Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a fast read: about 90 pages in a conveniently small, pocket-book, format (even for the hardcover). A useful synopsis of the modern debate for the uninitiated, review points for current atheists. While designed to be inviting, honest, and sincerely challenging to Christian readers, its quick trend from friendly invitation to stark reasoning demands the reader think critically, and when the hand-holding is over, the truly devout may become too offended to grant fair consideration.

It's aimed directly at Christians in America, however, particularly those of the less moderate sects who tend to have a more literal and inflexible bible interpretation (say evangelicals, Pentecostals, and some of the more traditional baptists).

He's careful to gently point out that if there can be no objective way to measure the validity of each religion's claims on various matters, but only taking such claims on faith, then true believers in each conflicting religion are positively doomed to stay locked in conflict. Conflict which gets ever bloodier and does more collateral damage with time's passing.

Despite the perhaps self-evident nature of pure logical reasoning, new human relationships aren't always motivated by rationality, and require a period of assessment and trust-building between the participants.

While Harris takes care to respect this at the beginning of the book, as it progresses he comes on increasingly strong. I expect that the truly devout readers will quickly become offended, and the politics of human emotion in relationships will blind these folks to giving dispassionate consideration to his ideas. Some more moderate believers could become a bridge, as they might be deemed more trustworthy by devout people than declared nonbelievers. It's an argument from authority, but for the devout to be operators-in-faith, at some point arguments from authority started to hold their sway.

It's a great opener to the debate from the atheist's perspective. For newcomers to the debate, the newly atheist, the longtime faithful or agnostic, it represents a way to get up to speed on the modern challenges in short order, and be cogent in following argument.

It's also a great gateway for people struggling to answer their own faith questions. The reading list at the end of the book is invaluable for those who wish to investigate the atheist perspective in greater detail.

The first book in that list, Dawkins' "The God Delusion" was my very first introduction to the atheist perspective. Raised in the Lutheran tradition, before reading I already considered myself agnostic and a lassez-faire spiritualist. Being very scientifically minded and already open to the critical thinking process, Dawkins' book sunk in readily, deeply, and exploded utterly my preconceptions.

I recognized I was actually an atheist before its conclusion, and the wisdom of that book's presentation still resonates for me. Dawkins itemizes and deconstructs all the major arguments for belief (or against atheism, evolution, scientific thought and critical reason) and hints at knowledge and understanding as its own reward which can develop and sustain a human need for spirituality.

To Harris' reading list, I would add:

Christopher Hitchens, "God is Not GREAT"
- views of conflict inspired by religious zeal, presented in a style unique to Hitchens, and that's made him (in)famous
Mary Jane Engh, "In the Name of Heaven"
- historical primer on 3000 years of documented religious conflict
(by this point you really start to see a pattern in humanity)
Sam Harris, "The End of Faith[...:]"
- adds in relevance to today's world conflict; how to approach religion-inspired terrorism; adds philosophy and shows how atheism does not exclude being spiritual
John Shelby Spong, "Eternal Life[...:]"
- great for current Christians, a lifelong Episcopalian minister reveals his how his Christian-inspired spirituality ultimately lead him to adopt an essentially atheist viewpoint, and without discarding his Christianity, transcends its Biblical verbiage to discover a spiritual perspective that redefined what is meant by the Christian concept of eternal life and ultimately what the full expression of Christianity must be, freed from human-generated dogma. Spong holds Harris in high regard, acknowledging his statements on spirituality, but says he goes further.

For the OTHER side of the argument, you may wish to consider Ravi Zacharias' "The End of Reason" (which now scares me).

View all my reviews >>

Andrew's Temperature Adjectives

I'm getting prepared to start writing in here a little more. Meanwhile, the mercury has finally begun dipping into more normal wintertime levels up here. It made me think about giving some regularized descriptive terms to common temperature ranges. I've created this list to standardize on some adjectives for the hot and cold!

Temperature Characterizations

C      F      Character
-------------------------
 40+    104+  Death Valley! (routine summer dry-heat temps in the major deserts)
 35     95    Scorchio!            (exceedence rare for hot North Dakota summer)
 30     86    Hot                  (typical summer North Dakota)
 25     77    Warm
 20     68    Room temp
 15     59    Cool
 10     50    Chilly
  5     41    Very Chilly
  0     32    Freezing
- 5     23    Frosty
-10     19    Cold
-15      5    Very Cold
-20    - 4    Frigid
-25    -13    Cool Arctic
-30    -22    Arctic               (typical cold winter North Dakota)
-35    -31    Cold Arctic          (rare North Dakota cold)
-40    -40    Frigid Arctic        (unlikely except for winter polar regions)
-45    -49    Extra Frigid Arctic
-50    -58    Super Frigid Arctic
-55    -67    Ultra Frigid Arctic
-90    -130   World Record Cold (Vostok, Antarctica: -89.4C 1983, current record)

I Am Your Keeper, Brother

As your master, I am worthy of your respect. And to the extent you know me to believe this as a core moral and ethical value, then so you ought work all the harder for me.

