Installing Ubuntu 9.04: External USB Drive

I was installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) in a Compaq CQ60-420US laptop computer from which I had removed the original Windows Vista installation. Although people generally advised against removing Vista and its recovery partition, I had several reasons for doing so: (1) I wanted to use Ubuntu (I would use WinXP in a virtual machine when I needed to run Windows-compatible software); (2) given the limited size of my laptop's hard drive, I could use the extra 10GB or so that was used by the factory-installed Vista recovery partition; and (3) Vista had a reputation of being slow, which was especially undesirable on the relatively underpowered hardware of a cheap laptop.

After I repartitioned and reformatted the hard drive, I found that I could not get the Ubuntu system to recognize the external USB hard drive. (That drive was not a USB flash drive; it was a regular internal SATA hard drive in a Rosewill RX-358-S SLV external enclosure.) First, I took a few steps, recommended in various posts, that did not seem to make much difference:

1. Following some users, I typed (in Terminal) "sudo gedit /etc/modules" and then added "usb_storage" as a separate line at the end of that file, exit, and reboot.
2. When that didn't solve the problem (though, for all I know, it may have helped), I typed "sudo mkdir /mnt/OFFSITE," where OFFSITE was the name I wanted for my external drive. Then I typed "sudo mount -a." But the rest of those instructions failed because the external drive still wasn't mounted.
3. I tried the advice to use System > Administration > NTFS Configuration Tool > Enable write support for external disk. Possibly this step takes place automatically if you type "sudo apt-get install ntfs-config" instead of installing ntfs-config through Synaptic. But it did not solve the problem.

I also tried the advice to install ntfsprogs (now included in the Synaptic list, above) and then type "sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdXX" where XX designates the correct drive (e.g., c1). This gave me "Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk." Given the NTFS orientation of ntfsprogs, this appeared to refer to the chkdsk program in Windows.


I didn't plan to install any version of Windows on this computer. My desktop computer was dual-boot, but for purposes of simplicity and to preserve disk space on the laptop's relatively small hard drive, I wanted to make this a Linux-only machine. So to run chkdsk, I tried restarting the computer with a Windows installation CD. But this introduced a new problem. Each time I booted the computer and hit the space bar in response to the CD's message, "Press any key to boot from CD," it went through the process of loading various drivers and then, when it reached the point of saying, "Setup is starting Windows" (in the bar at the bottom of the screen), it gave me a blue screen of death (BSOD): "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer," etc. The bottom line of the message referred to "STOP: 0x0000007B." (Note that I was getting this error before reaching the point of deciding whether I wanted to enter Recovery Console.)

Research on this problem led to a Microsoft troubleshooting page. It identified a number of possible problems, but I was not sure any of them applied precisely to me, and I hated to spend a lot of time on a troubleshooting wild goose chase (TWGC). I did run self-tests of hard drive and memory in the laptop's BIOS setup; that is, I rebooted the machine, hit the Esc key to go into BIOS setup, and ran its diagnostics. Those tests found no problems with those pieces of the laptop's hardware.

It occurred to me, at this point, that possibly I needed a BIOS upgrade. I went to the support webpage for this laptop and discovered, there, a flaw in my plan to make this a Linux-only laptop: Compaq was not distributing firmware upgrades for its laptops in Linux form. To upgrade the firmware, I needed to be able to run Windows.

Before addressing that problem, I tried rebooting the laptop from the Windows CD without the external USB drive connected. This could potentially defeat the purpose of booting from the Windows CD (i.e., I wanted to use it to run chkdsk on the external drive), but now I was curious. This, however, did not make a difference. Evidently the external USB drive was not the reason for this STOP 0x0000007B message.

In that case, the Windows CD appeared to be objecting that it did not find a working version of Windows already installed on the laptop's internal hard drive. But that seemed silly. Of course there would be no version of Windows installed on a hard drive, if the purpose of running the Windows XP CD was to install Windows on that drive. How did this error message expect me to "run chkdsk /f" if I could not even run Windows?

Well, I could install WinXP after all, make it a dual boot machine, and deal with the inevitable GRUB issues, as Windows and Ubuntu fought over which system would load first and then, just when I needed the machine most, refuse to load either. Or I could give up on the idea of running Windows diagnostics or firmware updates on this laptop. But I had previously experimented with booting Linux from a USB drive (a/k/a "thumb drive" or "jump drive"). Since then, I had become aware of another Linux USB drive approach known as Penlinux, where you could either buy one of their pre-configured Ubuntu 6.10 USB drives (for about $45, which was less than the cost of a 2GB USB drive back in 2007, when they apparently came up with this); or you could make one for yourself. I had heard of similar things in Windows; I wondered whether I could boot Windows XP from a USB flash drive and do these various maintenance tasks that way. The discussion of setting up a bootable WinXP USB flash drive appears in a separate post.

When I did boot the system with the bootable WinXP USB flash drive in TXT mode, I went into Recovery Console. There, I got a screen I had not received previously: "Setup has recognized the following mass storage devices in your computer: [none]." At this point, I did not have the external USB hard drive connected, so apparently this was OK. I pressed Enter and got the ordinary Recovery Console. There, a "dir" command produced "drive is not valid" messages for all drives other than C and D. For C, I got "There is no floppy disk or CD in the drive." D was recognized as the USB flash drive. So Recovery Console, started by the USB flash drive, appeared unable to recognize even the mere existence of the Ubuntu-formatted internal hard drive. I typed "exit" and rebooted the system without the USB flash drive inserted. Ubuntu still booted up OK. When I pressed a key to try to boot from the WinXP CD, I still got the BSOD and the STOP 0x0000007B message, as above. So merely starting the system with the USB flash drive, by itself, did not seem to have made any helpful change in the system. I booted with the USB flash drive again. This time, after booting in TXT mode, I chose the Setup option instead of the Recovery Console option in the Windows XP Professional Setup process. Unfortunately, this directed me to that same message: "Setup has recognized the following mass storage devices . . . ." But this time, when I pressed Enter to continue, I got the partitioner: WinXP was willing to set itself up in the jump drive. Again, though, it didn't see any other drives.

* * * * *

I thought that I might need to create (and, optionally, delete) a WinXP partition in order to completely rid this hard drive of the traces of Vista. (I assumed Vista was the culprit; I had not seen these problems previously in WinXP.) I booted my Gparted CD and inserted a 15GB NTFS partition before any other, where drive C would normally be. I had hoped to use my new bootable USB flash drive to install WinXP on it, but that drive was still not booting this laptop successfully, so I tried to install WinXP on that partition using a slipstreamed WinXP SP3 CD instead. That again gave me the "A problem has been detected" BSOD (above).

