The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)

It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".

To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".

I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!

"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"

"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."

"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."

"Ok. Then call me when your done."

I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.

I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.

I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!

A bit longer rant, somehow triggered by the end of this rant:

https://devrant.com/rants/7145365/...

The discussion revolved around strpos returning false or a positive integer.

Instead of an Option or a Exception.

I said I'm a sucker for exception, but I'm also a sucker for typing.

Which is something most languages lack - except the lower level ones like C / C++.

I always loved languages which have unsigned and signed types.

There, I said it... :) I know that signed / unsigned is controversial, Google immediately leads to blog entries screaming bloody murder because unsigned can overflow – or underflow, if someone tries to use a -1on an unsigned integer.

Note that my love is only meant for numeric types, unsigned / signed char is ... a whole can of insanity on its own.

https://phoronix.com/news/...

If you wanna know more.

Back to the strpos problem, now with my secret love exposed:

strpos works on a single string, where a string is a sequence of chars starting with 0.

0 is a positive integer.

In case the needle (char that should be looked up in the string) cannot be found in the haystack (the string), PHP returns "false".

This leads to the necessity of explicitly checking the type as "0" (beginning of string, a string position)... So strpos !== false.

PHP interprets 0 as false, any other integer value is true.

In the discussion, the suggestion came up to return -1 if a value could not be found – which some languages do, for example Scala.

Now I said I have a love for unsigned & signed integers vs. just signed integers...

Can you guess why the -1 bothers me very much?

Because it's a value that's illogical.

A search in a sequence that is indexed by 0 can only have 0 or more elements, not less than zero elements.

-1 refers to a position in the sequence that *cannot* exist.

Which is - of course - the reason -1 was chosen as a return value for false, but it still annoys me.

An unsigned integer with an exception would be my love as a return value, mostly because an unsigned integer represents the return value *best*. After all, the sequence can only return a value of 0 ... X.

*sigh*

Yes, I know I'm weird.

I'm also missing unsigned in Postgres, which was more or less not implemented because it's not in the SQL standard...

*sob*

I read this rant about IE (https://www.devrant.io/rants/514347) but could not relate to it (I use Linux MS suckers!) So I thought I'd post a browser rant of my own, and this time it is about Chrome (or Blink since it also affects Opera). Whenever I start typing localhost Chrome suggests "localhost" but when I click this suggestion it takes me to a Google search result when all I really wanted was to test a webapp on my dev box. This is very annoying every time.