---

I've taken some liberty there with chapter 6 of 1st Timothy in the New Testament to shed some light on how I'm feeling with Obama's irreligious religiosity.

I do not take the President to be a religious man, or a believer in the Christian faith, nor do I care that much. America, however, is populated with a heavy number of religious and faithful people. It seems to me that Obama believes it's worth a shot at using the faithfulness of America's religious as a lever to shove them toward his side in the healthcare debate.

Obama turns to faith leaders
Holy O Turns Faith Healer
Amend the Constitution to Include the Separation of God and Obama

It causes me to wince when I see religion manipulated to then go out and try to manipulate people. The line he uses, "I am my brother's keeper," extended into political-correctness with the further addition, "-I am my sister's keeper.", is once such wince-inducing agent.

What's he getting at here? On the surface it's the common-sense sensibility that we each have a certain ethical duty to help out those needing help around us, if we can. I think that just about goes without saying, and I further think that scarcely anyone in the whole frakkin' world would disagree!

By couching that sentiment in apparently biblical phraseology, he's seeking to add weight and imperative to this obligation, and to elevate its stature in the minds of religious Americans. To shift responsibility to fulfill this obligation from the individual to the state, he's attempting to attach some of the bible's authority to his own cause, and he does this by simply making stuff up.

I think one steps onto a vast ocean of quicksand when one attempts to debate the meaning of the Bible. It's broad and contradictory enough to mean almost anything to anyone at anytime. But, for the sake of my indulgence, I shall now see if I can swim in quicksand.

The only mention of "brother's keeper" in the Bible comes out of Genesis 4:9, where Cain indignantly responds to God's query as to the whereabouts of his brother Abel (who Cain has just murdered), "I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?"

God never appeared to imply at any time that Cain was the keeper of his brother. In fact, it was that God appeared to favor Able instead of him (for reasons that appear to have been beyond Cain's control) that drove Cain to murder.

The charge by God, "You are your brother's keeper." doesn't exist in the Bible; Obama's public injunction to that very end is simply something he's made up for political expedience.

---

Most religious traditions somewhere advocate for families and more broadly members of social orders to look out for one another. But I argue that this moral precept didn't arise because religion taught it to us. Though religious expression can be reflective of it, we did not receive our inbuilt sense of morality from religion. Rather, we evolved it.

To me, it makes perfect sense. Our species (and its progenitors) had a better chance of surviving (as individuals, families, orders, and even a whole species) if it was magnanimous toward other members whenever possible. This serves as a helpful buffer against the uncertainty of daily life and experience. If I'm strong and can assist someone who could use the help, if fate should ordain that I get into trouble at some future point, it will be all the more likely that I will then receive the help of others too. By being magnanimous and practicing reciprocating behavior, we help better the total odds of our survival as a whole.

Now such a population would also be vulnerable to the parasitism of freeloaders, and so that does happen, and a freeloader can exist or even exploit the charity of his social group to his own advantage. But only to a point. If the parasite load becomes too heavy, the parasites will threaten to kill off the host and both parties will die off. So past a certain threshold, the charity flowing toward more parasites will end. Both the hosts and the parasites have an interest in keeping the parasite population under control. (For more on this, I recommend Richard Dawkin's, The God Delusion.)

In this way we evolved an inbuilt ethical sense. It's natural, and while certain religious practices reinforce this, we weren't given it by religious edict.

Let me wade into the quagmire of the Christian holy book once more: regarding 1st Timothy again, chapter 5:3-4 obliges the able children of widows to help support their family's needs, repaying the support given them by their parents and grandparents. Further along in verse 16, women with widows in their family are also compelled to help them out, so as to free the church to help those others who are truly in need!

You can interpret this to convey the sort of sentiment Benjamin Franklin made famous on early American coinage, "Mind Your Business!"

It's both a command and a retort. You can think of "mind your business" in the usual way you might rebuke someone interfering in your affairs. But you can also think of it as an obligation to put yourself first.

