And the format proceeds in the background...

...the old data is officially unrecoverable as of... NOW. Data pattern 0xAA over the entire disk, then 0x55, then a new filesystem. Then unpack a stage-1 tarball, and suck down the latest-and-greatest versions of everything, get the newest Kernel installed and both Bluetooth and my flash-memory reader working, then start in on things like X. And Wine at some point. That'll be fun, trying to get 64-bit Steam running under 64-bit Wine under 64-bit Linux. If it works... well, life will be shiny. =^.^=

And while I'm letting things compile in the background...

...a useful pair of phone numbers for a lot of the folks on my friends list to know exists if nothing else.

(408)349-3300
(408)349-1572

Yahoo! Customer Service's phone number.
9:30AM to 5:00PM Pacific Standard Time

Account hijacked? Old e-mail address defunct but you're still getting Yahoo Groups E-Mail to another address you have associated with the account? Give em' a call, they can probably sort things out.

And have an ObQuote just because it's too priceless not to turn into a meme:

Peppering is what you do to a Ceaser Salad. He shot that dude!

Well damn... that sucked.

Linux Kernel 2.6.15...

Flash Reader works. Beautifully.
Bluetooth works. Beautifully.
Loading the 802.11 driver via ndiswrapper?

*CHUG*

The system suddenly is under such high system load I was watching individual lines of the screen get redrawn. Pixel by pixel.

Trying earlier kernels and earlier ndiswrapper versions didn't seem to change the behaviour.

So... I've apparently found an interesting... bug. And unfortunately one I couldn't debug... honest, I tried, but I couldn't figure out the first step towards trying to diagnose where this was bogging down.

And the kicker?

It's apparently a side-effect of upgrading the BIOS on my laptop to fix a clock-skew error I was running into. Joygasm.

So... for now I dumped a quick install of Windows on the boxen again for the moment. There's some wierd interaction between the clock-skew BIOS fix that was recently released, and 2.6.15 in combination with the SDHCI patch and ndiswrapper that causes no errors, but puts the system under such high load (I'm guessing interrupt load) that it can't even get enough time to redraw the screen fully.