As I am now the maintainer of F-Spot, I’d like to talk to anyone interested. I’ll be around for most of the conference day, come and see me.

We’ve got big plans lined up, more on that later!

I’m currently struggling with an utterly annoying problem that’s preventing me to do photo processing. Since I’m a photographer for some of my time, that’s really unfortunate.

Here’s the deal: I have a USB Hard Disk, a Western Digital Passport Elite (320Gb) and no matter what filesystem I put on it, after a day or two of working, it becomes corrupted.

I’ve run a bad blocks test (no problems), I make sure I unmount it cleanly each and every time and I’ve been extra careful with the drive.

I don’t recall this happening a few months ago (on Ubuntu Hardy), but recently it has started happening repeatedly (now running Intrepid).

I have no clue what causes this, but when it happens, I usually see something like this in dmesg:


[108400.182508] hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 3
[108400.288094] hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
[108400.296192] usb 4-3: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 33
[108446.992602] hub 4-0:1.0: over-current change on port 3
[108447.096102] hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
[108447.104075] usb 4-3: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 33
[108828.704908] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): htree_dirblock_to_tree: bad entry in directory #14770193: rec_len is smaller than minimal - offset=0, inode=0, rec_len=0, name_len=0
[108828.707727] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): htree_dirblock_to_tree: bad entry in directory #14770199: rec_len is smaller than minimal - offset=0, inode=0, rec_len=0, name_len=0


Does anyone have a clue what might be affecting me? Is this my hardware, or is something wrong with my software?

Western Digital Passport Elite (320Gb)

Pink, sweet!

While we could wait until this lands through the new dcraw (bug opened), some of us want to develop pictures now.

For those, I’ve built a patched ufraw. It’s retrievable through my Ubuntu PPA. Enjoy!