Think about that for a second.

Doesn't it make for the soundest of advice? It's far from selfish. If you've seen to your own interests (not at the expense of others, mind you) to make sure you can live in a self-supporting manner, then you won't be dependent on others for support. Moreover, you will then have the ultimate freedom to be magnanimous to others who need supporting around you. You can judge for yourself who is most deserving of your charity and sponsor those, the better they might be able to soon regain their footing and again become self-supporting. By making yourself up the best you can, you'll also have the freedom to take pity on some lost-cause case if you choose.

There are always those among us who will never survive without our charity, but perhaps deserve that charity out of basic human dignity. Or the promise, however fleeting, that they might be able to contribute to someone something of noble value.

---

Our modern, progressive-inspired government has wed itself to the idea of a social-contract with the governed in which it will care for the needs of the people if the people will see to its needs, taking a perverse abstraction on the principle of individual reciprocal support.

I do not believe this slowly built-up development had been the intention of the framers of our system. They labored to extricate themselves from such an overarching government, whose demands upon them were increasingly preventing them from becoming self-supporting, and had coerced them into a sort of co-dependence. Because they couldn't support themselves, they had to depend on the government to help them out, and the price of that support would be their willingness to become chattel for the government.

President Obama has made a crutch of his "I am my brother's keeper," line. He brings it out anytime there is a need to reinforce his notion of a social-contract wherein the government shall provide for you, so long as you provide for it.

2004, 2006, 2008 (1) (2) (3) (4), 2009

He massages the speechifying to suit the audience, becoming more suffused with religiosity when before faith-based groups or clergy, and appealing more to simple secular progressivism elsewhere.

But underlying this is an implication to each group that government will step in to ease your burdens if you help it forward its agenda to coerce property from the others who aren't yet committed. And, some are motivated simply by that prospect alone (i.e. Wal-Mart, which very surprisingly acquiesced to the Obama healthcare plans only because it offers them an advantage by forcing expenses up for their competition).

I think our framers were trying to craft a system which left the business of social-contract making to society itself, collectively and individually. It would have no role here, except to protect the ability for this to naturally arise by protecting property rights (you have title to what you've earned).

Only by each of us first looking to our own self-interest, will there ever be any surplus with which to be charitable. The extent to which each of us achieve success in this regard, makes for one less person which government needs to support.

And by moving in this direction, we deprive the government of this role of "keeper" its taken for itself. Without the depredations of an impossibly capricious and inefficient government largess machine, we regain the ability to more readily satisfy our own necessary self-interests. In the surpluses we accumulate, we finally reserve the individual freedom to be charitable to those few of us who might remain to seek out our help minding their business.

Then, brother, I can be your keeper.

A Prayer to Government

Oh Government, you rain down upon me with benefits to provide for all my needs. You have programs to redress nearly every social injustice, and provide for most wants. The scope of your magnanimity grows day by day.

Oh Government, though I know not where from which these numerous blessings flow, I beseech thee to not staunch them, for out of loyalty to thee I have rightly cast off my old ways and means,

and now depend upon thee for my daily bread. Only You have the power to make all things affordable.

Into your wise administration, I commend my freedoms, for what use have I of they, if by their exercise I am forced to live outside your gracious providence?

I shall shut out the heathen influcences of skeptical thought and critical analysis. Apparent failures of your many programs are due not to inefficient and corrupt execution, but lack of true faith in Your wisdom, and the solution to failure is bigger and more.

I humble myself before you and acknowledge my personal inability to provide for my own desires.

Forgive me, and give to me...gimmie gimmie gimmie gimmie!

Yes we can (has cheezburger)!

Amen.

The mystery of N10TM

So, I'm out driving to get groceries here in the south-end of Grand Forks, ND, and down the avenue comes this heavy pickup truck with a kingpin thingy to haul this semi-sized flatbed trailer. What's on the trailer immediately gets my attention, I mean, you don't just see stuff like this every day. It's a wrecked airplane! And by the looks, it had been a really nice medium GA airplane.

I see the trailer turn into the parking lot of the Super One strip mall area. It appears the driver's going for a break or pizza at the Pizza Hut or something. I cross over the lanes and follow him into the parking lot and then come to a standoff distance alongside, gawking over the awesomeness of the man's cargo.

He jumps out of the heavy pickup, and heads for the Hut. I want a picture, but I don't have a camera on me, but it appears I'll have some time, so I complete my grocery shopping and return 30 minutes later with a camera.