It began to appear that the process of deleting all partitions and starting over was more difficult than I had realized. That Recovery partition was no ordinary partition. There seemed to be a process by which it could be deleted from inside Vista itself; but once the Vista partition was gone, so was that option. At this point, I discovered Hiren's BootCD, another apparently famous funky tool that supposedly contained an unbelievable list of disk utilities. I downloaded a copy (version 9.9) and burned it to CD. I booted it, and it gave me four options: Boot from Hard Drive, Start BootCD, Start Mini Windows XP (which might well have done the same thing as the BartPE boot CD, as I now realized), and Windows Memory Diagnostic. I chose Start BootCD and used it to run PartitionMagic 8.05 Pro. PM did not see anything on the drive other than unallocated space. I tried running another program, but got a mouse error; apparently at least some of the programs on Hiren's BootCD were best run after a fresh reboot. I rebooted and tried Mini Windows XP. It was able to recognize a USB flash drive, so I used one to copy over the DiskPart.exe program I had previously downloaded. An AvaFind search of my drives revealed, at this point, that WinXP already contained DiskPart.exe, although in an apparently earlier (or at least smaller) version (i.e., 160KB rather than 191KB). With the larger one onboard, I moved the USB flash drive to the target computer and tried to run it from within Mini Windows XP. Unfortunately, this gave me an error message: "Error creating process [msiexec.exe /l diskpart.msi]. Reason: The system cannot find the file specified." I found msiexec.exe on the other (working) computer and copied it, and the older DiskPart.exe (i.e., same date as the msiexec.exe), to the flash drive. I tried again with this on the target computer. This did give me the DISKPART prompt and the options described in my other post. I typed "list disk." It showed that I had only Disk 0, which was right (if you don't count the jump drive). I typed "select disk 0" and then "clean." After a moment, it said, "DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk." I typed "list volume" and it did not show any volumes on the hard drive. So it seemed that it had indeed cleaned the drive. To test it, I tried something that had failed previously (see, again, my other post): I typed "exit" (to get out of DiskPart.exe), inserted the Windows XP installation CD, and tried to boot it. I got "NTLDR is missing" because, silly me, I had not yet removed the USB drive. I removed it and tried again. The disk churned for a long time and then gave me the familiar old BSOD. The older version of DiskPart.exe had failed to fix the hard drive. I restarted Hiren's BootCD and went into Hard Disk Tools > HDD Regenerator > Scan and repair. It ran for about an hour and detected no errors. (At this point, and repeatedly after this, I tried a number of other tools on Hiren's BootCD, not listed here.) Seagate SeaTools for DOS told me that it was a Seagate hard drive. I used that program's Advanced Features > Erase Track ZERO. I went into the Fujitsu low-level format tool, also on Hiren's BootCD, but it did not seem to recognize any drives. I tried rebooting the Windows XP installation CD again, but it still gave me a BSOD. In Hiren's BootCD, I went back into Mini Windows XP > BootCD WinTools, but didn't see anything that looked useful. I tried Start > Programs > Check Disk, but it did not find a volume to work on. Taking a different approach, I restarted the computer and chose Hiren's BootCD option (rather than Mini Windows XP) > Partition Tools > PartitionMagic Pro. There, I selected the unallocated space (i.e., the only thing listed) and created an unformatted primary partition that used up all of the unallocated space. I rebooted the WinXP installation CD, but still got a BSOD. Back in Hiren's BootCD, I tried the Active Partition Recovery program. It said this:

Logical C:

Detected file systems:

from partition table: FAT32 (LBA)
from BOOT sector: Unknown

Get file system from BOOT sector? [Y/N]

I said Yes. Next, it gave me an option to Perform Extended Disk Scan, with this note:

Extended Disk Scan may detect partitions being deleted even if you have created new ones instead, formatted and used them!

The screen also showed two partitions within HDD 80h. I arrowed down so that the first of them was highlighted: "Logical C." This gave me an error message: "Error reading sector # 0 or BOOT sector is invalid." When I highlighted the second one, "Unallocated," I got no error message, but it was weird that this partition was only 2.49MB. Anyway, I went back and ran the Extended Disk Scan. It was slow. After a while, it detected a 14.9GB NTFS logical drive. The program gave me the option of adding this partition to the drives list. I said yes. There was another one, a while later, a 35GB partition. Yes to that too. Both of these, I thought, were WinXP partitions that I had created, during the past month or so of fooling around with this laptop. As the scan reached the halfway mark, I was getting concerned that it hadn't yet found either the original Vista partition or the original Recovery partition. But then, about three-fourths of the way through, it did find a 10.9GB partition. The whole process took maybe six hours, on a 250GB drive. When it was done, I had three logical drives and two unallocated portions. Now what? I thought maybe I would take a look at these partitions in one of the other programs there on the Hiren's BootCD, so I hit Esc. This gave me an option of writing the detected partition information back to the hard drive. As I reflected on the matter, I decided that these former partitions were sort of like a former girlfriend: sure, things hadn't been so good with them, but then, things hadn't been so great without them either. So I decided sure, why not, let's take them back. Just like that, they were written to the hard drive, and I was rebooting. I went back into the partition tools, there on Hiren's BootCD, and took another look via PartitionMagic. Now PartitionMagic said it had "detected an error 116," and offered to fix it. I said sure. Now there was another error, partition table error #108. PartitionMagic was willing to format the single partition that it did find, so I went with that. It said it was "formatting partition *: (BADMBR)," but then it gave me Error #4, "Bad argument/parameter." Bad argument, indeed: this really was turning out like a reunion with an ex-girlfriend!

I decided to fight fire with fire. Vista had created this problem; maybe Vista could undo it. Probably the clearer reasoning would have been, they did this at a factory, so I need a factory to fix it. But I wasn't reasoning along those lines. I had gotten my hands on a copy of Microsoft Vista, and I was going to install it and see what would happen. The Vista DVD gave me an option of recovering my system, but I didn't have any previous images it could work from, so I went ahead with the installation option. Vista detected the five partitions or unallocated spaces that Active Partition Recovery had restored. I told Vista to delete each of those partitions. Now I had one big 232.9GB unallocated space. I went ahead with the installation of Vista into that big empty space; maybe I should have used the option to format that unallocated space first. But the main thing was that Vista installed, where WinXP had failed to do so. That was promising. Maybe it wouldn't even have been necessary to install Vista; maybe WinXP would have installed OK after I ran Active Partition Recovery. But maybe not; after all, PartitionMagic was still confused. Speaking of which, I decided to run it again, after Vista finished installing itself. This time around, when PartitionMagic on Hiren's BootCD detected an error, I didn't let it fix it; I now dimly recalled that PartitionMagic never got entirely comfortable with larger hard drives. Maybe if I hadn't let it fix the imaginary error the last time, it would have worked OK. But probably not: as before, it still thought we had a partition table error #105. I took out Hiren's BootCD and put in the Windows XP installation CD, and rebooted. But, wouldn't you know it, I still got a BSOD. Vista was happy with the hard drive; Ubuntu was happy with the hard drive; but WinXP couldn't be satisfied. Well, I had a Seagate Seatools CD from mid-2007. I assumed it was newer than the Seatools for DOS found on Hiren's BootCD, but perhaps not. What could this Seatools CD tell me? I rebooted with that CD, and I discovered that it could tell me, "No Hard Drives Found."

It seemed that Vista had its own special way with my hard drive. This called for a choice. I could leave Vista alone, giving it its own 15-20GB partition - that is, I could venture into the land of the Vista-Ubuntu dual boot. That might be the eventual outcome, but first I felt it was a good idea to screw around some more. I thought I might start by using Gparted to reduce the size of the Vista partition, as if I really were going to set up a dual-boot system after all, and see what happened then. So that's what I did. I booted with my Gparted CD, removed the 1MB unallocated space prior to the Vista partition, shrank the Vista partition to 30GB, inserted a 30GB ext3 and 5GB swap partition after that, and left the rest for an ext3 partition for data. Then I rebooted into Vista. I got Windows Boot Manager, telling me this:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next."
3. Click "Repair your computer."

I did this, using the Vista DVD. I chose the "Repair and Restart" option, removed the DVD, and rebooted. Vista ran a disk check and then came up OK, but wanted to reboot because of hardware changes. After that second reboot, it seemed to be functioning normally. I rebooted with Gparted, to see what had changed. There was now a 6MB unallocated space after the Vista program partition. So possibly what screwed things up was that I removed that 1MB unallocated space that had been before the Vista partition. I ran a check on the two ext3 partitions in Gparted. They were OK. I rebooted with the WinXP CD and, as usual, I pressed a key to boot from the CD. This time, I got this:

Windows Boot Manager

Choose an operating system to start, or press TAB to select a tool:
(Use the arrow keys to highlight your choices, then press ENTER.)

