My first purchase on the Amazon mp3 store was Jeff Buckleys version of Hallelujah to try and make sure the probably awful cover by the X-Factor winner doesn’t get to number one! I think I might buy the CD too just to cover all my bases!

I wouldn’t usually be at home at this time but I am waiting for a baby to be born - it seems to be taking it’s time but hopefully it will be out before Christmas!

I am not generally into conference type things - mainly because I have a full-time job, a small child and another one on the way so time/money is precious. But hopefully I will be involved in BarCampBournemouth in some way. I really have no excuse as it is right on my doorstep. It is being organised my Markng who really got the whole dotdorset thing started too. Anyway if you are interested go and have a look on the page.

BTW I have set up a linkedin group for dotdorset if you are interested.

BTW I am also on twitter.

When we got back from our hols I investigated the problem further and after rummaging around found that the fstab file had become corrupted. I duly fixed this or thought I had because when I rebooted I got a bad superblock error.This was slightly annoying as most of the stuff on the machine was not backed up.

I am not by any means a Linux expert and this problem was pretty frustrating as each time I booted the server I would be chucked into ‘File System Repair’ mode which is useless really as you can’t edit anything as all the files are mounted as read-only but I could see all the files. This made me very reluctant to wipe the drive. The first thing I did was buy a new hard drive so that I could back up anything if I managed to access the files.

I scoured the internet to find a solution to this problem. Most people seemed to think that the easiest thing was to wipe the drive and start again.

I found a piece of software called TestDisk. I looked at the list of LiveCDs and thought one of these might answer my prayers. I downloaded Parted Magic. I booted into it and ran TestDisk followed this tutorial. TestDisk didn’t find any bad superblocks.

I was getting slightly desperate at this point so I did a bit more surfing. I think in my initial quest I had perhaps been looking for the wrong thing. The server is partitioned using LVM so I started looking for data recovery tools for LVM. In my searches I found a couple of article that mentioned LVM recovery. I thought I’ll have one more go then I’ll wipe it. I ran through LVM recovery section ignored the RAID bits as my computer is not RAIDED. Using an Ubuntu LiveCD rather than Knoppix I managed to access the data. I backed it up onto the new drive and then thought I might as well see if I can get this to boot again. I fixed the fstab rebooted into the original system and it all started up cleanly again. Obviously I was very pleased with myself.

Unfortunately it’s doesn’t work on this server it does work on my other blog. On this site I wanted to show images from my Picasa feed rather than from flickr (there seem to be many WP plugins that do this). I use Picasa because the application is great to use at home and uploading images is really easy. I always found flickr a bit of faff.

Anyway if you want to use inlineRSS to do the same thing here is the xsl file that I use. I have put the actual image as a background image so I can center it vertically feel free to hack it though!

I have also made use of the last.fm xsl available from iconophobia.com - of course I have altered this too.

With a bit of thought you can probably manipulate any feed you can find with this plugin - I thin it’s pretty good!