I arrive just in time to meet the driver as he's emerging from the Hut. He proceeds to check the straps securing the load of wrecked airplane: mangled engine pods forward, mostly intact fuselage in the middle, and wings, bit of gear, and empennage at the back of the trailer.


I quickly go for my camera and approach, snapping a few shots on what's about the end of my memory card (still nearly full after a wedding shoot).

The driver notes my interest and I engage him with questions. He's hauling salvage. This airplane wrecked in 2007. Ran out of fuel and crashed into a truck in a parking lot almost exactly like the one we were in now. I didn't recognize the model immediately. The driver tells me it's a King Air, and I mentally note from the three rows of cabin windows that it must be a C90 King Air. I note the tail number. Since it wrecked in 2007, the NTSB probably has an accident report up on it by now.

The driver shows me pictures of the accident scene. I note to him how the cabin is squished a bit under the nose, but is otherwise fully intact and ask if there were serious injuries. "Yes," he replied, "pilot and three passengers got thrown around pretty bad."


"He ran 'er out of fuel," the driver explained.

"Wow, do you know how high he was when he ran out, I mean, was he on approach to an airport?", I asked.

"Oh God no."

I gave a grimace in acknowledgment. The driver offered all he knew, which was that he appeared to run out of fuel at a bad moment, and didn't seem to have the height necessary to execute any better a forced landing, like on an airport or away from people and cars and buildings. Considering this, some unoccupied wrecked cars and no fatalities seemed to be a decent outcome to a bad situation.

He explains that the stalling speed of this airplane is something like 90 mph, so coming into the parking lot would be like wrecking your car at full interstate speed.

He's preparing to depart, so I quickly walk around a shoot a couple more pictures, filling the memory card and hoping for the best, and then thank him and allow him to be on his way. This was a privilege. The airplane crashed in Chattanooga, TN and sat around there, and now was sold for scrap and though I didn't catch the final destination, I got a little insight into the life cycle of downed airplanes.

So, curious to know more about the circumstances, once home again I plug the tail number into the NTSB's database and get the accident report.

If you're reading this, skim the report and come back. Okay? Now it felt to me that the NTSB didn't care all that much about this incident, doing a phone interview of the pilot. It doesn't appear anyone else was too much involved. An FAA inspector confirmed the absence of fuel in the wings, but the pilot's story begs some questions in my mind:

He reported gauge readings between FULL and 3/4 and estimated by this he had fuel for 3 hours at least, more than enough for the 1h20m flight. Now...I don't know the preflight procedures for this type of airplane, but I do know that aviators generally regard fuel quantity gauges in GA airplanes to be liars. I guess certification standards are such that they must read accurately when the fuel tanks are full, and when they are empty, but the middle indications that come during operation may mean only that the tanks are neither full, nor empty, but by how much...? Are you timing your flight? Do you have any sort of totalizer measuring fuel burned?

Well, I was almost right on my guess as to aircraft model. It was a B90, the late 1960s forerunner of the C90 which I had guessed. The changes amounted mainly to perhaps a slightly buffed engine model and longer wingspan, so I mostly nailed it.

Pulling some B90 performance specs off the internet, I see that in cruise the airplane ought to burn about 64 gallons/hour. Now if the gauge indications are anything like my car's, when the gauge reads 3/4, the actual level is more like 1/2. And having half-full tanks in this airplane at that cruise burn rate would yield something close to 3 hours cruising time. So the pilot's estimate of flying time available seems to check here.

To my total surprise, Flightaware.com still had the accident flight's history in its database! Humorously, it listed the destination as Chattanooga (it was really Georgetown, KY), and that the airplane had "arrived." Yeah, I'll say that's true. One way or another, they always arrive. This data features prominently later.

According to the report, the airplane had reached its cruise altitude of FL210 when the pilot noticed that two of the four gauges suddenly read practically empty. Reassessing his situation, he reported to the NTSB he estimated having about 50 gallons of fuel aboard at this point, and opted to make a diversion to Chattanooga.

Okay...no emergency. It's quite strange that the left side gauges went from nearly FULL to empty in just 22 minutes, but...maybe there's some sort of electrical fault with the gauges. Who knows?

Do I dare to call shenanigans on the pilot, and on the NTSB for not making this clear in its report? Not being a real-world pilot myself, just an enthusiast (for now?), I'm about to get pretty presumptuous. But, this is the internet after all.