Vista (recovered) was the only option. I restarted the computer and tried again to boot from the WinXP CD. Still got a BSOD. I could have uninstalled Vista and reformatted the drive, just to see if there was somehow a "right" way to remove Vista, thereby making the drive once again accessible from the WinXP installation CD. I decided instead to get my Ubuntu installation in place in a Vista dual-boot. Maybe I wouldn't need to go back to WinXP or worry about it anymore, and could perhaps even replace the Vista partition with an occasional Vista boot from a USB drive (for purposes of e.g., upgrading the laptop's firmware).

In that case, the final question was whether Vista and Ubuntu could work with the external USB hard drive. That, you will recall, was the question that triggered this expedition.  By this point, however, I had begun to suspect that the problem was with the external hard drive, which appeared to be defective.

Converting Real Media Video to Other Formats

I had a RealMedia (.rm) file.  I wanted to convert it to .avi or some other format that I could edit in Adobe Premiere Elements.  I heard that Super © was useful for this purpose.

The first recommended step was to download and install the Real Alternative Lite codec.  Next, using Internet Explorer (not Firefox), I downloaded and installed Super C.  In Super C, I dragged the .rm file over from Windows Explorer to the open area at the bottom of the window.  Then, under "Select the Output Process," I chose the radio button that did not say "Join Format-Identical Files"; that is, the one I chose said "Select the Output Container," and gave me a choice among many formats.  I chose FLV/SWF (Flash).  Then, at the bottom of the screen, I clicked on Encode (Active Files). This gave me "An ERROR has occurred.  Click to read more."  I briefly tried to troubleshoot that, and tried various recommended settings, but had no luck.

I considered alternatives.  Video Cleaner Pro by River Past provided a free trial with too many restrictions.  Someone recommended Helix DNA Producer, and that led to Easy RealMedia Tools.  I downloaded both, opened the former, and installed the latter.  Both seemed to be designed to create RealMedia files, without the ability to export to other formats.  I downloaded the free trial of AVOne Video Converter.  It required an installation of RealMedia Player, which I had already done.  Due to restrictions on the free trial version, it wouldn't convert my 10-minute, 835kb .rm file.

I tried another approach.  I set up CamStudio to record the playback of the .rm file.  CamStudio was having trouble with audio recording, though, so I installed NCH's Debut Video Capture Software.  [Some weeks go by at this point.]

Some time has passed at this point, so pardon me if my recollection is mistaken, but at any rate Debut has proved useful for screen capture.  I have not found Super (C) to be very useful.  For Real Media specifically, I belatedly discovered that Real Player itself now comes with a converter, so that solves the original problem.  I have also used Oxelon to convert video easily from the Windows Explorer context (right-click) menu.

Ubuntu 9.04: Error While Copying; Folder Contents Not Displayed; Input/Output Error

I was using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) with an internal drive and an external USB hard drive. The latter was a Seagate SATA in a Rosewill RX-358-S SLV enclosure. I copied and pasted a 16GB folder from the internal drive to the USB drive. Those 16GB consisted of 13 files, among which was one large (15GB) VMware virtual disk. The folder I was copying was named VMs. When I copied that folder from the internal drive to the external drive, I got this message:

Error while copying to 'VMs'.

There was an error getting information about the destination.

When I showed more details, it said this:

Error stating file '/media/OFFSITE/VMs': Input/output error

I didn't know what it meant when it referred to "stating" file. Regardless, when I clicked on the target (external) folder, I got this message:

The folder contents could not be displayed.

Sorry, could not display all the contents of [folder name]: Input/output error.

I got the same error message when trying to view the contents of other folders on the external drive. Its contents were visible to Windows XP running on a different computer. The computer on which I was having this problem was able to detect the existence of the external drive and could show its folder tree in Nautilus; it just couldn't show the contents of any particular folder on the external drive. Meanwhile, the internal drive seemed to be working normally.

The Rosewill enclosure had eSATA as well as USB connectors. The same error messages came up with both. One source suggested that the external enclosure's power supply could be malfunctioning. Since Windows could read the drive, I doubted that was the explanation. I had had this problem previously, and had used ntfs-config to solve it, which is why I had installed ntfs-config when setting up the system this time. But the procedure I had most recently used didn't solve the problem this time. Reviewing earlier efforts, I typed "df -h" and confirmed that the external drive (/media/OFFSITE) was indeed at /dev/sdd5, as I had indicated in /etc/fstab. In that case, the advice of pablopancho would be to type "sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdd5" (which should run, at least, because ntfsfix was part of ntfsprogs, which was another program that I was now learning to install when setting up the system, anticipating that I would have NTFS drive problems at some point). This gave me error messages stating a number of failures (e.g., "Failed to determine whether /dev/sdd5 is mounted: No such file or directory" and "Failed to startup volume: No such file or directory") and concluding with this advice: "Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk."

So, OK, I connected the external drive to the WinXP machine again and rebooted it from the Windows installation CD. I went into Recovery Mode and ran "chkdsk /r." Chkdsk got only 54% of the way through the job and then stopped and said, "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." I rebooted with the Gparted live CD and told it to check the external drive. It did not complete that operation; instead, it said, "An error occurred while applying the operations." Fortunately, this occurred on a backup drive, so I was able to skip the attempt to recover its data; I figured I would just repartition it and start over.

Before repartitioning, though, just out of curiosity, I booted my laptop into Vista, connected the external drive to that, and was able to copy data from the external drive to the laptop. I assume I would have been able to do the same from a Windows XP machine, but I didn't try. As had happened to me previously, I was finding that Ubuntu seemed to be more concerned about drive imperfections than Windows was. I wanted the drive to be fixed, of course, so I went looking for the way to repair hard drives in Vista. It seemed that Vista was similar to XP in this regard: in Windows Explorer, I clicked on the external drive, right-clicked and selected Properties > Tools > Error-checking. I ran both the "Automatically fix" and the "Scan for" options. It began processing files, one at a time, very slowly. It took hours. In fact, after six hours, judging by its progress bar, it had only processed about one-tenth of the total contents of the drive. Granted, it was a 1TB drive with about 800GB of data. Vista might have finished with a 300GB drive, at this rate, in 24 hours or less. I wasn't inclined to let it churn away for a week, so I canceled. If this process was actually succeeding in recovering data, then I had to say that Vista seemed, at this point, to include an impressive file-recovery capability. But whatever.

I bailed out and took a look at the drive, or tried to. Now Vista said, "Location is not available. F:\ is not accessible. Access is denied." So I tried reformatting the drive. But formatting itself looked like it was going to take hours, so I tried to cancel. Unfortunately, Vista said, "The format could not be interrupted. To attempt to quit formatting again, click Retry. To quit immediately, click Cancel." Retry didn't work, so I used Cancel. I rebooted from the Vista installation CD and went into the Repair Your Computer > Command Prompt option. Chkdsk /? gave me the idea of trying "chkdsk f: /f," but that said "Cannot open volume for direct access." Rebooting back to regular Vista, I clicked on drive F in Windows Explorer. It was now showing as just "Local Disk (F:)," not as the OFFSITE drive. When I clicked on it, Vista said, "You need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it." So I went with that. But after running all night, and showing what looked like progress to completion on its progress bar, it said, "Windows was unable to complete the format." I rebooted into Ubuntu and tried Partition Manager (Gparted) again. It still showed the drive as being partitioned, but in an unknown format. Since I was no longer trying to save the data, I deleted the partition on that drive and then created a new extended partition and a logical partition, within the extended partition, filling the whole drive, in NTFS format. But the second step didn't complete; instead, Gparted told me that I had to run Windows chkdsk /f twice on this drive. I did that. Then I booted into WinXP and tried copying some data to the drive. I got this:

Windows - Delayed Write Failed.

