This ad deserves no attention and only ridicule. I responded to his criticism and mostly agree with his points, but I found myself thinking, if this is the future, the future will suck. He wrote a response to his own article detailing what his vision of the future would be, but this too left me thinking there wasn’t enough description of his ideas to grasp the vision.

I’ll start by giving a run-down of the Microsoft future, then Mr. Luke’s future, and then tear it all down and describe the only future worth striving towards.

Microsoft basically envisioned everything as a mobile phone. Regular desktops, mobile devices, books, and even refrigerators use the typical swipe mechanics. Every surface is capable of selectively allowing light to pass through, being opaque or translucent upon command. Every display is paper thin, even paper displays and mobile phones. Books are as thin as paper but are really just computers with “pages”, similar to two-sided business cards. And most annoyingly, every device employs a 3D display for mundane uses such as bar graphs.

Luke goes on to initially describe something that is vaguely similar to the Star Trek computer. Talk to your house, car, or anything else and it talks back. He then goes on to describe a system where people don’t need to look up their appointments, they just know them like a bird knows which way north points. This concept is referred to as an “exo-cortex” and is a device used to describe how “Bob” just seems to know everything. Communication is done by reaching out within one’s mind and contacting them. It’s all sci-fi but it doesn’t really describe how the future works any better than the Microsoft ad.

So, where did Microsoft go wrong? Almost everywhere. They employed the same devices currently available and made them smaller and added other current technologies on top, such as 3D displays (which oddly work not as stereoscopic images and do no use glasses). Nearly every element in the video is something that can be done today. Automatically translating eyewear, though small in form factor, can already be done (albeit in a phone). Phones, tablets, and now some desktop interfaces already employ the ridiculously annoying swipe interaction for everything. The poly-translucent surfaces (business card and fridge door) is semi-novel and would be extremely useful in more than just a cheesy computer display (think invisibility suit that can manipulate visible light waves to bend them around the object).

Where did Luke go wrong? Well, his first vision of the future is depressingly boring. In fact, this idea started back in the early 90s as “SmartHome“, which Microsoft expanded upon. The interaction mechanism of speech is pretty basic and really doable right now. Most of the things people would use it for are the type of basic Machine Translation problems Siri has demonstrated as an academically complete topic (my initial adviser described it to me as “boring and was completed 2 decades ago”). The “exo-brain” idea was better, but really, it doesn’t go far enough; it’s like the half-way vision of where human nature will ultimately gravitate.

If you haven’t ever watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, you should. See, while it’s just anime, the writers have an amazing ability to create a probable future. The original movie proposed the idea of the human brain getting an electronic implant that allowed them to connect to “the net” and communicate, perform tasks, and gather information by connecting to the futuristic USB port on the back of the head (a decade before The Matrix employed this idea).

The basic principle of the show is that mankind has embraces robotics and made them a part of their body, becoming a race of mostly cyborgs. Not the normal cyborgs we currently think of, but rather regular humans with electronics to enhance our already human attributes. For example, some characters have robotic eyes to provide better vision, telescoping abilities, built-in HUDs, and more. Not possessing implants of any kind is considered alien to most humans and one such character is labeled as a luddite.

There was one particular episode that struck me as remarkable, the very first episode. The human brain itself became obsolete and some people have opted to download their brain into a “cyberbrain”. This gives them all the computing abilities you expect out of a supercomputer and all of the intelligence seen out of even the most basic human brains. To read a heavy volume of text, the cyberbrain can either download it and process it or scan a barcode like book via the eyes (probably robotic as well). Interaction can be done wirelessly to “the net”, so basically, anything is possible.

Much like the biological brain, it has to process and perform complex tasks, but it can be upgraded, expanded, and improved. Imagine the learning possibilities. Given a more powerful cyberbrain geared for processing physics, the greatest works of Einstein and Feynman would be easily mastered. The open market could sell cyberbrains that specialize in certain tasks. Combined with other cybernetics, the limitations of mankind would know no bounds.