Again, according to the data on the B90 from the internet, in cruise power the airplane will burn approximately 64 gallons per hour. So that means with 50 gallons estimated remaining he ought to be able to continue up there in cruise for another 45 minutes at about 200 knots.

According to the report, it's with this estimate in mind that our dear pilot elects to prudently divert to Chattanooga, about 45 nautical miles away. If he stays at altitude and cruise power, he'll get there inside of 14 minutes, leaving 30 minutes to descend and execute an approach (at cruise power, which he wouldn't use of course, so he may have even more absolute reserve).


But instead, he's out of gas and crash-landing on some guy's pickup in the middle of a strip mall parking lot! How could this be?

Well now I turn to the Flightaware data for N10TM on the 19SEP07 incident flight. Flightaware gets its data on aircraft position from the same data network air traffic controllers use to monitor the skies. Radar sites get controllers the raw data. Their terminals process it for their needs. After that it goes into a network to which other entities may acquire special access for fleet monitoring, ground service planning, traveller updating, etc.

From this data, I noted that the airplane never reached its cruising altitude, and entered a turn toward Chattanooga near the apex of its flight, around 19600 feet. From this point the flight proceeded more or less direct to the field in a continuous descent. The descent rate and airspeed appeared to be not always stabilized, but averaged 1300 feet/minute at 180 knots groundspeed. That's enough height and speed to go 45 nm, and the straight line distance between reported radar points was in fact 45.6 nm. The field was about .6 miles further along.

It appears from internet sources that a best glide speed isn't published in the POH for the B90, but one source inferred one from data published for a C90 and listed it as about 125 knots. I don't know what sort of descent rate that would translate into, but 1300 fpm doesn't seem out of the ballpark to me.

Now in his report to investigators, he'd estimated having 50 gallons aboard about the time he noticed the two empty gauges and elected to divert. In descent, the power is normally pulled back somewhat, in some cases (certainly for jets, but maybe less so for turboprops like this) all the way to idle. This allows essentially a gliding descent and initial approach, making up for the excess fuel used on the climb to altitude by now using very little on the descent back down, certainly much less than that used on cruise. So the picture should still be okay.

Somewhere in this descent he reported he ran out, and too late to do anything but strap down tight and pancake on the nice pickup truck, like it was a last minute happenstance. I don't buy it. If his estimate had been right, he ought to have ample fuel to make a normal approach and landing. Maybe even enough to afford one go-around if he messed up flying his approach path. How could this be?

In my view, simple: he's shading the truth to investigators. He doesn't appear to have made it to cruising altitude at all (about 1400 feet under it). At the time he decided to divert he was probably already out of gas or very close to it. He didn't methodically consider and then execute a diversion while still carrying at least some reserve of fuel. He hastily and with OK, but somewhat less than perfect form beat a hasty retreat to the nearest suitable airport that came to his mind.

He turned direct from his climb heading, to the airport at Chattanooga, and didn't even try to line up for an approach to the closest runway end. He appeared to be trying to make a B-line for the field and I think he hoped to kick the airplane 'round at the last second to line up and touchdown on the runway there.

Only, he didn't even make it that far. His groundspeed and descent rate suggest a path that might not be unreasonable to expect from a gliding aircraft of this type. Surely if he were still powered, as he suggests when he elected to divert, I would expect he'd want to keep his altitude until he was certain of making his diversion airport. This would mean a delayed descent by some amount.

Even in normal circumstances, one wouldn't choose to make a continuous descent from the point he had, as obviously it's still too far out, and the data doesn't suggest any level flying segment. I think under normal circumstances one might plan to be in the airport vicinity at around 3000 feet, so as to have some flexibility to set up a normal approach.

In my armchair cockpit, I think I'd keep at cruise altitude to benefit from the fact that my fuel burn would be more efficient up there. I'd start down only if an approach and landing was assured, and for utmost margin, I might even fly until overhead the field at cruise altitude, and then enter a descending holding pattern above the field and inbound to a holding fix lined up with the landing runway. You can be certain of gliding in, in that situation.

None of this happened, and I believe that's because he'd already lost power. And while the outcome was a fair one for he and his passengers, he got lucky that no one was injured or killed on the ground. The track data had him near a golf course just before the parking lot. That might have been a safer forced landing site. I think he was fixated on just trying desperately to make it to that field.