Windows was unable to save all the data for the file H:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

As it turned out, I had two separate problems here. First, my hard drive was full. I doubt I had ever emptied out the root trash, and it turned out that was the bulk of the problem. I've explored that, and other aspects of making drive space in Ubuntu, in a separate post.


Second, I had to play around by trial and error with some technical steps involved in getting the external drive mounted. I worked through that in a forum post. But now I had a new problem. When I tried now to run an rsync backup process, I got this:

rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (490 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(600) [sender=3.0.5]

I had to interrupt this troubleshooting for a couple of days. When I came back to it and tried to run the same rsync backup process, I now got a number of error messages along these lines:

rsync: failed to set times on "/media/OFFSITE/[subfolder]": Input/output error (5)
rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "media/OFFSITE/[subfolder]/[filename]": Input/output error (5)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/media/OFFSITE/[subfolder]" failed: Input/output error (5)

Taillessmonkey found that the problem disappeared for him/her when s/he replaced the external hard drive enclosure. I happened to find another external drive enclosure on sale at about this time, and bought that. While waiting for it to arrive, I tried connecting the hard drive internally within the computer I was attempting to back up. When the computer started up, it recognized it immediately as the OFFSITE drive, but I still got some instances of that same "recv_generator" error. Actually, just one. Instead, this time I got dozens of "Input/output error" messages arising from an "rsync: rename" attempt to rename nonexistent files. For instance, one of those input/output errors arose from an attempt to rename a file called "DW_B9154.wav.Mw21w0" to be DW_B9154.wav. But there was no Mw21w0 file, or at least there should not have been. I could only guess that rsync was creating temporary copies of files, during its backup process, and was then losing track of those files before it could delete them. I wasn't sure if that was the case, or what to do about it if it was.

I did wonder, though, whether this might be a problem with the source partition rather than the target. With the backup OFFSITE drive still inside the computer, I ran an rsync to back up another partition to OFFSITE. This one worked just fine. I tried another. That one went with only one error. These same drives had produced numerous error messages when I had tried to back up to them in the external drive enclosure. It seemed that maybe I had two problems: one source partition was messed up, and also the external drive enclosure was no longer cooperating with Ubuntu.

Although that other partition had shown only one error in Terminal when I was running rsync with OFFSITE as the target drive, I was in for another surprise. When I checked the folder on OFFSITE to which that partition's contents had supposedly been copied, Nautilus reported that there were no files in that folder. Yet when I tried to manually copy files over from that partition to that folder on OFFSITE, I got a message indicating that the first of the files being copied already existed on the target. (I had set Nautilus to show hidden files, and anyway these were not hidden.) I went ahead and told it to overwrite the files already existing on the target (OFFSITE); and when it was done, what I saw on the target was

[This is as far as I got on this item.  I am only now getting around to replacing the external hard drive enclosure.  Other external drive bays seem to be doing fine with that same hard drive, so I assume the enclosure was much of the problem.]

Full Disk in Ubuntu 9.04

I was using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I started getting error messages indicating that my Linux program partition (mounted as / ) was full. For example: "Error while copying to 'tmp'. There is not enough space on the destination." This surprised me, because when I went to Gparted (Ubuntu > System > Administration > Partition Editor, installed via System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), I saw that the Linux root partition was 107GB, of which 102GB was used and only 5GB free.

Andre Mangan advised typing "sudo find / -type f -size +100000k" in Terminal to see what large files I had (with the option of changing the 100000 value). I added a zero, so I was looking for files of roughly 1GB and larger in size. This searched everywhere, including on my mounted data partitions (in /media and/or /mnt), so probably I should have unmounted those before searching: it included .avi (video) and other large but known files. It didn't seem to turn up any unexpected large files, though.

I posted a question on this. Meanwhile, I was noticing all kinds of errors resulting from this problem. Once I closed Gparted, I was not able to start it again: I got an error message, "Failed to run /usr/sbin/gparted as user root. Unable to copy the user's Xauthorization file." I got the same message when attempting to run Synaptic and other programs. I suspected this was also the culprit behind the recent failure of certain rsync (backup) jobs. Whatever was filling space on my drive was still operating; I had had 5MB free just a half-hour earlier.

Drs305's response to my post pointed me to his tutorial on disk space problems. Following the relevant portions of that tutorial, I first unmounted all partitions other than the active root ( / ) partition by typing "sudo umount -a". Then I typed "sudo find / -name '*' -size +1G" and saw that the /media/OFFSITE folder, which was supposed to be a reference to my external OFFSITE hard drive, was instead referring to a folder on the root partition. No wonder I had been having problems with my external backup! I deleted /media/OFFSITE and then typed this:

sudo find / -type d -name '*Trash*' | sudo xargs du -h | sort

This seemed to show me that there were lots of files in the /root trash folder(s), which I probably had never emptied. They appeared to be in /root/.local/share/Trash/files, and maybe elsewhere. To delete root trash, I typed "gksudo nautilus" and, in Nautilus (i.e., File Browser), I made sure to check View > Show Hidden Files. Then, in that session of Nautilus, I navigated to File System /root/.local/share/Trash. I selected the Trash folder and hit Shift-Delete. This said, "Are you sure you want to permanently delete 'Trash'?" I said Delete! with joy. It notified me that it was deleting about 37,000 files. So, duh, this could have been part of the problem. Then I noticed that the faster way to check disk space was, instead of using GParted, to type "df -Th | grep -v "fs".When it was done, I refreshed GParted. Now it showed only 37GB used. Still a lot!  So I thought I should probably pursue some of the other options described in the tutorial.

Before I could do that, though, I ran into a separate problem: my programs drive completely wiped itself out, so I had to restore Ubuntu from a backup.

System Files Backup in Ubuntu 9.04

A quick note on the rsync command I used to make a backup of my system files in Ubuntu 9.04.   I already had a TIB file backup made with Acronis True Image, but it was a month old and I figured the individual files would be more accessible anyway if I just copied them straight over to another drive. The command I used for this was as follows:

sudo rsync -qhlEtrip --progress --delete-after --ignore-errors --force / "/media/BACKUP/Ubuntu System Files"

where BACKUP was the name of a hard drive partition.

Arbeit Macht Frei - Origin of the Phrase

The phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("work makes free" or "will make you free") appeared over the main entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps, and still appears over some.  According to Wikipedia, the phrase originated in the title of Lorenz Diefenbach's (1873) book, Arbeit Macht Frei.  The title concept was apparently borne out in the plot of the book - in which, Wikipedia says, work turns bad guys good.

Primo Levi (2005, p. 8), a Holocaust survivor, says this:  "It is more likely that the meaning [of "arbeit macht frei," as it appeared over the entrances to concentration camps] is ironic, springing from the heavy, arrogant, funereal wit to which only Germans are privy."  Perhaps the greater irony is that Levi, a victim of racism, would express himself in such racist terms.  His personal anger - obviously, a very understandable anger - seems to have distorted his judgment.  Not that he is alone in that.  Others similarly throw around such adjectives as "maniacal" (Chatman, 2009, p. 52) and "grotesque" (Schoenbaum, 1997, p. 75; Welch, 2004, p. 221) when speaking of "arbeit macht frei" and related values.

