Absolved a practical C training within the scope of my studies. It was really trivial, and mostly boiled down to abusing printf/scanf. Scored 100% in roughly 40% of the available time. vim is such a great tool. Let’s see how I work out in the first few real tests, namely circuitry, electrophysics and advanced maths for engineers.
Crispin felt kind enough to provide me with an USB stick to implement a progress dialog for unmount operations in Nautilus. It just cost 60 pence to send it from the UK to Germany by air mail. Tempi Mutantur. The issue is that users won’t know when data is entirely written to the disk (which is done async), and it is safe to remove the drive. Filed a bug report against GnomeVFS, because it doesn’t tell us when the drive is really ready to be removed. I really wonder whether as of writing there is any solution to this problem in the kernel/HAL/GnomeVFS stack.
Although far fetched, if the device icon showed when it was busy copying stuff (mini progress bar, red blinkenlights ect..) the user would hopefully be a lot more aware that copying was happening, and be cautious about removing it. At the moment device unmounting seems like a pointless task with no motive behind it to most users.
I ran into a similiar problem a few years ago with floppy disquetes.
We were runing an Internet Cafe with all the PC’s running linux. Client’s eject the disquete on a whim and (correctly) expect all their data to be intact. A solution may be to not use async. That seems to be the way the ms windows dealt with the problem, anyway.
The real problem is when the device is mounted without the sync option (because sync is bad for performance and reduces the life of the usb memory). Last Chrismas, I got a small usb key with a red led indicating the activity. I was chocked to discover that after copying about 100MB, the key was still syncing for about 5m (5 MINUTES) after it was reported unmounted by the mount applet.