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A few days ago, I tried restoring my laptop to its original factory state by running the recovery CDs that it came shipped with. This mostly worked fine, but after the recovery Windows wouldn't boot properly, and the laptop would freeze with only the word GRUB on its screen.

A few people are going to say "Well, install Ubuntu then", but that's not the point here. The point is restoring the system properly, so it can boot Windows again. I agree that this is actually a bug in the recovery software, but the same thing happens when you delete your Linux partitions and re-grow your Windows partition (which is what some people want, after trying a distribution for a while).

First, you have to get the system to boot Windows. To do this, you need a bootable CD image with GRUB on it. It can be a tiny CD image, with only GRUB on it (probably the smallest CD you'll ever burn :))
You can create one like this:

$ mkdir -p iso/boot/grub
$ cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/stage2_eltorito iso/boot/grub
$ mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso

When you boot that CD, GRUB will start up and give you its shell. From this shell you can start Windows like this (change '(hd0,0)' to something else if your Windows installation isn't on /dev/hda1, see the GRUB manual for more on that):

> root (hd0,0)
> chainloader +1
> boot

Windows should now start. It might ask you to complete some steps of the OEM installation (entering your time zone and username, for example), and then reboot. Just re-enter the GRUB stuff to re-start Windows.

Once Windows is done starting, you have to find the I386 installation directory, either on the installation CD, or on C:\I386 as it was on my laptop, and install the Recovery Console by running C:\I386\WINNT32.EXE /cmdcons.

After doing this, you should reboot the system again (using the GRUB trick) and choose the Recovery Console option from the menu that appears. You will get a very limited shell, where you can type 'fixmbr' to fix the MBR on your boot drive, clearing the GRUB bit and allowing you to start the sytem. To do so, remove the GRUB CD from your drive, and type EXIT at the console.

You should now have a properly booting Windows system, without a hanging piece of GRUB.

The association of Dutch banks and most insurance companies have created a document (Gedragscode Verwerking Persoongegevens Financiële Instellingen, in which they describe what kind if info is kept on you, how it's used, and how you can restrict commercial use of it.

If you manage to get through the ton of legalese it's hidden in, it turns out to be very simple to make your bank/insurance company stop selling your personal info to "direct marketing" firms. All you have to do is send them a (dead-tree) letter specifying that you want them to stop, as specified in paragraph 7.2.2 of the document.

Then all you need to do is find the relevant clauses in the privacy statements of other companies you do business with (phone companies are notable for selling phone numbers and addresses), send some more mail, put a "NEE/NEE"-sticker on your mailbox and start enjoying an empty mailbox.

UPDATE: The "College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens" has a website with template letters.

I've converted all the GWBASIC files I found on the floppy with my first programs to plain ASCII (well, Codepage 850) text files, and put them on my website.

The original disk contained a few more files: some DOS executables and some 'adapted' code from other people, but I'm not putting that online..

When I was at my parents' place this weekend, I found a big stack of old 5.25" floppy disks. Browsing through them a bit, I found a disk with my very first GWBASIC programs on it.

Now I had one problem: I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive. Luckily, my dad likes to collect lots of old stuff and he had a non-booting IBM Portable PC (with a 5.25" drive!) lying around. So after an afternoon of unscrewing parts that were never meant to be unscrewed (especially not after 20 years), I went home with a floppy drive.

Back home I tried to connect the drive to one of my PCs. This can be hard, especially if you're using the wrong cables. After a day of switching cables and jumpers (the floppy drive is so old that it has DS0-DS4 jumpers!) my PC finally booted again (picky Compaq BIOS, sigh).

So now I have a disk image of my very first programs (1990-1994), and separate copies of the .BAS files (most of them converted to ASCII), but I'm wondering about the best way to put them online. In the original tree? A zip-file with the original directory tree? And how about the 'non-free' parts? (some of those very first programs I made just called external programs, made by other people)

I've upgraded to PyBlosxom 1.3. There shouldn't be any breakage (the RSS 2.0 feed changed a bit, but that shouldn't be a problem). I need to migrate to the new flavour system though.. it looks nice.

Got a new lens today, and decided to try it out:

More pictures at the usual location.

I've updated my photo gallery script. It's almost a complete rewrite, and uses FastCGI now (so it can cache EXIF information, which makes multiple accesses of the same file(s) a lot faster).

You can see the photo gallery I wrote it for, too.

(I've now even fixed the bug where it would eat all of my machine's memory by trying to keep all decompressed frames of MJPEG videos in memory, instead of just looking at the first frame)

Warning: Posting a picture on your blog may result in bandwidth over-use if that blog is on a planet ;)

Oh well, I signed up for that myself, and bandwidth isn't too expensive here...

Because I'm a member of the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team, I have to do a lot of (re-)installs. I don't really like a few of the default settings in Gnome and Firefox, so I whipped up a small shellscript to configure them to my wishes without it taking me an hour. It also looks cool to see the desktop react immediately to gconf keys being changed :)