Contrary to Levi, there is a more plausible explanation for the use of the phrase.  A number of sources reiterate, without citation, that the Weimar government adopted "Arbeit Macht Frei" in 1928, as a slogan in support of a job program.  Be that as it may, the phrase plainly had deep roots in German culture.  Certainly Germans have been known to consider themselves hardworking (Reigrotski, 1959).  Before Diefenbach's Arbeit Macht Frei, Spielhagen's Hammer and Anvil expressed the concept in several forms, including "Only work can make us free!" (1870, p. 668).  Indeed, starting as early as 1763, according to Kloberdanz (1975, p. 212), Volga Germans commonly said, "Arbeit macht das Leben süss" (work makes life sweet).

Consistent with that cultural self-image, Rees (2006, p. 9) states that Rudolf Höss, who was responsible for putting the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign over the gate at Auschwitz, was thoroughly convinced of the positive benefits of work.  Nazi concentration camps plainly were places in which people were worked very hard (Roth, 1980).  Friedrich (1994, p. 3) likewise does not question Höss's sincerity, but suggests rather that he intended it as "a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom"; he quotes Höss as saying, "All my life, I have thoroughly enjoyed working."  Schoenbaum (1997, p. 76), too, quotes Höss as referring to "the blessed effectiveness of work" by which criminals "can still be rescued from criminality."

The concept of hard work being good for a person is familiar enough; the idea that it would be good for a person who is being worked to death is less so.  Possibly a sort of explanation, if not precursor, appears in Kafka's (1914) In the Penal Colony, where a machine inscribes the "sentence" conveying a criminal conviction into the convict's skin until he dies.

In the case of at least some Jewish prisoners, it is not hard to surmise the nature of the criminality from which Höss seems to have offered work as a purifier. According to Wegner (2002, p. 142), Nazi stereotypes of Jews circa 1938 "suggested in no uncertain terms that Germans 'worked' while the Jews 'rested.'"  Wegner finds that contrast in, for example, depictions of a Jewish banker as compared to a German farmer.  This financially oriented stereotype was not new.  Ahamed (2009, p. 180) notes that, during a food panic in Berlin in 1923, a mob had chanted, "Kill the stock exchange Jews."  Indeed, Chazan (1997, p. 106) cites stereotypes regarding exploitation by Jewish financiers from as long ago as the 12th century.

The phrase itself - "arbeit macht frei" - can be, and has been, translated into English as "work shall set you free," in a clear echo of John 8:32 ("You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free").  It is quite likely that, as one source suggests (without citations), "arbeit macht frei" originated in the Protestant work ethic.  While that ethic has its drawbacks as well as its strengths (see Beatty, 2003), it is not intrinsically malevolent, much less murderous.  To the contrary, according to Lewis's (1994, p. 19) article on German literature of the time, when Spielhagen (1870) invoked the liberatory powers of work, he was expressing an ideal of "democratic innocence."

Despite events like those cited above, it appears that, until 1933, Germany may actually have been less hostile to Jews than were other countries in its vicinity (Koonz, 2003, p. 9).  Even on into the 1940s, the mass extermination of Jews was not a publicly promoted and popularly supported national policy in Germany.  Instead, the Nazis seem to have appealed to a popular impression that "arbeit macht frei" indeed.  In other words, it appears that an ordinary German of the time might have looked at that slogan with approval, and might even have felt that Jews in particular were in need of some exposure to an honest day's work.  (I say they "might" have felt this.  In quickly researching this brief essay, I have not been able to uncover readily available sources on some points.)

Contrary to Levi's (2005) view, then, it does not appear that signs reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" were posted primarily as a cynical joke at the expense of Jews and other concentration camp inmates.  Once posted, of course, there was ample reason for knowledgeable persons to contrue those signs as cynical in the extreme; but for purposes of public relations, the signs seem to have conveyed a familiar and acceptable message.

In that sense, the real joke may have been on the ordinary Germans who were successfully manipulated by such slogans.  They, too, were starved, raped, and killed by the millions, in the course of the war into which their era's clueless leader led them; but unlike the concentration camp inmates and staff, the joke passed them by.  They, too, were the butt of it; but unlike the people the camps, they didn't get it.  They evidently tended to believe that "arbeit macht frei," and other Nazi propaganda, for a very long time.

To express it in today's terms, ordinary Germans seem to have been sufficiently unhappy with the Goldman Sachs of their time - with, that is, the perceived Jewish financial elite (see Feingold, 2008, p. ix) - that they were willing to accept retaliation against Jews of every type.  In the present day, fortunately, we are not burdened with the need for a strong leader who will promise to bring us out of the financial depths, as Hitler did for Germany, and who will do so partly by making Jews the scapegoats, either deliberately or as an inadvertent result of his policies.  Let's hope it stays that way.

American Community Survey (2003): National Population Statistics

As described in a previous post, I found that the Cornell University Disability Statistics website offered materials that seemed likely to help me estimate the number of people with disabilities (PWDs) in a particular county in the U.S.  The next step was to understand something about the general population terminology and concepts that formed the basis for census calculations.

I had learned that the American Community Survey (ACS) provided the most frequently updated and most recent county-by-county data.  The Guide to Disability Statistics from the American Community Survey (Weathers, 2005, p. 28) indicates that estimates of the numbers of PWDs depend directly upon the number of questions asked. According to Weathers (p. 4), the ACS approach has several limitations:

First, the ACS is limited to six questions that are used to identify the disability
population [as a whole] and it does not allow one to identify the prevalence of specific health conditions (e.g., cancer, paralysis, HIV/AIDS, etc.). Second, the ACS definition does not explicitly include important societal and environmental factors that may contribute to a disability such as discrimination and lack of reasonable accommodations. Finally, the ACS does not capture the population living in “group quarters.” Group quarters include individuals living in institutions, college dormitories, and other types of group quarters. This is a very important limitation in that it may leave out an important segment of the population with disabilities. The Census Bureau plans to address this last limitation of the ACS by including a sample of persons living in group quarters beginning in 2006.

By contrast, at the low end of the scale, according to the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Current Population Survey - Annual Social and Economic Supplement (March CPS) (Burkhauser & Houtenville, 2006, p. 19), the Current Population Survey asks just one question about disabilities -- regarding, specifically, the presence or absence of a work limitation -- and thus "misses a large part of the broader population with disabilities based on an ICF [i.e., International Classification of Functioning] disability conceptualization."  On the other extreme, as Burkhauser & Houtenville (2006, p. 19) also note, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) uses 93 disability-related questions.  Generally, they say, "data sets that ask more questions to identify a population with disabilities and that contain a broader disability conceptualization will capture a larger disability population."

Weathers (2005) quantifies the difference made by these varying operationalizations of the concept of disability.  Weathers uses data from 2003.  To analyze these data, it may be helpful to begin by clarifying the meanings of some terms that the Census Bureau uses.

First, the resident population of the U.S. includes all U.S. residents living in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  That is, it excludes residents of Puerto Rico and American possessions abroad, as well as U.S. citizens living abroad, whether in the military or as expatriates.  This post does not examine the question of whether PWDs may be disproportionately represented in the military -- whether, that is, the percentages of PWDs in their home counties would be noticeably higher (particularly in some age groups and locations) if those members of the Armed Forces were available for inclusion within the count of PWDs under the ACS.

The resident U.S. population as of July 1, 2003 was estimated to be 290,210,914.  According to the 2003 ACS Subject Definitions (p. 13), the resident population is divided into people who live in housing units (i.e., households) and those who live in group quarters.  "Housing units" can include any occupied "unit," including tents and railroad cars; but "If all the people staying in the unit at the time of the interview are staying there for two months or less, the unit is considered to be temporarily occupied, and classified as 'vacant'" (p. 14).  The data include transients (i.e., those who stay only briefly in any one place), however, by including them if there is no place where they usually stay.  Note that "Vacant units are excluded from the housing inventory if they are open to the elements; that is, the roof, walls, windows, and/or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements. Also, excluded are vacant units with a sign that they are condemned or they are to be demolished" (p. 14).  It preliminarily appears, then, that the 2003 ACS data undercount people who are not living in any kind of housing unit but, rather, are living outdoors (e.g., under a bridge) -- among whom, again, there may be a disproportionate number of PWDs.