I see the future as one in which the biological human body as the next device to be crafted, mastered, and obsoleted by technology. The only major obstacle: the human nature to be adverse to replacing itself with robotics and ethical challenges. If you need proof that we are the only thing stopping ourselves from adopting concepts like robotic eyes, ears, limbs, and brains, look into the story of Oscar Pistorius.

Me? I look forward to never having to wear glasses, forget a phone number, or deal with an aging brain that can no longer learn.

So here’s my quick rundown of each team. Team names in blue, I am predicting playoff berth; team names in green a conference finals appearance, yellow for a Cup appearance, and red for Cup winner.

Western Conference:

• Blackhawks – Strong offensive firepower with Towes, Kane, and Hossa. Weak in the net as Crawford proved too easy to slip one past last year. Preseason game against the Red Wings’ top prospects (versus Blackhawks top lines) showed definite weaknesses. Playoff experience will be helpful.
• Blue Jackets – Nothing to look at here, move along.
• Red WingsIn the middle of rebuilding, they still have Lidstrom, Datsuyk, and Zetterberg. New crop of recruits look very promising, including Nyquist, Emmerton, and Bruunstrom. Howard can hopefully get past his sophmore slump and do better. One of the leagues best and a trip to the finals is a guarantee.
• Predators – Strong on defense with Weber, mediocre forwards in Tootoo, Fischer, and Erat. Rinne could be good or bad. Newfound playoff experience will be useful. This is a hard working determined team.
• Blues – Gathered a few aging stars in Arnott and Langenbrunner. Halak is inconsistent in net. Looks to finish near the top of the teams that don’t make it this year, but there is potential for improvement.
• Flames – Mediocre talent landed them near the bottom last year. Team looks mostly the same, so will probably fare the same.
• Avalanche – Few big names here in Forsberg and Hejduk. Picked up Varmarlov, though he wasn’t too good in Washington. Possibly improves over last year, but not playoff caliber.
• Oilers – Tons of very young talent, including the oft discussed Nudget-Hopkins. Still far too young and inexperienced to be good enough for the playoffs.
• Wild – Picked up Setagouchi and Heatly from San Jose. Strong forward lineup, but Backstrom has been ineffective in net before. Still, this team looks playoff strong, but too many changes to be effective as a team.
• Canucks – Nearly won the Cup last year and the team has mostly remained the same. Strong offensive firepower (Sedin twins especially), strong defense, excellent special teams, and decent goalie. Luongo is inconsistant and ineffective when needed most (weak / bad angle shots).
• Ducks – Strong on offense with Perry and Selanne, but no depth in the rest of the lines. Defense is mediocre with Hiller providing somewhat decent goal tending, if healthy. Given the rest of the conference, the Ducks don’t look strong enough to repeat a playoff berth.
• Stars – Change in coaching after a disappointing second half last year (and missing the playoffs by 2 points). Lots of young talent, such as Benn, Ryder (pickup from Boston), Fiddler (from Phoenix), and Godard (from Pittsburg) and a few veterans left (Morrow, Ribero, Ott). Team looks strong on defense and strong on offense. With new ownership on the horizon finally, this team has made lots of movement to build a better team. If they can get their passing skills under control, they are a definite standout. Their lack of playoff experience will probably be the reason they don’t make a Finals appearance. The next few years look very promising for this team.
• Kings – After making tons of moves in the off-season, following a disappointing early exit in the postseason. Kings picked up some big name talent, such as Gagne and Richards, and kept some big talent, such as Kopitar and Doughty. Big question is the inconsistent goalkeep, Quick; some days he’s great, not so much on other days.
• Coyotes – Barely strong enough to make the playoffs in previous years, they don’t look as strong this year. Most notably is the departure of Bryzgalov in goal. Otherwise, the mediocre talent in Doan, Vbrata, and Yandle remained. Team boasts one of the largest defensive squads (12), even though the Coyotes are still not very strong on special teams or defense. This team still has a big question mark regarding ownership as they are owned by the NHL after their bankruptcy in 2009, the question remains how long the NHL is willing to remain in this position.
• Sharks – Gutted after last years disappointing conference finals, this team has been rebuilt. Traded away some of their top offensive firepower (Heatly and Setagouchi) to build a better defense, which they always lacked before. I disagree in this move because they didn’t get defensemen worthy of the forwards they traded. Murray and Boyle remained while they traded Ian White to Detroit, though their defense doesn’t look as strong as it should. They’ll make the playoffs and if they disappoint again, McLellan should be looking for a new job.