The NTSB might have been wise to this pilot though. They didn't seem to care about the obvious possibility that there might have been a gauge problem when the gauges seem to be showing close to FULL, or maybe some sort of fuel leak. A conservative assumption of 1/2 full tanks at this stage would, as the pilot mentions, rightly given him at least 3 hours of cruise flight. Yet only 22 minutes after takeoff, he's noticed two gauges reading about zero (it's not reported what the other gauges read). And fifteen minutes and 45.6 nm later, he's glided that bird to the deck. I'd say his gauges were all probably reading closer to empty all along.

Using ATA over Ethernet saves the day (and data)!

Hey... a non-political post for once!

Welp, this week I got an unrequested opportunity to put my PC technologist hat back on and fikits my laptop, whose hard drive had gone nearly tango-uniform.

I flexed my dusty skills and, after much mafipulation, managed to extract the win! Dead 40GB drive out (hey, it's like a 2002 model!), new inexpensive 160GB drive in, all data salvaged, unit operating like nothing ever happened.

My wife and I share the laptop and use it considerably. She noted earlier in the week that it was making strange noises. I didn't hear them, but ran SpinRite across the disk to verify its integrity. That passed and no problems were noted. The hard drive is OEM, and my rule of thumb is that one ought to expect a HDD failure in a laptop at least once in a 5-year ownership period. They have to take lots of mech-destroying bumps and jolts, and so are more at risk than a well isolated desktop unit. I've never owned a laptop that made it from purchase to trash without a drive dying.

A few days later, the most horrible noises did begin to emit from the unit. Not the clicks of head-resets, not the ray-gun of stuck platters or stuck head armature. This was a lower pitch metallic growl which sounded almost exactly like a large sleeve-bearing case fan whose aforementioned sleeve bearing has become contaminated and is now loose and buzzing.

During these growls, the drive couldn't move any data, and Windows halted. The situation was serious. I powered down immediately, hoping to preserve a chance to salvage the data, and resigned to procuring a new drive.

We had backups, mine were up-to-date, Jane's were weeks old. Just the same, I was hoping not to have to play endless hours of setup reloading Windows and Ubuntu and getting all the apps reconfigured and so-on.

I had no access to a 2.5" IDE drive adapter cable for a desktop or USB enclosure. So instead, with a cold drive, the plan was to boot the laptop with the failing drive to Knoppix and connect it to my network. Then, I would also boot my wife's Windows desktop PC with Knoppix and use it as a repository for rescued data (all my big drives were too full!).

I cleverly hit upon ATA over Ethernet as an expedient means of accessing the faulty drive and moving its content to an image file on the desktop PC.

The process for setting up ATA over Ethernet was as follows:

Both PCs:

Verify AoE support in the kernel

grep ATA_OVER /boot/config-`uname -r`

A result denotes support. If you've ever configured/compiled your own kernel, this bit seems self-explanatory.

Assuming support's been modularized, insert the module

modprobe aoe

Target PC (the PC whose block device you want to make available on the ethernet):

Install the vblade EtherDrive emulator. This software exports any local block device, partition, RAID, LVM volume, or even flat image file, as a network block device.

aptitude update

aptitude install vblade

Then export the chosen block device to the LAN

vbladed 0 1 eth0 /dev/hda

In this case, the above line exports my failing hard drive to shelf 0, slot 1. This concept of shelf and slot numbers is how you differentiate various block devices that might be available on the same LAN. Most PCs have only one connected ethernet interface, but if you have more, you can specify each one you want to make your device available on, and if your initiator PC has multiple interfaces to the same network, you'll get automagic channel ganging for faster throughput, if your device's native interface throughput is faster than a single interface.

Anyway, on the initiator PC (the PC which is going to access the remotely shared block device):

aptitude update
aptitude install aoetools
aoe-discover
aoe-stat

That should install the needed support software to attach an AoE-shared block device, and the status command should show you the device which was discovered and made available to you, in my case e0.1.

The system's already attached to the drive at this point. There's no security or per-machine restrictions. If there is more than one machine which may want to access the device, I think you'll have to manually coordinate access. While I think many could simultaneously access a device for reading, mounting a filesystem shared this way read-write on more than one initiator is going to result in damage to the target's data structures.

Everything that happens next is from the initiator PC. I used GNU ddrescue to image off the failing drive in a manner that would allow me to backup and retry unreadable areas if necessary.

ddrescue /dev/etherd/e0.1 fail_drive.img /home/knoppix/transfer.log

Specifying the transfer logfile allows ddrescue to record its progress, skip over errors, resume if interrupted, and using extra options, go back and retry previously failed areas.