The Census Bureau indicates that residents of group quarters were sampled in 1999 and 2001, but the 2003 data exclude people living in group quarters.  For purposes of introducing some relevant terms, then, it will be convenient to refer to the 2000 census.  According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 2003, table 77 (examining 2000 census data), about 7.8 million people (2.8% of the total resident population of 281,424,602 in 2000) lived in group quarters.  These people were divided almost equally into institutionalized and noninstitutionalized group quarters.  Among the institutionalized individuals in group quarters, by far the largest groups were males aged 18-64 in correctional institutions (44%) and females aged 65+ in nursing homes (29%).  Other institutions include mental hospitals and wards and juvenile facilities.  Among noninstitutionalized individuals in group quarters, 55% were living in college dormitories.  Other noninstitutional group quarters include military quarters, religious group quarters, shelters, and group homes. 

If 2.8% of the total resident population lived in group quarters in 2003, as was the case in 2000 (above), that would mean that just over 8 million (i.e., 2.8% of 290,210,914) lived in group quarters in 2003.  Subtracting those 8 million from the total resident population would produce something like the 282,909,885 people whom the Census Bureau estimated as the total household population in 2003.

The total household population included people of all ages.  In the analysis of disabilities done by Weathers (2005), however, the focus is on people who were between 18 and 64 years of age in 2003.  In the 2003 ACS, to use the slightly adjusted number provided by Weathers, the Census Bureau estimates that there were 176,395,446 people in this age group.  This number is quite close to the 176,305,337 estimated by the SIPP for that year, and roughly midway between the estimates of 172,761,000 from the NHIS and 179,132,544 provided by the CPS.

I will be using the ACS figure in the next step, which addresses the numbers and percentages of people with disabilities within that larger total.  At this point, I join Weathers (2005) in turning from the estimate of the total numbers of people with disabilities in the population, and focus (at least for the time being) upon the prevalence of disabilities among people of traditional working (i.e., post-high school, pre-retirement) age.

rsync, USB Drive, Error 30: "Read-Only File System"

I was regularly copying a folder to a USB drive in Ubuntu using rsync.  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the rsync process started producing these error messages:

rsync:  failed to set permissions on [USB drive/folder/filename]:  Read-only file system (30)

rsync:  mkstemp [USB drive/folder/filename] failed: Read-only file system (30)

rsync:  failed to set times on [USB drive/folder/filename]: Read-only file system (30)

rsync:  delete_file:  unlink [USB drive/folder/filename] failed: Read-only file system (30)

rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1058) [sender=3.0.5]

The fix, for me, was to reformat the USB drive in Windows.  It would probably work even if Windows was not the cause of the problem.

Suggestion to Yahoo! Answers

Dear Yahoo:

I was using the RSS feed for Social Science - Other.  I received a million questions a day.  Many were re-posts of previously asked questions to which I had provided thoughtful answers. 

I want to be able to block (1) questions that I have already seen, (2) selected individuals, and (3) questions of a certain length (e.g., less than 15 words). 

I also want to be able to label and subcategorize questions for other potential answerers to see.  One approach would be to offer the thumbs-up-thumbs-down option for questions as well as for answers.  Ideally, if someone clicks on the thumbs up, they will see a drop-down list of reactions, including mine; and if they click on mine, they will see the comment I have added, e.g., "Seems to be a student looking for an easy answer to a take-home test question."  My followers, if any, will also be able to see my filtered list of questions.

I want to be able to automate the provision of those filtering comments.  That is, I want to have a half-dozen of my favorite comments readily available.  I am viewing a question.  I want to tell the poster to do a web search, narrow it down, and come back with a more specific question.  I don't want to have to type that out.  Likewise, I may also want to tell the person that it sounds like a take-home test question, and I'm not inclined to help people do their homework.  I type these into my list of favorite answers; they appear when I'm viewing a question; I select the ones that apply; and I'm automatically on to the next unanswered question.

My list of favorite answers can be partially selected from a pre-provided list.  One favorite answer may include an automatically generated Yahoo! search of the web, responding to key terms in the question.  That is, I want to be able to check a box for "try this search" and, perhaps, to modify the automatically generated search before posting it.

I want to be able to save my favorite answers in paragraph form.  For example, if I write a paragraph to answer a question about the Civil War, or if I see a good answer that someone else has provided (perhaps saved in directory form), or if there's a Best Answer that already seems on point, I want to be able to get to that quickly, and to direct the poster to it, rather than reinvent the wheel.

Definitions of Disability

The Web is filled with references to handicapped people and disabled people and people with disabilities.  But what is a disability?

Iezzoni and Freedman (2008) describe a "medical model of disability" (p. 332) originating in the 19th century. That model, they say, treats disability as a form of illness; and illnesses, in the medical model, are typically diagnosed in individuals and treated by doctors.  Against this, Iezzoni and Freedman contrast the "social model" (p. 333), which considers disability a social phenomenon.  In the words of the Fundamental Principles of Disability (1975) produced by the now apparently defunct Union of the Physical Impaired Against Segregation, "Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society" (p. 3, cited by Oliver (1996, p. 22)).  In other words, there are a great many physical and mental impairments - the need to wear eyeglasses is an example - but not all impairments are treated equally; some result in much more isolation or stigma than others.

Within the social model of disability, Iezzoni and Freedman (2008) favor the definitional approach adopted by the World Health Organization's (WHO, 2009) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF):

The ICF puts the notions of ‘health’ and ‘disability’ in a new light. It acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some degree of disability. Disability is not something that only happens to a minority of humanity. The ICF thus ‘mainstreams’ the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience. By shifting the focus from cause to impact it places all health conditions on an equal footing allowing them to be compared using a common metric – the ruler of health and disability. Furthermore ICF takes into account the social aspects of disability and does not see disability only as a 'medical' or 'biological' dysfunction. By including Contextual Factors, in which environmental factors are listed ICF allows to records the impact of the environment on the person's functioning.  [I have notified the webmaster of incoherence in that last sentence.]

Iezzoni and Freedman (2008) note, however, that different definitions serve different purposes, and that at present there are numerous legal definitions in use in the United States.  Two of the most prominent definitions they cite are those of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA).  Section 12102(1) of the ADA defines disability as meaning, with respect to an individual, "(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment."  By contrast, the Social Security Advisory Board (2003) says that the Social Security Act of 1956 defined disability as “inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or to be of long-continued and indefinite duration” (p. 3); but this definition, they say, is increasingly subject to challenge.

The Census Bureau is yet another important source of disability definitions.  Definitions used by the Census Bureau in recent years include the definition of "work disability" in the Current Population Survey; the definition of disability in the Survey of Income and Program Participation; and the definition of disability in the American Community Survey (ACS).  Among these and other data sources that have been used by the Census Bureau, the ACS is especially useful for obtaining local data at the city and county levels.  The 2008 ACS Subject Definitions operationalize the concept of disability in a set of related questions posed to survey participants:

Using models of disability from the Institute of Medicine and the International Classification of Functioning, disability is defined as the restriction in participation that results from a lack of fit between the individual’s functional limitations and the characteristics of the physical and social environment. So while the disability is not seen as intrinsic to the individual, the way to capture it in a survey is to measure components that make up the process. The American Community Survey identifies serious difficulty in four basic areas of functioning: vision, hearing, ambulation, and cognition. Described below, the ACS asks respondents about serious difficulty and the resulting data can be used individually or combined. The ACS also includes two questions to identify people with difficulties that might impact their ability to live independently. In the 2008 American Community Survey, there are three disability questions, two with subparts totaling six questions in all . . . . (p. 38).

