The Bull Og

Don’t have time to really research this any further, but I think I found out why I couldn’t start Selenium today using my normal command line invocation. I was getting this when I tried to start it:

java.net.BindException: Address already in use

Hmmm… hadn’t started it before sitting down for work…. so…. what could be the issue? How did port 4444 get bound already? A little…

"nmap locahost"

…yields:


PORT STATE SERVICE
4444/tcp open krb524

krb524?!? I don’t remember firing that up. What is it? Well, if you do a search for “krb524 4444,” you’ll quickly see that “krb524″ has to do with Kerberos and it seems that Kerberos is using port 4444.

I’m on a Cisco VPN. Does the Cisco VPN use Kerberos? I don’t know, but it’s plausible enough for me to chalk it up to that and pass a new port (something clever like -p 4445) to the Selenium JAR and whoomp - as they say - there it is.

In my early 20s, my father and I traveled from Michigan to the west for a combo train/bus ride. We landed in Spokane, WA, and rode a train to Bozeman, Montana. Along the way, we made a stop in Missoula and took a spin on the merry-go-round with both of us being on horses on the outside of the ride.

As we spun around, he would occasionally reach up and grab a white, plastic ring from a dispenser shaped like a dragon’s mouth. That was fairly entertaining and I tried it a couple of times; the dispenser was just high enough and offset from the ride to require a good sense of timing and a good stretch to get the ring.

At some point, my father sensed that the ride was coming to an end and said “go for the brass ring!” I was a bit confused; the brass ring? What did he mean?

After one or two more turns, I could see him going for the dispenser again but this time, there wasn’t a white ring in the dragon’s mouth but rather something darker. As I watched from behind, he reached up and snagged the darker, brownish ring and let out a laugh. He shook it all about and sported a big, Cheshire grin on his face.

“Go for the brass ring!” has become my mantra as a result; I thought it when I moved to Vienna after grad school instead of moving to California, when I eventually moved to California after living and working in Vienna, when I took a job with Yahoo, and when I moved to SOMA.

Roughly two years ago and in preparation for the move back to the States, I bought an external hard drive (120 GB.) I was running WinXP at the time and had also just purchased Norton Ghost. My plan was to store a Norton image on the drive, bring the drive back to the US, and restore to new hardware so that I would have the same computer as I had been using 6,000 miles away.

After I returned to the US, I bought an HP desktop and swapped my WinXP image for the Vista OS that was on the box. I no longer needed the 120 GB external hard drive as a vault so I started using it as a briefcase and shuttled my music back and forth to work where I was (am) using a Macbook Pro.

I offloaded all of the content off the drive, reformatted it with Extended (HFS Plus,) and dumped everything back onto it.

Then, I discovered Ubuntu at home. I wiped my desktop clean of WinXP (all of my content was on the external hard drive of course,) and dropped Hardy Heron onto my desktop. I kept on saying “someday soon, I’ll backup all of my digital content from the external hard drive to my desktop, but it’s a pain to split it out now so I’ll just keep it where it is” - on the external hard drive.

One day, back in November, I plugged in my digital briefcase and was horrified; the drive could not be read. I can’t remember the exact error but I couldn’t see the contents of the drive. I unplugged it, plugged it back in again, nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Tried it on different machines. Nothing. Tried running some diagnostics on it: no space left, no space being used.

Slowly it sank in; the drive was probably … corrupt. All of my photos and music and documents and everything; all of my digital content - gone. Despair, to say the least. I started searching for a way to recover the data. I had heard that it was possible, even after catastrophes like unintentionally formatting a hard drive.

During my search, I found “data recovery services” and “data recovery software.” Given the cost of data recovery services, which might run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, I tried a couple of different data recovery software options and have only one worth mentioning because it was the only one that (mostly) worked: Data Rescue II.

I say “mostly” because it was able to restore all of my content (I think,) but it couldn’t restore their names, so now I have a bunch of DOC, PDF, MP3, and JPG files with unintelligible names like “J900×1200-03236.jpg.” I’m happy to have the files back (especially my wedding photos - but I had those on CD anyway. Can you imagine what my wife would have done to me?)

I have to dig through thousands of files and recategorize them. I don’t think I’ll be able to rename them all, but at least if I can get them regrouped in some relevant manner, I’ll be better off. I’ve learned my lesson. Now I use rsync to backup files offsite,