Eastern Conference:

• Devils – After a horrible start to last year, they rocketed off to an excellent finish. As long as Brodeur is strong in goal, this team stands a chance. They re-signed valuable talent, such as Parise and Sykora. This team has lots of potential, but it may be Brodeur’s final year, which would be a serious blow to the quality of the team.
• Islanders – An owner at the helm has started collecting all of the league’s bruisers. They had a bit of a streak at the end of last season, but if you watched, you’d see it was because they became an overly physical team. Case in point was the game against Pittsburg with half a dozen fights, including one when Brent Johnson dropped on punch on DiPietro to break his jaw. DiPietro has never been very good and is always injured. These guys are just a bunch of boxers on ice.
• Rangers – Active offseason, they picked up Brad Richards and Rupp to fill in some offensive firepower, which they lacked last season. If Staal can stay healthy, and Lundqvist is on top of his game, this team stands a good chance, but they’re in the strongest conference and division, so they’ve got to climb uphill.
• Flyers – Another team active in the trading department, the Flyers picked up future hall-of-famer Jagr and Talbot (from the Penguins). They also picked up Bryzgalov from Phoenix and pitched Boucher to Carolina. They also pitched Gagne and Richards, though those trades are questionable. This team will be playoff strong, but the goalie carousel will continue and ultimately cost their hopes of lifting the cup.
• Penguins – Sid the Kid went out last January due to a concussion and hasn’t been cleared for contact yet. Malkin had knee surgery midseason as well (MCL). Malkin is back and they also picked up Neal (from Dallas) midseason. Even without their top scorers, and possibly the best since Lemieux, the Penguins reformed into a defensively strong team. They boast one of the best offenses and defenses in the league, matched by unstoppable special teams (I believe they lead in shorthanded goals too). If Crosby makes it back healthy and playing where he was a few years ago (last year seemed like a peak and he may be timid or unable to play at that level), the Penguins look like the best team in the league.
• Bruins – Defending Stanley Cup champions, the Bruins have to shake off the Cup hangover. Few teams in history have repeated, but the Bruins stand a decent chance. Most of the team is kept intact from last year, including my favorite Marchand, though Recchi retired and his absence will be felt. Thomas will probably go down as one of the best goalies in history, so if he maintains the same performance, the Bruins will be a tough team to beat.
• Sabres – I think the Sabres are playoff caliber, but they are in a really good conference. Miller should be better than he was last year, and Leino was a nice addition to Pomminville, Ennis, and Vanek. Unfortunately, they don’t appear as strong as their competition.
• Canadiens – Another strong year for the Canadiens ahead. Most of their quick-strike forwards stuck around, such as Gionta, Gomez, and Cammalleri. Defense remains strong with the fan (and my personal) favorite Subban, Markov, and Campoli. Goaltending could be better with Price but he was fairly effective in the playoffs. Rivalry with Boston will prove to be excellent hockey, but ultimately, Boston looks to be the better team.