These various definitions, including especially that of the ACS, will be relevant to further exploration of data on disabilities within the U.S.

Browsing the Cornell University Disability Statistics Website

I wanted to know how many people with disabilities there were in a particular county in the U.S.  I decided to try to answer this on the basis of materials available at Cornell's Disability Statistics webpage.  I hadn't used that webpage previously, but I guessed it would probably have links, at least, to the main sources of data on the numbers of people with disabilities on federal, state, and local levels in the U.S.  In my initial looks at the webpage, I found its layout somewhat confusing.  There also seemed to be quite a bit of material there.  I decided to summarize what I found, for future reference.

The website required me to log in to view its statistics page, so I did.  I wondered where I was, in the grand scheme of things, so I backed out to the main page of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR).  Its research webpage led me to its Digital Commons, which led to its list of research units, which led to its Employment and Disability Institute (EDI), whose collection included a large number of manuscripts from recent years.  This was a bit overwhelming, so I backed up one or two steps and took a slightly different path through the EDI's webpage to its Research page and its Publications page.  The latter looked promising:  it sorted EDI publications into seven areas of expertise, each with its own webpage:  ADA, Accommodation & Accessible IT; Community Inclusion; Disability Benefits and Work; Disability Employment Research; Disability Statistics Research; Educational Achievement & Transition; and International Disability Research.  The Disability Statistics Research link under Publications actually just produced what appeared to be the results of an automatic search.

I went back to the EDI homepage.  This time, I explored the links under the Our Areas of Expertise & Projects heading.  These included ediONLINE; ADA, Accommodation & Accessible IT; Community Inclusion; Disability Benefits and Work; Disability Employment Research; Disability Statistics Research; Educational Achievement & Transition; International Disability Research; and Workforce Development.  Here, the Disability Statistics Research link led, reasonably enough, to the Disability Statistics Research homepage.  It looked like one of those that I had seen before, when I was doing my initial poking around (above).  The main current project shown here was the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics (StatsRRTC), whose purpose was to bridge the divide between the sources of disability data and the users of disability statistics.  This project's homepage pointed to a list of events, such as a free webinar reviewing a statistics report.  I clicked on one of those events, entitled Discovering Untapped Talent for the Workforce of Tomorrow: Strategies for Employing People with Disabilities.  I was hoping it would lead me to sources of information on the topic, but it appeared to be intended just to notify people of seminars that they would typically have to attend in person.

I backed up a step and tried the Resources page instead of Publications.  This opened up links to the Benequal Organization Assessment webpage; the Disability Medicare Wizard webpage; the Disability Statistics page; the Human Resources (HR) Americans with Disabilities Act Tips page; a Disability Policy Primer; the website of the Longitudinal Study of the Vocational Rehabilitation Services Program; the Northeast ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] & AIT [Accessible Information Technology] Center; the website for the Plan to Achieve Self-Support (PASS) program; the Person Centered Planning Education Site; the TransQUAL Online website; and the Universal Access New York website.

From those choices, I went into the Disability Statistics page.  I looked through its Statistics and Data Sources pages, but then decided that its FAQs page looked most promising.  There, I gravitated toward its list of Disability Data Source User Guides, with links to the Guide to Disability Statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS) (Weathers, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS) - Annual Social and Economic Supplement (Burkhauser & Houtenville, 2006); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the 2000 Decennial Census (Erickson & Houtenville, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Harris, Hendershot, & Stapleton, 2005); the Guide to Disability Statistics from National Health Interview Survey – Disability Supplement (Maag, 2006); the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (Burkhauser, Weathers, & Schroeder, 2006); and the Guide to Disability Statistics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) (Wittenburg & Nelson, 2006).

To choose among those user guides, I looked at the FAQ that indicated which data sources would be most appropriate for various purposes.  That FAQ indicated that the ACS was best for current data on disabilities, but also that data below the state level would be reported only in the 2000 Census.  Looking at Weathers (2005, p. 3), however, I found that the ACS was supposed to provide data at the county and Metropolitan Statistical Area levels as well.  I obtained some additional confirmation of that by going to the Census Bureau's American FactFinder page, using its Get Data link under the ACS heading, and observing that it did offer data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates.  According to the About This Data Set link for that particular three-year estimate, however, data on disabilities were not included.  Instead, the 2008 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates provided the most recent data set offering estimates on disabilities.  (One-year estimates were available only for local units of population > 65,000, as distinct from the lower limit of a population > 20,000 applicable to the three-year estimates.)  For actual findings, as distinct from estimates, the most recent survey with data on disabilities was the 2006 American Community Survey, with an accompanying 2006 Quick Guide ("quick" meaning a PDF of only 50 pages).

This look through the Cornell Disability Statistics website suggested that the site provided informative access to a variety of helpful materials, and that the ACS in particular would tend to be the starting point for my work in reaching specific numbers about persons with disabilities in a particular county.  The next step in my inquiry was to try to put some of those materials to use in reaching actual numbers.

Religion and Me

I liked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I liked, probably most of all, the camaraderie that you get when you are a member of a close-knit group of fellow travelers, like how you might feel toward other Americans when you're in some remote location abroad.  "You're from the States?  Where?"  "Texas."  "Texas!  I'm from Wyoming!"  "Wyoming!  Alright!"  Like that makes you practically cousins.  That's how it is, sometimes, when you are among fellow believers, in a world hostile to the Gospel.  And then, being a Bible-believing Christian as the end of the world nears, and thinking about what's going to happen when all the believers are raptured.  That was pretty exciting stuff.  And the hymns at Christmas, and the feeling that I had a Friend, and the special meanings in everything.  There were a lot of things to like.

On the other hand, I disliked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I disliked the feeling of obligation to save souls - to harass people about Jesus, in effect, when I knew they had absolutely no interest in hearing it.  I disliked the confusion that I experienced, and that I certainly saw in the lives of others around me, as we tried to reconcile our hope that God was on our side with the reality that, too often, things were just not working out as advertised.  After all the allowances for God's superior wisdom and so forth, the uncomfortable fact remained that we were forever inventing ad hoc justifications on his behalf, as if he were an abusive father for whom we needed to make excuses, lest the outside world find out what a cluster our family life actually was.

I especially disliked the dishonesty of trying to portray the Bible as being consistent when it was weaving around like a drunk sailor, and as being a source of guidance when it was obviously wrong and even dangerous.  I disliked that my religion seemed, historically, to have been on the negative side of everything, as if God wanted us to be dragging our feet and giving people a hard time whenever they wanted to dance, drink, and play bingo.  It was as if God did not want us to acknowledge equal rights for women, or to reject slavery even if St. Paul did condone it, or to understand dinosaur bones, or to inform kids about sex - and so on, ad nauseum.  I disliked the fact that Christians of the sixth century cut off the ears of Christians who disagreed with them, and that Christians of the twelfth century found it important to take Jerusalem from the people who lived there, and that Christian faith seemed to provide an important fault line underlying innumerable other wars and atrocities - dividing Byzantine from Roman Christendom, and Roman Catholics from Protestants, and Presbyterian Protestants from Lutheran Protestants, and Missouri Synod Lutheran Protestants from Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Protestants, and so forth.  I definitely disliked seeing how Christians avoided taking responsibility for the assumption of superiority that keeps being used to justify such behavior, century after century.

