I plan to add new memory to my desktop machine around the time I install Windows 7. A few months ago I checked the price on two more DIMMs of the same type that are already in the machine: $32 at the time. I should have bought then because they are now up to $50. Oh, well.

The cause for the upward shift? The general sentiment seems to be simple supply and demand. Some have it as demand for DDR2 has fallen, and others have it as the supply was too high.

I have decided not to wait and get it now.

Back in late January I reported that my workstation at UIUC was going to be taken down. It took a while because another website on the machine needed to be moved first, but that is apparently done because Proteus is now down.

I was contacted earlier this week by a system administrator back at UIUC about Proteus, my old workstation. Proteus is still hosting my old site, another former graduate student’s website, and the UIUC SIAM Chapter’s website.

The system administrator wants to take Proteus out of service. Since I have this website it is not such a big deal, but I have a couple concerns. First, the web-based Geneagrapher is still running there (although it probably should not be). This will force me to let it go or to implement a solution for this site. Second, I am not sure how much losing that site will affect the page rank here. Big deal, I suppose.

Last night, I reinstalled Windows XP. It had not been working for a little more than a month, and I tried a few repair approaches that did not work out. There was no urgency to do this, which is why I waited so long. Ultimately, I reinstalled Windows (but I “punished” it first by giving it a much smaller partition; I have better things I can do with that space). Of course, this means the MBR was wiped out and I needed to reinstall Grub in order to get easy access to Linux again.

This post is more of a note to myself to save time next time (not that it took that much time, but perhaps every bit counts). It assembles information from several sections of the installation portion of the Gentoo Handbook.

Here we go (the devices are specific to my current setup):

1. I booted using the Gentoo minimal install disk.
2. Mount partitions and change root (Sections 4 and 6).

# mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/gentoo
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/gentoo/boot
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

3. Make mtab and reinstall Grub (Section 10).

# grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab
# grub --no-floppy
grub> root (hd0,1)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

The parameter (hd0,1) corresponds to the /boot partition (/dev/sda2). If it is not clear how to specify the partition for /boot, that information is available in Grub with

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1