• Senators – Talked about lots during the offseason due to the active trading, this team still looks like it needs much improvement (they seem to prefer trades to their AHL drafts). They picked up a few crummy goalies in Anderson (Avalance) and Auld (Canadiens). Interesting note: Auld has been in the league for 10 years and played for 9 teams averaging a mere 24 games per team. The rest of the roster looks like low scoring forwards, weak defense, and subpar special teams. Don’t expect much from this team.
• Maple Leafs – I’d love to see the Leafs (love that Canadian spelling) make the playoffs, but this conference is stacked and I don’t see it quite happening. Phaneuf is fun to watch, terrifying if you’re a forward with your head down, but this team still lacks firepower and experience enough to qualify.
• Hurricanes – The Canes barely missed the playoffs last year, but made a few trades in the off-season to get back in, such as Boucher and Kaberle. Ward and Boucher make for a fairly decent goalkeep combo (even though Ward racked up enough goals against to rank 21st), as well as Staal and Skinner. The Canes look good but not good enough, especially on special teams (20th on PK and 24th on PP). Given the troubles on special teams, they little chance against the rest of the Eastern teams that almost all nearly do better.
• Panthers – Not much to see here, they finished 3rd worst team in the league as one of only 8 teams below 50% win mark (seems like a few teams lose way more than the norm). Honestly, I don’t see how this team is still in Florida, let alone in the NHL.
• Lightning – Impressive, out of nowhere team last year, made it to the conference finals. This team made their mark as the team that put away the Capitals (honestly, who hasn’t at this point) by utilizing their quick striking offense around Washington’s poor blue line. Roloson is something to behold, especially since he’s one of the older players in the league (41?). This team looks strong on both defense, with guys like Bergeron and Ohlund, and very strong on offense in St. Luis, Lecavalier, Stamkos, and Downie. They’re not very physical, which may be their undoing in the playoffs.
• Capitals – Ahh, the little engine that could. The Caps are the eastern version of the Sharks: perpetually set to disappoint. Don’t get me wrong, they do everything right in the regular season, they have an amazing line up, and I’ve predicted their Cup victory 2 times in the past and been wrong. How can they go wrong with guys like Ovechkin, Knuble, Backstrom, Semin, and Neuvirth? This team is deep in the line up, an explosive offensive setup, a newly rebuilt defensive team, and special teams that ranks in the top across the board. Hell, even Ovi lands over 200 hits a season! Why don’t I think they can pull it off? One word: Boudreau. He’s been behind the bench since 2007, leading the Caps to finishing 1st, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in the eastern conference. He’s clearly doing something right in the regular season, but can’t seem to lead to playoff success. A team that good in the regular season should see some sort of success in the post-season, and if Boudreau doesn’t produce this year, I bet he gets canned.
• Jets – Last up is the failure that was the Thrashers. So the Thrashers changed owners and went to Winnipeg (the previous Jets became the Coyotes, not a good sign), but the team is generally still the same. They finished near the bottom last year and are set to repeat, but at least they’ll have rabid fans supporting them. Seriously, the Jets fans are insane (almost as insane as the Canucks fans who destroyed their own town because they lost, seriously, how stupid is that?). Poor Byfuglien, sentanced to community service after raising the Cup. Sorry Winnipeg, it’s not happening this year.