Lots of Christians would tell me, right off, that their religious practices and beliefs are not like that.  And that's the nature of religion:  keep moving.  Keep 'em guessing.  If something has been publicly rejected as one of the worst aspects of your faith, make sure that you join everyone else in condemning it, and redefine your religion as something that would never behave in such a way.  It's just commonsense marketing.

Liberal Christianity was my case in point:  it freed me from much of the heavy baggage of my fundamentalism.  As a liberal Christian, I could have a much more educated sense of superiority, there in my nice clean clothes on Sunday morning, surrounded by all those other nice-smelling middle-class suburban white people.  It wasn't about the Bible anymore, per se; it was about the undeniable importance of compassion and giving.  These, I think, were the kinds of Christians to whom Bertrand Russell would have been referring, in Britain in 1927, when he wrote these words:

There is another point which I consider excellent.  You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged."  That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.

Liberal Christian belief and Unitarianism, with which I flirted after some years away from religion altogether, gave me company in my mild, patronizing scorn for the fundamentalists among whom I had counted myself previously.  Actually, it gave me company, period, as I socialized with other religiously indifferent but socially concerned individuals.  But then, alas, the socializing gave way to subgrouping, gossip, and misunderstanding, and I understood that his would probably always be one of the defining features of the Body of Christ.

I couldn't have said for sure what I was supposed to be believing during this phase.  I do remember that, during a visit to a Unity church, I was struck by the many references to "the Christ in you."  Those references reminded me of the advertisement I was hearing on the radio at about the same time:  "I like the Sprite in you."  Neither, I surmise, was intended on a literal level; but in what figurative sense I should construe such sentiments, I cannot say.  In any event, I sensed that my days as a liberal Christian were numbered when I found myself thinking, during a visit to a new church, that it was a pretty cool place, except for all the talk about Jesus and such.

I never got around to becoming Jewish, except to the extent of being married to a Jewish person whose religion consisted of lighting the candles and singing the prayer, and then dissolving into laughter halfway through because that was all she remembered.  But I picked up a fair amount during my dozen years in New York, half of which I spent at a school where, it was said, the three major religions were equally represented:  Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed.

As far as I can tell, Judaism is more or less like Christianity, on a smaller scale.  You have your extreme fundamentalist conservatives, who make things miserable for themselves and everyone else.  You have your totally assimilated liberals, who don't much know or care what their putative religion is about.  In the middle, you have people who occasionally become overbearingly self-righteous about some particular issue, or who otherwise have a somewhat identifiable culture of their own, but who generally seem like they get along better and are happier to the extent that they can control their religion, rather than having it control them.

Other religions seem, to me, to follow relatively similar lines of thinking.  There are the Brahmins at the top in India, and the upper-class Muslims in various nations, and I imagine I would find, if I looked into it, that there were social classes among the Incas as well; and in all cases, no doubt, the lower-income people are expected to fight and die to defend the upper-income people of their religion - even if they actually have more in common with the lower-income infidels they're shooting at.

Nowadays, I've begun to think that may be the nature of the difference between religion and spirituality.  If you're religious, you'll pick up that gun and shoot that person - your former neighbor, perhaps - because of the religion s/he belongs to.  Or, to put it differently, you probably wouldn't be shooting him/her if s/he were of your own religion.  You may think you would never do that, but then the social pressure and the law and the fear kick in, and after a couple of months of military training, you become like all the others, before you, who said and then did exactly the same things.

It's somewhat different with atheists, who never seem to have armies of their own.  For them, the righteous zeal tends to come out in other ways - in, for instance, the racist e-mails I get from some atheist intellectuals, educating me about the stupidity of Bible-belt rednecks.  This literature is ironically reminiscent of the sacred spam I get from my few remaining Bible-thumper friends.

Spirituality, I think, is not a matter of imagining that your elevated feelings of a "higher" reality are anything more than funky chemicals in your skull.  It's also not a question of whether God exists.  His existence or nonexistence does not make anyone spiritual.  I think, much to the contrary, that it may be more spiritual to simply admit that you don't have privileged knowledge about Truth.  Spirituality, in my working hypothesis, begins with daily renunciation of transcendentalist hubris - with, if you will, the recognition that, if the gods had wanted us to know more, they would not have played games with us; they would have told us plainly.

Ways to Transfer a 20GB File to a Laptop

I had three machines:  a laptop running only Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and two dual-booting Ubuntu/WinXP desktops.  One of the desktops ran almost exclusively in Ubuntu 9.04, with VMware Workstation 6.5 running Windows XP virtual machines on top.  The other desktop ran almost exclusively in WinXP SP3.  The project at hand:  the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop had a 20GB VMware virtual machine (VM) file, and some other related VMware files.  I wanted to copy those files over to the laptop, so that I could use them as a ready-to-go VM, rather than having to create a new VM from scratch on the laptop.

Before wiping the laptop and replacing 9.04 with 9.10, I had set up a Vista installation on it, and had tried using the Tornado UBS file transfer device to copy the 20GB file from the 9.04 machine to the laptop.  The Tornado needs to run a WinXP executable file, so I was able to do this on the source machine only by running that executable in a WinXP VM.  For some reason, though, the transfer would terminate at the 4GB mark.  In other words, I wound up with only a 4GB file, not a 20GB file, on the target laptop.

I thought about trying to upload and then download the 20GB file, but I realized that would probably take a couple of years.  I didn't have a USB flash drive big enough.  I thought about using a file splitter to transfer it over in several pieces via thumb drive, but that was an admission of defeat.  Besides, I wanted to be able to move files back and forth henceforth, not just this once.

I had two external USB hard drive docks and one external USB hard drive enclosure.  The latter, a Rosewill RX-358-S SLV, had recently died and needed to be repaired or replaced.  It was the only one that Ubuntu 9.04 had recognized.  The two external docks - a Rosewill RX-DU 100 and a Cavalry EN-CAHDD2B-ZB - had been recognized by Windows XP and, I think, by Vista, but not by Ubuntu 9.04.  I discovered, though, that Ubuntu 9.10 did recognize the Rosewill dock, and in passing it appeared that it might also work with the Cavalry.  I had manually swapped hard drives around previously, and was thus now able to copy an earlier version of the 20GB VM from one of those drives, inserted into the Rosewill dock, to the laptop.

If that hadn't worked, there were some other possibilities for the job. Up through Windows XP, you could use something called a direct cable connection, which if I recall correctly could be impossibly slow, depending on which method you used.  Under Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can use Windows Easy Transfer, provided you have bought the special cable.  Both of these methods, like a crossover cable but unlike a router-based network, would require you to manually unplug and replug cables if you brought more than two computers into the mix.

A better way was to use ethernet cabling.  One possibility was a crossover cable for a direct wired connection between the two machines.  I saw somewhere that some network adapters were now able to detect whether it's a crossover kind of situation, and were able to change their connections internally, so you could just use a normal ethernet cable running between the two machines.  Another possibility was to set up a home network using an ethernet switch or an ethernet router.  These ethernet options had the drawback of requiring various kinds of command-line tinkering, which seemed to have failed for a lot of people (including me) who had tried their hand at it but had found it to be dysfunctional in one way or another.

I saw somewhere that smb4k provided a good interface for Ubuntu ethernet management.  I went into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, searched for smb4k, and marked it for installation.  It required a bunch of other packages - it is for KDE rather than the Gnome desktop interface that Ubuntu uses.  When I typed "smb4k" on the command line, I got an error message, "Either your PATH environment variable is not set properly or there are the following programs missing on your system:  kdesu."  I checked Symantec for kdesu.  The closest it got was kdesudo.  I installed that, and smb4k started up.  I did like its interface, but I ran out of time to explore it.