Incorrect owner flags for directoy hard link (id=xxxxxxxx)

While running Apple Disk Utility repair on my external USB drive (which I use primarily for Backup), I started getting hundreds and hundreds of warnings:

Incorrect owner flags for directoy hard link (id=xxxxxxxx)
(it should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)

where the id was a 8 digit number, like 19831030, that increased with each message. After running all night, it repair didn't seem any closer to finishing. So, I killed Disk Utility. I set the USB Drive as my startup drive (fortunately, it has OS X on it), and rebooted into safe mode (Cmd-S).

Then, I entered:
fsck_hfs -yprdf /dev/rdisk1s2

Fsck_hfs gave me similar messages, but seemed to be running faster. Indeed, it finished in about 47 minutes, with errors repaired. I ran it again, this time with no errors reported.

To finish and reboot, I entered:
shutdown -r now

After reboot, I switched the startup disk back to my built-in hard drive, and restarted. Once restarted, I ran Apple Disk Utility on the USB drive again. It found a minor error, and repaired it. Since then, it has been repairing fine.

I still have no idea why the USB drive started misbehaving. My guess is that one of the kids interrupted a backup by non-gracefully powering down the machine. Anyway, I hope this trick helps others.

Children: Agents of Chaos

I love kids. Especially toddlers. They are unpredictable and sometimes unstoppable. They haven't learned what things should and should not be pushed, thrown, leaned against, poured, stepped upon, eaten, flushed down the toilet, or inserted into the CD slot.

Unfashionable

This paraphrased quote from Randy Pausch's book, "The Last Lecture", caught my fancy:

"Fashion is commerce masquerading as hip"

My wife tells me that only a person lacking fashion sense would find this amusing.

Only the Criminals Need Fear...

I'm glad I'm not this guy: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-25-n65.html...

...yet.

A High Quality Knol

This week I published my first article on Google's new Knol service (http://knol.google.com/k/knol#). It was pretty easy. The topic is something near and dear to my heart (and my career) -- Bugs. More specifically, software defects. You can check out the article by clicking, "Setting Bug Severity and Priority". Let me know what you think.

Update: Moved article to Google Docs after Knol shut down: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12wzwGnKE0GG4ehEC0d2MYT8WrcTsX9AGe1ERRC11AIA/edit?pli=1#heading=h.vq50zqp6utsv.

Makes as much sense as...

Selling T-shirts at an Andrea Bocelli concert
Selling pork rinds at a Weight Watchers convention
Searching for "Dixie Dregs Lyrics"
Braille billboards
A roach coach pulling into a parking lot... at Google.

While riding home from work Friday, I saw a "Roach Coach" (i.e., a mobile diner, famous for serving greasy low-quality food) pulling into the parking lot at Google. My first thought was that the driver was lost (based on the confused look on her face). My second thought was that it didn't make much sense for a roach coach to be pulling into a Google parking lot. Which got me to thinking about things that don't make sense when you hear about them. Which led to me writing this post.

"Pretentious? Moi?"

Short article about humor on wired.com: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/st_holt/.