so I decided to re-write the whole thing in Python, and learn that language while I was at it. So, having the whole hard drive wiped out is seeming less and less a tragedy as I ponder it. 

Go Busk, Young Man!

Right now it is Tuesday, the 4th of January, 2022 and it's about 8:34 in the evening; I'm pretty sure the batteries in the spotlight and in the amp are OK, and so I might go out to play; since I can do this any other time...

The Singing Bird Clock just chirped 9 PM...time to see what the Lilly Pad looks like...