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Last year I partitioned the drive of my aging G4 PowerBook (12in Aluminum) and set it up as a dual-boot Ubuntu/OSX system. I've been pretty happy with this arrangement, but I haven't been using OS X much, really only to do some music with Ableton Live (no Linux version). So I decided to move OS X off onto an external drive and use the entire internal drive for Linux. My plan was to get a nice new Maxtor OneTouch 4 mini 500GB to act as the new backup drive for my Linux systems, and use the old Maxtor OneTouch 4 mini 120GB as the new external OS X drive.

After backing up both of the partitions, I was unable to boot into OS X from the external drive. I tried a bunch of things, starting with holding down the Option key to get that boot disk menu. I googled around and found a helpful discussion on the Ubuntu community site about someone else who is trying the same thing. This advice didn't work either. I got the following error:

$ ofpath /dev/sda1
/pci@f000000/ata-6@d/disk@0:4,\\ofpath: No such file or directory.

After googling around some more I found another posting about booting PowerPC Macs from external USB2 drives, this one from the OS X perspective. It was very helpful, but after reading it and booting my powerbook into openfirmware, it looks like it wasn't going to work.

Reading down the page and some more googling confirmed that the 12in Aluminum G4 PowerBooks can't boot off external USB drives.

I recently updated my personal laptop to Ubuntu 9.04. Everything went well during the upgrade, and it's all smooth sailing on the desktop afterwards. It's not an earth-shatteringly different upgrade but it's nice and solid.

The only problem is that it broke my local Django dev installs. I kept getting "Internal Server Error"s from Apache, and the following weird error when running Django's local dev server:

$ ./manage.py runserver
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./manage.py", line 2, in <module>
    from django.core.management import execute_manager
ImportError: No module named django.core.management

After some searching I found this bug report on LaunchPad which basically says that with Ubuntu 9.04 Python2.6 no longer has /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages in the path. You have to put your local code in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages. Once I moved my code everything worked fine.

A friend of mine called me recently and told me about a media phenomenon that was sweeping across China and sloshing across the Pacific to hit our shores. It's the "grass mud horse". (Actually, I think my friend may have said "gelassenheit mud horse", which is weird and not really in context. But "gelassenheit" kinda sorta sounds like "grass" when spoken by a non-native English speaker over a crappy mobile phone connection from an undisclosed location.)

The grass mud horse is one of the Baidu 10 mythical creatures. It's sort of like an alpaca and lives out on the grasslands. The horses have a problem: invading "river crabs" are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, "river crab" sounds very much like "unity", which in China's cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Actually, looking back on it, my friend might have actually said "community" or even "harmony", but you know how it's easy to misconstrue things over a crappy phone connection. Anyway, censored bloggers often say their posts have been "unified" a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao's regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a "unified" and "harmonious" society.

Let's all sing the grass mud horse song in solidarity with the Chinese dissidents who are fighting censorship!