Ddrescue is a super handy tool. If SpinRite's dynastat sector reading abilities were available to this tool, it would be perfect (sidebar: I consider it a big failing that SpinRite has no convenient means of redirecting successful sector reads to another device or imagefile. Often, when dealing with a failing drive, you next good read is likely to be your last, and the mechanism may be continuing to degrade around you. In such situations, the less you have to touch the source drive, the better. You want to transport Scotty's pattern out of the damaged transporter buffer and into a fresh one you've got waiting. You don't really want to just reconstitute the degraded pattern inside the same degrading transporter. What if after all it's many hours of beautiful dynastat recovered and reallocated sectors, the mechanism's occasional clicks become a permanent repeating clank, rendering the drive inaccessible? Steve, think about this for SpinRite 7. Consider the wealth of block device connection options a live Knoppix environment gives us. That's the rich platform for attaching revival storage, and spinrite's internals would be the muscle.)

Well...this tool ran for about 90 minutes, and the drive occasionally emitted those painful shrieking buzzsaw sounds, but eventually ALL the data was salvaged. Hooray!

---

The second act was to be far more thorny. The original drive was 40GB and held a majority Windows partition with system volume Truecrypt encryption (to protect private personal data in the event the laptop was ever stolen), a minority Ubuntu partition, and a few hundred MB in a partition at the end as linux swap.

To be sure that was getting quite cramped, and a happy side effect of the drive replacement was the prospect of much more space to work with. But, how to transplant these bootable partitions onto the new drive in such a was as to ensure they would remain usable (in the case of the Truecrypted Windows system volume), bootable, and enlargeable.

This turned out to be a more formidable task than I'd originally bargained for. I think I won't go into fail details, but simply report that in the end, after much experimentation and head scratching over partitions that then failed to boot, I was finally totally successful. Here instead is the shorter story of the process which worked:

I began by using the previous AoE process to write back the 40GB drive image to the new drive.

In my prior failures, I learned that the best my BIOS was going to do was 32bit LBA, meaning that only 137GB of the 160GB drive capacity would be addressable by the BIOS (28 bits are used for the sector address, the rest for other junk). This had bearing in my repartition plan. Prior experimentation moving the Windows partition around left it unbootable for unknown reasons, I decided to leave it in place, but later would expand it. Ubuntu would exist below the 137GB barrier, to give Windows the most space, and prevent boot problems by way of a partition which straddled the barrier. To boot Ubuntu then, required a small boot partition which could load the kernel. Once running, the kernel could do 48bit LBA and so mounting the root partition past 137GB would be no problem. After expanding the Ubuntu partition some, the remaining space could be allocated to additional NTFS storage and Linux swap.

I started by noting down the sector layout of the partitions. Frak cylinders, sectors are just fine in LBA, so ignore cylinder boundary warnings when partitioning.

The structure was:

[30GB Win/Truecrypt][8GB Ubuntu][2GB swap][**unallocated**]

To move the partitions around, I needing something sector precise and unafraid of JFS or crypted garbage. This ruled out parted. It insists on knowing the underlying filesystem to do moves and resizes, but this isn't strictly necessary. I went manually.

I would define a temporary 4th partition at the sector positions I desired for my destination, then use ddrescue to copy the data from the current location to the new location. After test mounting the filesystem on the new temporary partition, I would note the sector locations, then delete that partition, and use #4 for setting up another new partition location.

In this way I first setup a 250MB boot partition spanning so as to end precisely on the last addressable sector inside the 137GB boundary. I next, used fake 4 to reposition the Ubuntu root partition to its new home starting after the boot partition. I next mounted both and transplanted /boot to the new boot partition, made arrangements in root to splice this partition back onto it's normal /boot location within the VFS once Ubuntu was booted (so automatic kernel updates would work), and then used the grub shell to install the grub bootloader into the superblock of the boot partition, pointed properly at the needed files in the partition.

Once satisfied, I could delete all the partitions, recreating them one-by-one in their new larger sizes.

Now the structure looked like this:

[136GB Win/Truecrypt (30GB filesystem)][.25GB ext2 BOOT]|137GB Boundary|[16GB Ubuntu root (8GB filesystem)][6GB extended -> [4GB NTFS][2GB Linux swap]]

At this point, I tested bootability and was pleased to find both OSes bootable by normal grub selection. The Truecrypt MBR password dialog to open up the Windows partition for use worked as normal.

Finally, to resize the filesystems to encompass their entire partitions. With the Truecrypted Windows volume, I thought orignally I'd have to decrypt, resize, and recrypt, but I cleverly worked around that inside Ubuntu.

