Itch Scratched
I’ve referred to it as the Well from Hell or Gulf Gusher almost from the beginning, and know that it is officially recorded as Mississippi Canyon block 252, but from time to time someone would use another name, and I kept forgetting to write it down. The thing is, the name was familiar, but I didn’t associate it with the Gulf or oil.
Finally, Mary at Pacific Views and Left Coaster made the connection on the Macondo Prospect, BP’s internal name for the well.
If you have never read Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, you should. If you know about the history of Colombia it will be a richer experience, but it isn’t necessary to enjoy the novel.
Naming an oil well for Macondo, “a city of mirrors”, is only slightly better than naming your new nuclear power plant Chernobyl, or building a resort near a volcano and calling it Pompeii.
6 comments
Hmmm. I read One Hundred Years… when I was in high school; I remember very little about it. Somewhere I have a copy… ah, maybe I do and maybe I don’t. Well, there’s always the library… um, not available to me without help; Stella has other plans and Lily is not tall enough to reach the stacks.
(OT, those big files I mentioned may be in a Windows format of some sort. Whatever… if I can’t see ’em, I can’t delete ’em. And uninstalling/reinstalling the s/w didn’t get rid of ’em.)
Lily will be de-shelving books all too soon.
You aren’t trying to do this through the GUI? I’m not sure what that sees, but they should be accessible from the command line.
Re: the GUI… it doesn’t make a difference. Through the File Browser, one sees a bunch of “empty” folders with legitimate names but “?” for all the numeric properties. From a terminal using “ls -l”, one sees in essence the same thing. There’s something weird about those folders. BTW, in the GNOME interface, there are settings to allow you to see just about anything. This ain’t Windows!
I thought I’d found the fix on a SourceForge forum, a snippet of Python source code which, if replaced in the backup-config app, would fix a bug with deciding which old backups to delete before proceeding to new backups. The broken code basically deleted… nothing. But alas, the fix was in 🙂 … the fix was already applied to the sources distributed with this version, and I’ve seen no basis to believe the source and the distributed build are out of sync.
There is one other thing I may have screwed up on: my backup directory was a descendant of Documents, which itself gets backed up; perhaps the s/w isn’t smart enough to catch and avoid the circular reference. Hey, I’m learning a lot! 🙂
Does it give a read on file permissions? The permission on the directory should start with a d followed by 9 more characters. drwxrwxrwx would mean that anyone can do anything with the directory. Hyphens means you can’t do something [read, write, execute].
Yep. Got that, either through the GUI or from a terminal. No surprises there. The surprise for me is that I’m an Administrative user (same privileges as root), assigned myself to the root group, and it still tells me I don’t have the permissions to look at those weird directories.
I’ve reinstalled the backup and restore app and opened one of the backup folders in the restore app. Everything looks just as it should: the right files were backed up (if anything was), etc. So why can’t I see the folders themselves and their contents? (No, they’re not hidden. And the messages are about permissions.) If I don’t get a reply on the forums… it seems less and less likely… I’ll try copying the backups to another drive (if I have permissions) and experimenting with them there. This is really tiresome!
Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier, Steve, but I’m having major problems with the latest update of Firefox. It slows everything to a crawl because of “plugin-container.exe” which was designed to speed everything up by moving plugins to a separate process. At this point if I can’t disable it, I will be changing to Chrome.
I was going to suggest directly logging in as “root” to see if that gave you access, because all of the “permissions” doesn’t necessary mean “all” – some things only want to talk to “root”, rather than checking permissions.