Recovering dead hard drives

I had my thinkpad hard drive in a hard drive enclosure and on the way into work one morning dropped it, oops, kinda rattles now when powered on.

I started looking to see if I could repair it, after opening it up (no I don't have a clean room) and finding that the arm was the rattling bit. So the data is probably still on there but I dunno how to get it off.

Anyway, here are some links if you are going through something similar

Scott Moulton runs a website called www.myharddrivedied.com which includes presentations from DefCon

He uses the http://runtime.org/ software

Checkout www.dl.tv series of episodes that interview Scott (1^st of the series starts at DV.tv episode 105)

 

They Write the Right Stuff

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.

An interesting article about how the shuttle team write software with almost zero bugs.

They Write the Right Stuff

Choosing a Video Game System

Given that the Playstation 3 was just released yesterday (but has been available in the US since Nivember 2006) here is a interesting review from Paul Thurrott Choosing a Video Game System

It compares PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii

Quick Summary

Best now: XBox
Probably best in future: PS3
Novelty Device: Wii

I had a chance to play with the Wii (projected onto a wall in a meeting room) for a while and it was great fun to play tennis and golf, but this thrill wears off quickly apparently if you actually buy one. Its interesting that his kids have voted with their fire button (so to speak) and left the Wii alone after the initial novelty wore off.

Amphibian King - Expert running shoe recommendations

OK, I'm no athlete but I do a bit of running, mostly 5 mile road running. I even went as far as considering doing the Dublin City marathon in 2005 but after doing my 1st 13 mile half marathon (in just over 2 hours) it soon called a halt to those ideas.

Anyway I'm getting back into a bit of training and was looking for new training runners and came across some boards.ie entries recommending Amphibian King in Bray.

I went there on Sunday and was talking to the owner Damian (who replies to the posts on boards.ie if you have any questions). They were busy enough so I made an appointment and came back in an hour. He measured my feet exactly and got me to run down his test track in my bare feet. He has a video camera recording your run and then plays back on a Apple iMac each step to see if you stride is an Under Pronator, Neutral Pronation, or Over pronator (also called supination which is only 3% of population). He shows you video examples of each type and compares your run to each. You can clearly see the different types as he shows frame by frame video of how your foot arches may be collapsing or rolling too much.

I had a fairly neutral run thank god so he recommended 3 different types of shoe (Asics, Brooks and N) each of which I tried on and ran down the track and viewed the correction of my gait afterwards using the video footage. There was very little difference between them when correcting my run but the asics came in a slightly wider fitting so felt more comfortable.

Its a great service and Damian is very knowledgeable and gave great advice. He spent over a half an hour with me and there was no sense of being rushed. It cost nothing for the advice, €130 for the pair of Asics Numbus trainers which is no more expensive than I would have paid in any major high street store in Dublin. If I had not heard his advice I would have bought the Asics Gel Kyano which I previously owned and are even more expensive but would be the wrong shoe for me.

With a 30 day return policy and €10 off any next purchase he seems to have all the bases covered.

VS 2005 random observations

Random observations about Visual Studio .Net 2005

- Turn on Quotes when editing in Source view of webform ASPX pages

Go to Tools-->Options menu item

Choose "Text Editor" Branch in tree on left then "HTML" then "Format". Tick on the "Insert attribute value quotes when typing". This works for all server controls and html elements so when you space after <asp:Textbox enabled=
it gives you a intellisense dropdown for true/false when you choose the option it automatically puts quotes around it. This saves you having to do into design view all the time to quote all your attributes. If you don't you get an error.

- Displaying Currency In datagrids

When trying to format the currency on the datagrids. When I applied DataFormatString="{0:c}" I expected it to display as €10.00 but it doesn't. You also have to add HtmlEncode="false" to the tag to get it to work.

- Debugging

I don't know if there is a bug in VS2005 but sometimes when you build a project and you are waiting on it to launch the internet browser window to start stepping through code nothing happens. BUT, move the mouse and all of a sudden it continues with the debugging and launches the window.

This sounds like random behaviour but all 4 of us on a development team (running on isolated machines with different installations of VS2005) have repeatedly encountered this. If you don't touch the mouse, the build process will just wait there until you do before launching the debugger, very strange.

Browser Wars, Internet explorer 7 Vs Firefox 2

I have been trying both of these browsers for a while now

Firefox

- New integrated spell checker is excellent, its like the MS Word one and
works by highlighting words for correction with red underline squiggle
- List of firefox add-ins (extensions) is still far superior to that of IE
- Integrated adblock support, still need to get filtersetG extension
- Still prefer the download manager support to IEs

Internet Explorer

- When a window pops up it gives the URL of the new popup, this is great for
security because you can see if its coming from the same site but also very
handy for development to see QueryString parameters etc that are usually
hidden
- New printing and print preview functionality allows you to graphically
change margins etc by dragging arrows
- Tabbing support is great, need to configure defaults to have all new
windows appearing as tabs of the 1 instance of IE though.
- Quick Tabs gives you a preview of the pages in each tab. Very nice,
especially for large numbers of tabs, this is available through Firefox
extension but its in IE by default.
- I don't like the way the refresh and stop buttons have been pushed to the
right away from the back/next buttons, seems counter intuitive
- RSS Feeds are now supported in favourites but seems to only pick up ATOM
feeds, have had a few problems subscribing to RSS feeds saying that they are
not supported