I booted into Ubuntu and installed the ntfsprogs (for ntfsresize util). ntfsresize works on the filesystem inside a partition. To get it access, I used software by Jan Krueger which does the truecrypt authentication magic and passes the results onto dm-crypt, which can then handle the realtime blockwise encrypt/decrypt. The output is a mapped block device which gives decrypted data and accepts clear data for encryption, and works just like any normal, unencrypted block device.

Under normal circumstances, this is what I do to get access to my documents on the NTFS filesystem, as I store finance data there, which I use in Ubuntu on GNUCash.

I passed this device as the argument to ntfsresize, which WAS able to then resize the encyphered filesystem to span the whole partition! No laborious decryption necessary for the tool to work! Sweet!

Resizing the Ubuntu partition was far simpler, thanks to the "resize" remount option for jfs. I booted the Knoppix live-CD once more, mounted the Ubuntu root partition, then remounted it with that option specified. Leaving off any size specification to the option causes it to expand the underlying jfs filesystem to fit the whole partition. Unmount.

Finished!

I now have a secure Windows partition with much more free space, a larger Ubuntu side, and some residual swap and unencrypted NTFS storage. Best of all, aside from the space benefits, it's like nothing bad ever happened to the lappy.

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Finally, a tidbit if you ever need to very quickly create a large image file for the purpose of storing or preparing a filesystem.

The tradition is use of the trusty dd program, with /dev/zero as the source, but this results in a laborious and needless writing of zeros to the entire desired span and size of your diskimage file. The tip uses the sparse file writing capabilities of most modern filesystems.

dd if=/dev/zero of=your-sparse-diskimage.bin bs=1 count=1 seek=1G

Note how the above command uses a single byte as a block, writes just one single-byte-block, and then seeks 1 gigablocks (1GB since a block = a byte, now) further out on the new diskimage file. This results in a file which is 1GB in size, but actually uses only 1 cluster (generally 4KB for most filesystems) on disk!

By seeking to the desired end, you cause the filesystem to generate a hole between that endpoint and the last written byte. The file appears to be the size of the full seek, but its size on disk in this cast would only be one byte. Cool! Of course once you put a filesystem into the image file, mount it, and start throwing data into it, its size on disk will grow to approach the reported size.

While I've posted this mainly for my own future reference, to any passers-by out there who happened to read it, I hope you found it of interest! Cheers!

Prudent Virtue

While reading, "What has Government done to Our Money?", by Murray Rothbard and available on mises.org, I was enchanted by Rothbard's use of a quotation, uncredited, "Liberty is the Mother, not the daughter, of Order." (see pg. 49)

I thought about this for several minutes, and decided that it was self-evidently true. I wanted to know what man was so brilliant as to have uttered this phrase, selected by Rothbard as I'm sure many others before him, to with great brevity capture the proper relationship of order to liberty.

How masterful. Government would have us believe that to enjoy liberty, we must first order our world. Government then offers insists to do this for us by its regulation and coercive power (often by appealing to our base sense of envy, and offering to use that power of coercion against some fashionable "them" to the popular benefit of poor "you"). But in so doing the order which results only confers more liberty to the state, not its people, by restricting the liberties of the people.

Some internet searching yielded an answer as to the identity of the originator of that quote, and also an expansion of its idea to yield a sort of family tree of the virtues which generate individual liberty. Foremost among them is prudence.

Today I offer that article as a source of inspiration to you, dear reader.

It is my hope that this humble blog helps convey some of these Libertarian ideas which your own curiosity impels you to explore further.

On the political talk circuit, folks are always calling the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and pleading with them about what possibly they could do that would make a difference in the present situation. It seems hopeless that mere individuals of limited means could have any power to frustrate the plans of enlarging state control. But, I think it must be far simpler than we imagine.

If we all practice prudence in our lives, relationships, and economizing, then prudent culture will naturally spring forth. And that culture will have the awareness and expectation necessary to naturally diminish state control and restore natural individual liberty. We know how to behave, and we know what's good. Thousands and millions of small, individually prudent actions in all facets of life naturally have the effect of restraining government authority.

Demand for the services of a coercive government will be reduced, because we assert our ability to govern ourselves, and by prudence extricate ourselves little by little, from our imprudent reliance on government, instead of ourselves, as a provider of all our needs.

Prudence begets Thrift. Thrift begets Liberty. Liberty begets Order.

Maybe I can suggest one more offspring to this tree of virtues: Order begets Peace.

If you hadn't already, do check out this article.