There you have it, 2011/2012 NHL teams as I see them. In the past, I have been about 80% right on who makes it to the playoffs and about 66% right on who wins in the playoffs (stupid Washington and San Jose, I’ve learned my lesson this year). We’ll come back to this next April and June and see just how accurate I was.

If you’ll excuse me, I have a Caps vs. Lightning game to watch.

This is when I discovered the Google Font Directory.

What Google is offering are freely available fonts, even hosted by Google, that you can use on your website. For example, you can use these fonts to improve the appearance of your WordPress theme. Google provides links and instructions for each font listed in the directory. To use, you will need to add a CSS “link” tag in your HTML and reference it in your CSS via the “font-family” property. For example, you would add the following:

[code lang="html"]
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Serif'
rel='stylesheet'
type='text/css'\>
[/code]

Then in your CSS, you would have something similar to this:

[code lang="css"]
body {
font-family: 'Droid Serif', serif;
}
[/code]

That basically turns the Droid Serif font on using a font-family. Font families allow you to specify a set of fonts, and if the browser supports the CSS property, it will try the fonts in succession until it finds one that it can use.

This is pretty great and allows you to do the same in WordPress; simply add the link in your header.php and the font-family in your stylesheet.css.

But what if you want to use these fonts on your (Linux) desktop? Good question. Clearly, sifting through the font directory and downloading all 250+ fonts (at the time of writing) would take too long and scraping the site would probably violate some TOS. Fortunately, Google has made sure that all fonts uploaded are open source. To make grabbing every font easier, you can grab the entire repository right here.

Now we need to install these for Xorg so that we may use them on our desktop applications. We would basically do the following:

[code lang="text"]
hg clone https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/
find googlefontdirecory | egrep '\.(ttf|otf)$' | xargs -I{} cp {} ~/.fonts/
fc-cache -f -v
[/code]

What that does is check out the GFD repository, finds all TrueType fonts (TTF) and all OpenType fonts (OTF) and copies them to your own font directory. Afterwards, it uses fc-cache to scan directories and updates the Xorg font server.

That’s it. You can now use them freely in your desktop. Now that these fonts are available to your desktop, you can now use them with your XeTeX documents as well:

[code lang="tex"]
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Droid Serif}
[/code]

After playing around with fonts, I’ve come to appreciate a good looking font. I’m pretty happy with how my resume turned out and how this blog looks (notice the title is a vt100 font). When you’re done checking out the Google Font Directory, check out Font Squirrel as well (all free, though not necessarily open source).

Happy fonting!

I started out looking for online documentation and justification for this decision. The first thing I found was the WikiBook. I read Andrew Roberts’ Benefits of LaTeX Typesetting. I found a comparison between TeX and word processors; the comments there are valuable as well. The best article, by a long shot, that I found was Dario Taraborelli’s Beauty of LaTeX. His direct comparison of kerning made me immediately appreciate TeX. I actually had no idea what kerning was until I read that article.

Now, I needed to know how to build a PDF from a LaTeX file. I first installed every texlive package available on my distro (Gentoo) and then set out to find a GUI editor. I wanted to learn LaTeX in a WYSIWYG editor until I felt comfortable with the tool. The only tools that looked promising were LyX and Gummi. Initially, LyX looked like the best of both worlds; it promised a WYSIWYG editor and access to the generated TeX code. The interface was clumsy at interacting with the typeset objects (i.e. setting table width never seemed to work), the produced TeX was spread out over several files and unintuitive to the uninitiated, and it produced PDFs that did not match the designed file (big problem). Gummi, on the other hand, provides a plain text editor (with syntax highlighting) and a poppler viewer of the generated PDF in a split pane. Periodically (configurable), it would regenerate the PDF and the poppler viewer would refresh. This seemed like the best feasible tool.

Then, I set out to look for existing packages to make things easy at first. I sifted through CTAN (TeX’s CPAN equivalent) but didn’t like any of the packages there. I found Miklos Csuros resume (I apologize for the ASCII-ization of that name) and decided to start with that. He provides a class file that makes things easier so I wiped out his details and filled in mine. It produced a resume that looked decent but it didn’t look stellar and I still didn’t know what was going on. Being a programmer, I decided to start hacking through his class file to slowly add things I wanted, eventually improving it to my satisfaction.

After a week of fudging around with it and still not knowing what I was doing in LaTeX or what I even wanted with my resume. I hopped on Amazon and decided to buy a LaTeX book and invest a week or so reading it and getting up to speed. I read a better part of the first 7 chapters or so and skimmed other sections that piqued my interest. I started to get a feeling for how LaTeX documents were structured and about many of the common packages. At this point, I decided to venture out any write my resume from scratch in pure LaTeX.

While I was waiting on the book to arrive, I scoured Google looking for a resume format that appealed my sense of style: clean, professional, efficient use of space, and beautifully typeset. I looked at hundreds of resumes, everything from resumes for graphics designers to CVs of tenured professors. I stumbled across Benj Lipchak’s resume and was impressed. It’s clean, stylish, and well organized (though I disagree with his section ordering).

