Gentoo won't boot!

I recently moved from Spokane to Portland. In all the chaos of finishing some things for my work, disassembling my home-office, and putting it all in a moving truck, etc, I neglected one critical element...

I had installed an update to sys-fs/udev which required kernel 2.6.27 or later, while the most-recent kernel I've got installed/compiled/etc is 2.6.25 (plus a couple others which were fubar). I had neglected to keep a recent kernel in working condition.

Gentoo users/admins will see the problem immediately (and probably shouldn't read the rest of this post, since it's not terribly magical).

• Old kernel: udev won't run, so it won't see devices, especially my RAID array.
• Newer kernels don't work at the moment

So I'm pretty much stuck. (If anyone can imagine a Windows machine in this situation and suggest a way to fix such a problem on Windows, I'd love to hear it...)

Fortunately I already had the sources for 2.6.31 on my server's filesystem, so I dug out a copy of System Rescue CD (somewhat aged), booted the server, mounted the RAID devices in their appropriate locations, and chroot-ed into my server's filesystem.

Then I:

1. Took a snapshot of /boot and /lib/modules
2. Copied the System Rescue CD's kernel config (/proc/config.gz) into my new kernel directory (/usr/src/linux/)
3. Used 'make oldconfig' and 'make menuconfig' to bring it up-to-date and fine-tune it a bit.
4. Use genkernel to build the new kernel and initramfs (including RAID/LVM tools) and install them
5. Adjust my GRUB configuration, reboot, voila!

Mind you, at this point the kernel config wasn't optimal or terribly awesome, just functional. I'm currently in the process of tuning it further.

So... that's how Linux saved my sanity today.

Time Management Matrix

So, in the last year I picked up use of Covey's Time Management Matrix (thanks to the recommendation of my previous boss).

It works great on a whiteboard, but I've always wanted a web app to do it.

So I set up a Google Spreadsheet to help me out. Here's how...

1. Create a new spreadsheet.
2. Rename the first sheet 'Entries'
3. Create a new sheet called 'Matrix'
4. On the 'Entries' sheet, label three columns:
   • Name
   • Importance
   • Urgency
5. Create some example entries (see screenshots below)
6. Go back to the 'Matrix' sheet
7. Fill the cells in like so:

   
   A2: =SORT(FILTER(Entries!$A$2:$C$100, Entries!$B$2:$B$100 >= 5, Entries!$C$2:$C$100 >= 5); 2; 0; 3; 0 )
   D2: =SORT(FILTER(Entries!$A$2:$C$100, Entries!$B$2:$B$100 >= 5, Entries!$C$2:$C$100 < 5); 2; 0; 3; 0)
   A14: =SORT(FILTER(Entries!$A$2:$C$100, Entries!$B$2:$B$100 < 5, Entries!$C$2:$C$100 >= 5); 2; 0; 3; 0)
   D14: =SORT(FILTER(Entries!$A$2:$C$100, Entries!$B$2:$B$100 < 5, Entries!$C$2:$C$100 < 5); 2; 0; 3; 0)

8. Cells A1:C1, D1:F1, A13:C13, and D13:F13 are left for labeling each section - and can be merged sensibly.
9. I recommend marking borders along the right-hand side of column C, and the top of row 13 - for clarity.
10. Also, columns B, C, E, and F can be shrunk to improve usability, since they contain integers 1-10.

And... that should be it! Create task entries, assign importance and urgency, and it should automatically appear in the appropriate quadrant on the Matrix sheet.

Screenshots:

Compact Nautilus in Ubuntu

So, I occasionally note the compact Nautilus view that Fedora and similar distros use by default, because it's neat and tidy.

I prefer Ubuntu on my desktops though, which uses the more expanded view, something like this...

Unfortunately, the Nautilus developers don't make it terribly intuitive to switch between them.

The good news, there are fairly few adjustments to make to get to the compact view (at least in Ubuntu 9.10, for which this is written).

First, open Nautilus, go to the Edit menu, select Preferences.

Under the Behavior tab, deactivate "Always open in browser windows". This change does the bulk of the work.

Then under the Views tab, change the default view to "Compact View", and activate "Text beside icons".

As far as I can tell, the order of these changes doesn't really matter.

That's pretty much it!

The result: