Four Island

Oh my goodness! So, yesterday, it was my birthday, and I was sitting around feeling sad and stuff and then I logged on to my diary to write a depressing post or something and I saw "UPGRADE TO WORDPRESS 3.0". Ignoring that run-on sentence, WORDPRESS 3.0 IS OUT!!!! On my birthday! Yes, yesterday was my birthday, everyone hug me. But, seriously, this was like a present or something. :P

So, I upgraded my diary to Wordpress 3.0 (which wasn't too difficult, just a standard Wordpress upgrade) and immediately noticed a difference in the administration panel. "What? Everything's gray now! What happened to my color scheme?" Well, as I just figured out, you can easily change your admin panel color scheme back to blue if you like by going to "Your Profile". In fact, I'm not sure I ever set my diary's admin panel to blue, so I may just be insane! lol O_O

Anyway, one of the more exciting things I was waiting for in Wordpress 3.0 was the unveiling of the new default theme, Twenty Ten! And is it a looker! whistles :P It is actually quite a pretty theme, with a nice header image (which you can change; there are some pretty presets there! Or you can upload one :P) and a nice sidebar (for once, the calendar widget looks GOOD :D). My only problem with the theme is that the text of the posts is a bit big, but I'm sure that I can change that by tweaking the stylesheet. :)

Do you know what is exciting? Apparently, you can now set your admin login/password DURING installation. How fancy! I can't wait to set up another Wordpress blog (which I seem to do all the time because I have no life) and not have to create a new user! :P Speaking of cool new features that I haven't used yet, have you heard? Wordpress MU and Wordpress have merged! Omg! Now you can host thousands of Wordpress blogs from one single Wordpress installation! How choclatey! :P I don't see how I'm possibly going to abuse that anytime soon! :P

Isn't this fun? There are many other new things that you can play with in Wordpress 3.0, SO GO CHECK THEM OUT :P. Anyway, Wordpress 3.0 is quite fun and I can't wait to see the various ways that I'm going to abuse all of the new power it holds by creating some god-awful Frankenwebsite. The last one tried to eat my children! Well, if I had any children. Imma... Imma post this now, okay? :P

Yesterday's post on stupid spammers inspired me, for some reason, to do something I've been wanting to do for a very long time: clean out my Gmail inbox. I've had Gmail for about a year and a half now and I've accumulated nearly 2000 emails in my inbox. It just doesn't look good. It doesn't look good at all.

I remember reading a while ago (though my Google searches turn up nothing now) that a good Gmail strategy is to get everything out of your inbox. Like a traditional Inbox at an office, your email inbox is a place where new and action-requiring emails live. Once they've been dealt with, they shouldn't be there anymore.

I didn't simply want to Archive everything, though. Wouldn't it still be unorganized, but rather, just out of the way? Isn't that like cleaning your room by shoving all of your dirty clothes under the bed so that they're out of sight, but not quite out of mind? So, instead, I decided that I'd create a few labels ("Friends", "Four Island", "Facebook"...) and then, working back from the oldest part of my inbox, label emails under all the appropriate labels. Then, I simply archived my entire inbox. There goes my garbage! However, unlike the garbage under your bed, my email was sorted and I could simply click on "Friends" to see emails from my friends instead of having to search through "All Mail".

This was good. So, I've formed a new policy for email checking. Here we go:

1. First of all, and this is fairly specific, but if you use the Google Mail Checker Plus extension for Chrome or any other similar program that not only checks your inbox for new email every once in a while, but also shows you what the new email is, disable it. If you don't want to disable it, at least configure it so that it doesn't show you new email. Make it send you to gmail.com instead. The best way to organize your email is to make sure that you are fully focused on the task, rather than simply waving your hand at something that pops up.
2. Second, create labels for yourself. If you have specific types of email that you get regularly, like emails from your friends or emails from annoying social networking sites, create labels for them. If possible, also create filters that can automatically assign new incoming email to one of your labels. However, if you do this, don't make the filter tell these incoming emails to skip the inbox. You still want all new email in your inbox, ready for you to deal with them.
3. When you have new email, go to your inbox and click the email at the bottom. You should work through your email one at a time to ensure, once again, that you aren't distracted.
4. Read the email. Does it fit under one of your labels? If so, label it. Is it garbage/spam? Mark it as so. Does it require a reply or other further action? If it requires a reply, try writing it right then. If that's not possible, or if the email requires further action, then simply move on to your next email. If you are done with the email, though, Archive it. This will move it out of the inbox and out of your way.

If you follow these steps, not only will your Gmail inbox be deliciously clean, but you will know that the items in your inbox actually require something to be done to them. Isn't that great? I hope you've enjoyed this little mini-howto as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Really, I haven't written one of these for a long time! :P

The Story Of How Starla Can Never Upgrade Her OS Painlessly (Yes, an IRC joke. Don't you love those?)

Ubuntu and I, we go way back. We have history. Ever since I fell out of my chair at 2am because Ubuntu was able to identify my wireless network card when Gentoo and Debian couldn't, I've been a solid Ubuntu user. However, there is one part of our history that always goes wrong: upgrading. As detailed in my last Ubuntu post, my Ubuntu upgrade process can be rather horrendous. In fact, Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 may have been the worst upgrade experience for me, but after that, everything was lovely. Ubuntu 9.10 worked out fairly well for me, after I fixed the mouse problem.

This time, it appears that the completely opposite has occured. When I started to upgrade Ubuntu, as expected, I was having trouble. The upgrade failed a few times due to my dismal Internet connection and Ubuntu's busy servers and eventually, the Update Manager failed to show the Upgrade button. I switched to using the command line, but after a while, that stopped working too. Eventually, I decided to do what I had done for Ubuntu 9.10: download the alternative CD, mount it and use the packages on it as a foothold. While that worked for me last time, it still took a couple of days to download the rest of the needed packages.

Not this time. As soon as I started the upgrade, I got "30 minutes remaining." O_O. A half an hour? Only a half an hour? Impossible. It couldn't be. But it was. 30 minutes later, all 1014 packages were downloaded and had begun to install. It was amazing. I don't believe I've ever undergone such a fast Ubuntu upgrade.

However, this seemingly amiable upgrade may have been a warning of what was to come. Needless to say, Ubuntu 10.04 has not been very nice to me. Let's go over the specifics, shall we?

• One of Ubuntu 10.04's "new features" is a new boot process which is supposed to make booting much faster. For me? My computer definitely takes longer to boot than it did before, which is annoying considering how long it took before.
• And that's if it's a completely normal boot. Two days ago, when I started my computer, fsck ran because it hadn't checked my disk in a while and it took TWENTY MINUTES. YES. Don't blame it on the large amount of data on my drive--after twenty minutes, the progress had frozen at 90% and I was eventually forced to restart the computer. This, I think, is ridiculous.
• Previously, applications that hid in the system tray could be restored with a simple click of the icon, while right-clicking made a context-menu appear. Now, several Ubuntu programs like Rhythmbox and Transmission instead show the context-menu on left click, and nothing on right-click, forcing you to use a context-menu to open your program. Not a show-stopper, but definitely annoying.
• When I close my computer screen and open it back up later, EVERYTHING STARTS FLASHING. It's insane, makes it impossible to see what you're doing and lasts a while. Why is this? Does Ubuntu think that my programs aren't bright enough?
• Something in the upgrade has broken my copy of gnome-globalmenu (which I use to simulate a Mac-like menu bar) and now, certain programs like Gwibber do not work. This is disappointing, especially as Ubuntu 10.04 has a lot of added features for Gwibber with the addition of the MeMenu.

There are definitely more problems, but they're hiding from me. Anyway, I hope that the next version of Ubuntu (oh god, it's 6 months away....) is better.

Through the popularity of my current comic (Pillowcase!), it's sometimes difficult to remember that I once had a different comic: Kirby's Fan Mail. Yeah, remember that? That was a.... weird little comic, wasn't it? Yes, anyway, I recently had it brought back to my attention when I was looking through my Google Analytics. I saw a referral to Four Island from something called badwebcomics.wikidot.com, and I though, "Hm, what could that be?" So I went to the page in question and found.... a review of Kirby's Fan Mail explaining how it fails and how I'm mentally challenged! YAY! :P

Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. The article actually was about how stupid the comic was and I seriously find it VERY amusing. Read it here, plez. 'Tis awesome. Like how he points out that I can't draw or that I think word salads are comedic gold.

However true or funny the article may be, however, there are some points I would like to make in my defense:

• First of all, the author of the article spelled my last name incorrectly. It's Insigna, not Insignia.
• One of the author's favorite things to make fun of was a comic of mine called Shimi's Warning, which he described as incredibly stupid because it was just a picture with a link to an off-site comic. There are several reasons that I had to do this. First off, Shimi's Warning was done in Flash, which, due to a technical limitation of the comic hosting software, could not be hosted directly on the site. Second, the only thing you can post in the comic area on that site is comics. You cannot just post text. Yes, I probably should've provided a text version of the URL so people could just copy/paste it, which I eventually did. However, the comic itself has since gone down which is really not quite a shame because it was pretty bad.

And.... that's really all I can think of right now. It's not too easy to defend KFM :P. In fact, here are some things that I think the article lacks:

• Blatant copyright thievery - After writing a comic involving a cookbook, I posted a comic from the original Kirby manga because it had to do with the previous comic. Yeah.
• My total non-coolness - Yeah, four years ago, I didn't know what "emo" meant. So I probably embarrassed myself.
• The whole "world trip" debacle - For a few comics, I talked about having Kirby go on a trip to other people's comics and do stuff. Instead, I stopped posting comics for two months and simply had him write a letter of apology when I got back. Wow, my failness never fails to fail!
• Same with the "awesome" 50th Comic Party.
• Homophobia.
• There is clearly no food in this one, yet he claims he is eating it.
• The punch line of this one is the fact that the sender of the letter didn't leave a name. Ha-ha.
• I'm not going to pretend to know what I was on while writing this one.
• My total disregard for an update schedule. For a time, I would post like 10 comics a day, and then I wouldn't post for like a month. Then, I stopped doing the comic in 2007, only to pick it up for a month in 2009. I'm surprised people actually still read it.

Clearly, I could go on for much longer, but I don't feel like it. Instead, I'll let you, the reader, either read the article I linked to above or search through Kirby's Fan Mail for more of my failness. Oh yes, and check out my recently revived comic, Pillowcase! Thank you and good night! :P

Some of you may remember last year when I asked people what to do in the way of a commenting system because the main reason people said that they didn't comment on my blog was anonymity. While I didn't really find a satisfactory solution for my website (other than partial integration with The Fourm), I tried installing IntenseDebate for most of my hosted sites/project sites, including True Falsities, Color Pencils and Bubble Blog. It worked out pretty nicely. IntenseDebate looked pretty and all comments were associated with a central IntenseDebate account that could be used on other IntenseDebate-supporting sites.

There was one problem, however.

INTENSEDEBATE IS FREAKISHLY SLOW.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about True Falsities and why it suffered the death that it did and I recalled the fact that it took a very, very long time to load. I took a look using Chrome's Developer Tools and I saw that it it had a network latency of 5 seconds. 5 seconds! And that's me.... accessing a website.... within my own house. 5 seconds. I can only imagine how long it must take for viewers overseas.

Clearly, something had to be done. I looked around at my other IntenseDebate sites and saw that Color Pencils and Bubble Blog were also loading hideously slowly (which may also have been the reason that those two sites died). I disabled IntenseDebate on True Falsities, and, what do you know? It started zipping along happily. But that wasn't acceptable--I wouldn't receive any comments without some sort of centralized commenting system.

So I did some looking around and found Disqus. It looked pretty neat. So I downloaded it and set it up on True Falsities. Oh, wait, did I saw that it was easy? No? Oh, well, good, because it wasn't. Because of some monstrous limitations placed on my server that are out of my control (and yet completely fixable by certain people that will simply not oblige), my server couldn't access the Disqus website. Apparently IntenseDebate did all of its processing on the client side.

So I then spent the next 2 hours finding a proxy and configuring the Disqus plugin to use it instead of straight Internet access. And it finally worked. But.... it was hideous.

I don't know why, but Disqus simply didn't want to work. I had a difficult time exporting my comments from IntenseDebate to Disqus, the actual comment forms looked bad and wouldn't even appear most of the time and everybody instantly became anonymous. Also, every single comment looked horrible because Disqus completely discarded any formatting information the IntenseDebate provided. I tore out my hair at this point. I was actually hyperventilating.

Clearly, Disqus was no good. So I looked around for another solution and found something called Echo. It looked pretty awesome. Wait, check that, IT COSTS MONEY. No way José.

So, at this time, nothing can be done. True Falsities, Color Pencils and Bubble Blog are stuck with immense latency and there's really no chance that anybody will go on those sites now because of it. Which is very sad. Because I like those sites and they are never posted on. I really didn't want to settle with this, so I did something thinking and came up with a thought. :P

As some of you may know, the specification for Four Island 3.0 includes a complete rewrite of the travesty that is the Four Island commenting system. I figured, hey, if this new commenting system comes out nicely, I may detach it from Four Island and let it be its own commenting system like IntenseDebate that people can download and use. Probably called FourComment. :P

I think this is a good idea. Because I want integration with social networks. Because I want ratings and notifications. Because I want my webpage to load.... quickly. FourComment should be very professional and I hope that I go through with this because the current state of commenting systems on Four Island is.... bleh. A big integrated thing with cool features and a professional look would make me very happy. :P And with that, another large project is added to the Four Island 3.0 specification. :P

The story of how I came to love an album called Annetenna is sort of long and thus I won't publish it here. If anyone cares (they don't), I'll tell. It's not a secret. Let's just say it involves the TV show "What I Like About You". I can see your brains turning off.

I'll just jump straight to the point. Annetenna was a short-lived band that emerged from the ashes of another band called Ednaswap. They created an amazing debut album that was shelved by Columbia Records due to "internal organization". Annetenna decided to self-publish their self-titled album and put it up on their website for all to download. For free.

Now, the tragedy is that at some point, Annetenna's website went down. Along with all of their songs. Perhaps since the band went out of existence, they forgot to pay the domain renewal fee. Regardless, after that, the songs became difficult, nay, impossible to find on the Internet. Such is the bane of people who like music by obscure artists. :P

Anyway, I eventually tracked down someone who wrote a review (who has requested anonymity) of Annetenna and I went out on a limb and emailed them. To my delight, he replied the next day and provided the songs to me along with some live tracks. And I thought, "Why should I be the only one who gets these songs?" The album was originally available for free, and, while searching the Internet trying to find the album, I found many other people who really wanted to download this album. So I decided to put the songs up on my website for all to download.

I hope this page receives high Google PageRank because I want other people who want this album to get it. You can either download the songs individually or via a torrent that I will attempt to seed as often as I possibly can. Below, you will find a list of songs that you can download. They are all in MP3 format. Some of them also have a live version that you can also download.

1. Ultraviolet (live)
2. Oblivion (live)
3. Halo
4. 74 Willow (live)
5. Extraordinary (live)
6. What We Are Not
7. Don't Think About it Now (live)
8. Homewrecker
9. This is Not a Love Song (live)
10. My Favorite Song (live)
11. From All Sides (live)

Click here to download the torrent file. The torrent contains all of the files listed above, including the live tracks.

I hope that, for those of you who came here looking for Annetenna songs, I just made your day! And for the rest of you, who are just reading because you're my regular readers, well, I'll give you a hug anyway. :P

Once upon a time, there was a website. It was called Four Island. And now that I've finished plugging a website that you are already on, let me explain that there was a user on it named Drifty. She had an idea one day that went like this:

I wasn't sure whether to put this in Deck of Cards, Spam or here, but this is a collaborative effort and it's cool. I just thought this up.

So, want to write a story, but haven't got the time or drive? Why don't you work on a story with a small group? It can be insane, random, funny, sad or... anything!

My idea is that we form a small group, and we each contribute a character of our own making, using a bio sheet. Then, one person types up a chapter and posts it, another person makes another chapter after the first chapter and posts it and we keep on going until... THE END. The only rule is that you can't type two chapters in a row unless you has permission. Oh, and the story must make some sort of sense

Drifty

Yes, I am so insane that I archived the original post (if you notice, it doesn't exist on The Fourm anymore). Anyway, Drifty called it The Greatest Story and plopped it down in Storybook Time. And so, people found it, liked it and signed up. And soon enough, there was a full plot line in development. We called it Starfall. It is, as of yet, incomplete.

Then, I decided to enhance the actual process with some methods to make everything more organized. I pretty much went offically psycho over the entire project and proposed that we make a series of TGS projects, one after another, that had nothing to do with eachother.

The Greatest Story really became a part of Four Island, and although only one such project has ever been started (and is still, unbelievably, in production about nearly two years due to the massive procrastination of a user who I am proud to say was NOT me this time :P), the process itself has undergone a multitude of changes. TGS is no longer just a collaborative project, it's a process under which multiple authors can collaboratively write a book.

Now, TGS was created in April 2008. What am I doing talking about it now? The first TGS project is nowhere near completion. Another TGS project isn't going to start yet (though they are free to do so at any time). Besides, most of you know all this. Most of you know what I'm going to say next too. Who cares, I needed a post for this week. :P

No, the exciting thing is that I'm writing a website for TGS! It's referenced to as "The TGS Website" all over Four Island so now you can understand what I'm talking about all the time. :P Anyway, The TGS Website is planned to be a website where authors can sign up and join new TGS projects. Then, under the guidance of the TGS process, the authors can band together and write a book! Doesn't that sound like fun?

I'm writing The TGS Site in Ruby, oh glorious Ruby on Rails, so you know it has to be good! :P It probably will not be completed soon due to the fact that I'm a l*y porsiaor (TimTam doesn't want me aooiig during this post), but it will not become vaporware! Disregard the fact that this is the third effort so far at creating a TGS Website! I will discuss TGS and its website with you more and more.... and more.... and more later. Stay tuned for more excruciatingly painful details! Starla out!

The other day, I was looking at some delicious Rails plugins when I scrolled to the bottom of the page and noticed a header containing the words "No Signup Forms". What? How is that possible? Well, for those who don't know, gradual engagement is a form of user registration that doesn't require registration forms. What? Insanity!

Actually, it makes a lot of sense. See, what you can do is let the user wander around and do their thing. When they want to do something that requires an account, you automatically generate an account for them and set a "remember_me" cookie to something like 5 years so that they are automatically logged on to their new, autogenerated account when they visit the site. Then they can modify their account settings to fit them and it's allllll goood! :P

Well, I instantly caught on to this idea because, like most Internetters, I dislike having to fill out forms. Wouldn't it be much better if we could just visit a site and do what we want without having to fill out long forms, confirm stuff and then check our email to activate the new account just so we can tell someone that $_SEVER is actually spelled $_SERVER? Yes, it would be much easier and much less annoying.

I see one problem with it, though. The whole system with the remember me cookie is very fragile. If a user clears their browsing data, switches to a new computer or is actually still frequenting that website after 5 years, their account will be lost to them as they were provided with no credentials with which they could use to log in again. I think a good thing to do would be to ask the user for their email address upon auto-generating their account. It's not like filling out a huge form and we could reassure the user that it's simply so we can remember them. Then, we can email them a welcome letter along with a random password that the user can use in case their cookies get mangled. That seems fair, right?

So, what do you, the user, think? Is entering your email address too much like having to fill out a registration form or do you think you would be okay with that? Imagine accessing a site, seeing that someone is wrong about something and clicking "Comment". A little popup appears asking for your email address, which you dutifully fill in. Your comment is then added to the post and next time you want to correct someone, you don't have to even enter your email address. Sound good? :P

Does anyone remember a post on this blog a few years ago about a program called "Nonsense"? A few blog posts have gone mysteriously missing for no reason (like 2008's Christmas Day post) and that bothers me. You see, I have an obsession with archiving. I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENED AAAARGGHHH!!!! :P (That, btw, is the reason I hate Skype, because its chat logs are stored in a proprietary binary format. You'll see, I'll all convert you when Four Island 3.0 comes out. Just wait and see.... :P)

Anyway, I bring this up because TimTam recently asked me about it. I have mentioned Nonsense before in random posts such as Four Island is destroyed by Color Pencils and A Short Tribute To Doctor Who but, other than in 2008's mysterious vanishing post, I've never really explained what it was.

Remember Humorix? Well, on their website, they have a Downloads page with a few random oddities. One of these oddities is an interpreter called "Nonsense". To quote Humorix,

Nonsense generates random (and sometimes humorous) text from datafiles and templates using a very simple, recursive grammar. It's like having a million monkeys sitting in front of a million typewriters, without having to feed or clean up after them. From the Slashdot homepage to absurd college courses to buzzword bingo cards, Nonsense is a good way to waste time.

Humorix

During Four Island's extended downtime (omg, that was such a long time ago! :P), I wrote a script for Nonsense that generates humorous Four Island quotes (and American Pie parodies :P). Originally, some of the diction that I used has some innuendos and the quotes came out sounding quite wrong. :P Recently, however, I've revamped the script so as to make it sound more appropriate (but just as funny!) and grammatically correct. You can find the script here. Download the Nonsense program from its website and run the script like this:

./nonsense -f hatkkirby.data Quote

You can replace "Quote" with "AmericanPie" for a parody of American Pie :P

However, I know most of you scalawags don't use Linux and probably don't have a Perl interpreter installed. So, I've included a few examples to make you loffle!

#536 + (190) - [X]

JAL: I'm going to a toilet while listening to Happy Ending, listening to My Interpretation and asking Hatkirby "What are you doing?" with my sexist Madonna.
Hatkirby: Hihat!
JAL: HIHAT BLUEMONKEY I'M WHAT THE FSCK SMELLY DRAWING A PICTURE WITH SAMMI9494 HAHAHAHA!
Hatkirby: Are you stupid?
JAL: I'm asking Bluemonkey "Are you smelly?"
Hatkirby: ****! That's so alive that I think I'll start being hyperactive!
Hatkirby: Byee!
JAL: ....cyas
Ozzyfrog: SMILEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY T_CASE!!!!!!!! YOU SLOWLY OWE ME 141 MOVIE THEATERS!
Sammi9494: I am drawing a picture with Timbo94 with Pyro's cinder block in North Dakota.
* Hatkirby is eating Douglas
* Bluemonkey thinks Hatkirby is stupid
* Pyro is going to wow-pie.de

#534 + (143) - [X]

Sammi9494: I hate Sammi9494 because she's so gross!

#474 + (959) - [X]

Tamasys: I desire JAL because he's so noobish!
* JAL is making a Star Rod
Tamasys: I collect Hatkirby's phones.
Hatkirby: I annoyingly collect dead Adenosine Triphosphates.
* JAL is listening to music
Tamasys: 23
Bluemonkey: I am radioactive when I am asking "How are you doing?".
Sammi9494: My pasta is listening to Headlock by Imogen Heap, as well as being hyperactive, as well as falling 1993 floors off a high building at Four Island, as well as asking Pyro "Do you want a jawdroppingly thin cinder block??" with my lollipops and eating Mary Poppins with my Douglas with my oneric computer.

Lofflecopter. Also, an online version of my script has existed for a while but in a very bad shape. I've fixed it up so that it's usable so now, you don't even have to download Nonsense! Just go to the online version and loffle. :P

It seems in my post strike last year, I neglected to do the obligatory Christmas Day post. Well, actually, I completely missed out on Christmas Week. Last year (lol, two years ago) I did some fun things like reviewing an extremely odd play that I had written when I was young (I had written another play that I planned to review this year, but.... :P), writing an extremely corny story and temporarily reviving KFM.

Actually, looking back at 2008, you will not find a Christmas post. That is because, somehow, the contents of the row were deleted from the database (even though the actual row wasn't deleted). I keep meaning to check my backup (yes, you read that correctly, I only have one pre-October '09 backup) and restore the post, if possible, but anyway, back to last year.

The main thing I was going to write about in my Christmas post was the most important Christmas present: a new laptop! Oh my god, I know! :P It took two days to transfer my files, set up Ubuntu and install all of my programs, but it was worth it! However, I currently have one problem that doesn't want to be fixed.

When I installed Ubuntu, I opted for the new ext4 filesystem rather than ext3. It seems I made a mistake. Today, while on my Windows side, trying for the fourth time to mount my Ubuntu filesystem, I discovered something terrible. First off, as you may know, while Linux is very nice about foreign filesystems, Windows has remained blind and apathetic. I had previously managed to mount my Linux partitions on my old computer (which had an ext3 filesystem) using a third-party IFS driver that was actually for ext2, but as ext3 was backwards compatible, it worked okay.

Both last week and today, using four different IFS drivers, when I mounted my partition, all I could see were the root subdirectories (such as "home", "usr" and "bin") and nothing else. These folders didn't contain anything either. It was very frustrating until I remembered that I had ext4 and I realized that that was probably what was causing the problem. At that point it became very annoying because I would now have to either remember to transfer files while still on Linux or use a memory stick. It gets worse, however.

When I next booted into Ubuntu, I looked back to the screen to a horrible sight. "Why is it in terminal mode?" I wondered, "Oh god, is it a kernel panic?" It wasn't, but the error message wasn't much better. "ERROR MOUNTING ROOT PARTITION - LOADING MAINTENANCE PROMPT - PRESS CONTROL-D TO RETRY". I crossed my fingers and pressed ^D, but I just got the same error again, along with some more information, however. It now said "OMG RUN FSCK MANUALLY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (not verbatim :P). So I ran fsck, pressed ^D again and it now worked. It gave me quite a scare, though.

So, when deciding which filesystem to use, if you dual-boot with Windows, go with ext3 but otherwise, you should go with ext4. I really don't know what extents are but I'm just going to assume it's better in some way. :P