It took several weeks to get something close to what I wanted. The end result still has a few quirks that I intend on ironing out. The text bullets separating the parts of middle section isn’t graphically appealing, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to demarcate the entries. The font, Linux Libertine, is also not my favorite.

After spending a couple of months with LaTeX, I think it makes a wonderful typesetter. Unfortunately, TeX makes for a crappy programming language. I couldn’t help but think the entire time that it would be far more easily laid out and styled in HTML and CSS. I had to pour over the companion book I bought non-stop and still couldn’t always find the answer I sought. Debugging the output from xelex or pdflatex when you have an error proved to be a hair removing experience.

I eventually learned that LaTeX is mostly a bunch of packages with predefined defaults, most of which have copious amounts of wasted whitespace. I found the savetrees and layouts packages to be extremely helpful in cutting down waste and visualizing my current page layout. LaTeX allows for some truly interesting tools and uses; such as an embedded python package, presentations made with inkscape, and live previewers. My main wish is for modern document types that represented document styles that people have grown to expect.

I really like LaTeX. Actually, I really like XeTeX and LuaTeX. Most people think TeX is for academics only, but I would challenge that assertion. While TeX is an interesting language, the documents that can be produced from most of the TeX processors is simply unmatched when compared to word processors. I’m proud to add this quirky but highly useful tool to my resume.

So enough meta-writing. In December, I finished my Masters degree in Computer Science. In May, I was accepted for publication in IEEE IRI. Also in May, we had our first child, a baby girl named Emmalynn.

Enough catching up. No one likes reading or writing the whole “I haven’t written in a long time” posts, so I will stop there. I am working on a new article about my latest interest: LaTeX.

• erebus: dual core AMD, 2GB of memory, 2.5TB of storage, shiny new SSD storing the Arch Linux install
• citadel: hexa-core Phenom 2, 6GB of memory, 150G Raptor, SATA 6Gb/s, and USB3 (still Gentoo)

After spending 2-3 days reinstalling, the new server is basically finished. It still has a 2TB btrfs partition that died and is waiting for the fsck tool. I am also ordering a new rack (21U) to store everything, since I am moving out of my current home office.

Now that I have returned, I hope to make a more public presence, starting with smaller, more technically specific blog entries.

Well, a few weeks ago, I found that one of the primary drives was failing. I moved data off only to find out the hard way that the destination drive, which used btrfs, has no means of recovering journaling errors. The btrfsck only reports that errors exist. This was a crippling setback that I was able to correct with a backup.

Then, I went to update the system, which was one of the things on my list before the hardware gaffes, and I found that Gentoo restructured it’s use of spawn-fcgi. Now if you want to run spawn-fcgi with lighttpd, you will need to setup an init script. See Naib’s final comment.

Also, I found that the PHP extension configuration had changed. Rather than installing other packages, they are now USE flags. For example, instead of installing php with +pdo and then pdo-mysql, you just install php with +pdo and enable the pdo_mysql.so extension module. Oddly enough, I didn’t need to uncomment the extension directives in my php.ini, as they seemed to be autoloaded because of .ini files in the ext-active directory.

I don’t intend on abandoning lighttpd just yet, so I had to migrate to the new configuration. Now, the conf.d script for lighty is under /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. I had to manually merge my old config into this because there were just too many differences. One gripe I have about merging Gentoo ._config files are most changes are to either comments or whitespace.

So when the dust finally settled, I have my system running again. All my long term data is now stored on different drives, and backups are scheduled weekly. This whole incident has made me want to setup a Linode account and point voidreturn.org there as a fallback.

To reduce the disk usage on the partition this MySQL database resided, I started moving the entire /var/lib/mysql directory elsewhere. This is the directory where MySQL keeps the actual database data. I started out by moving the mysqld-bin.* files. Part of the way through this, the system crashed and the destination partition was not stable enough to withstand this failure (btrfs has no fsck).

