Haunted Houses, Ghosts and Poltergeists

I need a spooky category.. Gerry Ryan has had a few calls from women saying their houses are haunted. I’ve an open mind about this and wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand at all.
The first caller said that she saw a silver haired woman lying on the bed next to her one morning, she turned away and back again and the woman was gone. She heard her child mumbling one night and went into her room later and the child said that she had been trying to call out and she was held down by something. Last Monday she took 3 photos of her children and apprently there’s an hump-backed old woman with a cane in the picture. A psychic told her that the woman in the house doesn’t want them living there! *gulp*
There’s more, and it’ll probably be repeated on Saturday morning so have a listen then!

Data Recovery from a Hard Disk

Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on , the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!

Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

In a radio interview (realaudio link) this morning an “expert” told the nation that the DDOS attack on SCO was orchestrated by “people who are promoting a thing called open system software where by you can have competitors for the Microsoft products which are essentially free.” Peter Aherne provided a brief transcript of the interview and it looks shocking in it’s ignorance of the facts!
There’s a lengthy thread on the ILUG about it including links to articles debunking the interview.
The serious accusations in this interview need an answer and sooner rather than later!
Update! Nils posted a cleaned up transcript of the interview, and Gavin McCullagh posted one too.