Now, each database is technically stored in its own directory. For example, the WordPress database might be in a directory /var/lib/mysql/wordpress (depending on your setup). I was lucky as this directory was intact. This may seem obvious, but those directories are all that are needed; the databases are self-contained.

The first thing you want to do is check the database to make sure the files aren’t corrupted:


mysqlcheck db_name


If all checks out well, then you really only need to reinitialize the system tables:


mysql_install_db


After that, you’ll have to readd all users. For example, see how to add back the WordPress users. This is just a simple example as there are lots of situations that can ruin your MySQL database. I found this article that walks you through a few other cases of corrupted or damaged databases.

First, I’ve been working overtime to finish a work project. I missed the estimate by about 280 hours, or 50%. It’s a large Qt application to read, write, and validate highly complex configuration files. In the small subproject that I work on, 300K lines of C++, this added 50K and changed countless thousands of others. It turned out to be much more work than I originally thought. It’s not a lot of code as it only represents 4 months worth of work. We will be integrating our product soon, so it should slow down for 6 months.

Then, I started working on my thesis. Since everyone was on vacation over the summer, I was basically working alone. I ran into a few problems which I’ll talk about in a different post. I applied for my final tuition payment at work and verified with the graduate school advisor that I will be able to defend my thesis and graduate in December. I’m super excited about that.

I also decided to start training for an ultra marathon. My weekly mileage went from 20 miles to 40-50 miles a week. I’m aiming for a 50K in February and a 50 miler in 2011. You can follow my training on Daily Mile.

Then my fileserver and router hardware has started failing. If you tried to access this site earlier in the week, it was unavailable due to a failing harddrive. To make matters worse, when I tried copying to another drive, the system crashed. I learned then that btrfs has no fsck and no means of recovery; I wouldn’t recommend it until an fsck exists. Over the next few months, I’ll be updating various machines (it’s been 4 years since I rebuilt my desktop).

It’s good to be back.

Before I set out, I figured I’d see what the US Department of Defense trusts is good enough that state secrets are highly unlikely to ever be recovered. Turns out, they have specified a sanitization requirements for all classified materials in the past. In the DoD 5220.22-M, it stated that a 7 pass wipe, though all references have been removed. The DSS, which issues security clearances for personal and sites has also removed overwriting as an acceptable sanitization means (only degaussing prior to burning, makes it a bit difficult to sell). Well, those techniques may be outdated except for only the most well funded and highly motivated person(s), such as foreign governments, but most likely not for Joe Keyboard willing to spend $20 on an old 160 GB drive.

I stumbled upon DBAN, which is a LiveCD distribution that provides a means to wipe a drive adhering to those now outdated DoD standards. This was an awesome find! I immediately downloaded the ISO, burned it, put the CD and one of the old drives in an old Dell machine and started right away. It booted, I choose to manually select the drive, chose my wiping method, and started the process in under 5 minutes. I read that this method could take a long time, and sure enough, it took 3 hours for a 30 GB drive on the DoD long pass (7) method.

Afterwards, I booted a SystemRescueCD in the same machine to see if I could recover anything. I followed a few guides to see if I could find anything meaningful, but had no luck. Now keep in mind, I’ve never actually done tried to recover files like this so I could have been doing it wrong. Also, I am not a system administrator by trade. I might have made mistakes or become impatient, so YMMV. That being said, I had fun fooling around to see if it actually worked. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t really feel worried about anything that might be recoverable off the drive.

If you find yourself wanting to sell a hard drive and want to wipe it the best you can without damaging the drive (and don’t have access to a degaussing machine), then I recommend you try DBAN out. This isn’t fool proof as the ultra-paranoid can only resort to an acid bath or degaussing then burning. For everyone else, you can probably be 95% sure that no one is going to be able to pull data off the drive.