unhandledexception.net

I have just finished recovering data from two failed Maxtor drives. One is a customer’s PC, the other one’s mine.

I bought my customer a Western Digital, as Microbytes were short on Seagate drives, and Western Digital is pretty reliable as far as I am concerned, as I only needed to replace 3, compared to 10+ Maxtor drives. As I mentionned in an earlier post, they were pretty adamant about me trying to save their backed-up data, and the fact that I didn’t feel like going through another windows installation, so I set out to attempt a Norton Ghost clone. I have used Norton Ghost in the past, to clone my dad’s drive last summer when it failed (yes, it was a Maxtor). I tried the latest Norton, version 10, and I didn’t like it much, so I reverted to the 2003 bootable floppy. I really don’t know what the hell they did to version 10, but it seems like the interface was so bloated and dumbed-down that even I could not understand it. Finally I found an option that allows me to run the old version of it, which I am familiar with, but I reverted to the previous version because the boot CD took about 15 minutes to load somekind of a Windows kernel that reboots every 24 hours.

Anyway, I pop in the Ghost 2003 boot floppy and boot up the machine. It did not work, so I enabled the “Forces to continue cloning even if source contains bad clusters.” option, started the cloning and went to bed. The next morning a “Cloning successful” message appears. I turn off the machine and pop out the old Maxtor, and it starts up normally. I run a scandisk just to see if everything is good, and it seems pretty good.

As for my drive, things were a little more difficult, due to errors in reading the Master File Table. So, I try a couple of times, and it ended up seeing the drive instead of closing. I enable the same option to continue cloning even if there are bad clusters. I wake up at night and decide to check out the progress, and I find a message informing me that the MFT is corrupt. Yes I know, so it continues. The next morning, it still ain’t finished, so I go back to bed. Then when I woke up again around noon, the cloning was complete. In disbelief, I put it in my comp. Windows recognizes it, asks to reboot and perforns a CHKDISK to clean up the file table. It reboots, and I find out that most of my data was safe. So that means I will be shipping that drive back to Maxtor today.

So, if you need to clone an ailing drive, Norton Ghost is the tool. Obviously, it’s not a replacement for a backup!

This week, the Concordia CSU is having their dreaded annual elections again. Thankfully, this year, somebody got smart and prevented the usual poster crazyness. Posters are now allowed only on designated billboards, so the walls and escalators are not plastered with crap as they used to.

I hate the CSU. I want it completely dismantled. It just stands for everything I hate, and I, along with most engineers aren’t getting anything from it. If I had a choice, I’d have opted out the day I set foot on campus, but somehow a disposition in Quebec’s labor code forces everybody to be part of the company union, if there is one, and apparently that applies to students. Every semester they steal a few dollars away per credit, which we don’t see comming back:

• The CSU runs a soup kitchen called “the People’s Potato”. Concordia University is a school, not a church or welfare organization, thus, why the hell are they using our tuition money, which students don’t have a lot, to feed the downtown bums? Every day, students and other people line up, blocking the hallways, flaunting their fashion wear and iPods to get free vegan food.
• The CSU is a member of some anarchist pan-canadian student groups that believe they are entitled to everything for free. One of the things they want for free is education. So, once in awhile they organize rallies to harass the school and/or the government to obtain what they want, without regard to the views of the students they represent. Last year, they even got to declare a strike. I am sorry, but I am in engineering, and I must WORK to get my degree. Quebec holds the record for the lowest-priced education in the world! Yet these brats want it all free. Communists? No, I don’t think they would enjoy spending their summers collecting fruits. They are hippies, dirty hippies.

In any case, there are two slates running, Experience and Conscious, or, respectively, right or left.

Unfortunately, here in Montreal, as in many places around the world, residential high speed Internet is offered by the telecommunications indusrty, an indusrty run by business clobs that treat their customers as if they were a simple commodity they could not care less about. They charge the price they want, offer the quality service they want, and treat their customers the way they want.

For example, I am with Videotron, on their High Speed package. It costs about 40$ a month (we also subscribe to cable TV), you get 20 GB download and 10 GB upload (for extra bandwith you use, you pay extra) a 20 MB inbox and 5 MB of web space. They officially prohibit running servers, and have blocked some ports (like port 80) in order to prevent the customer from running a web server. Although they knew I was running (and still am) running several services (mainly for my own use, such as SSHing and Remote Desktop, and a webserver and SQL server for application development.

The service they offer is really targetted for the “average” family that has one computer and are using it for the kids to do their homework, internet browsing, and “legal” music downloading into their iPods with these white “mug-me” earbuds that they love to flash everywhere. DNS lookup speed? who cares! Pings? WTF are these? Latency? What are you talking about. SSH? Never heard about that! Somehow this stuff makes me resent the rapid expansion of the Internet and has me dreaming about the Internet still being a place reserved exclusively for geeks and beginners would be cluelessly staring at the bash prompt for years.

This morning (well rather yesterday when I was working out) I decided I’ve had enough of my old earbuds, and I was going to buy new ones this morning. I had these Sony earbuds for awhile now I picked up at a boxing day sale at Future Shop. They are really good, except for the fact that I need to wear them with the tissue cushions so that they actually stay in my ear, and that these cushions always came off, so I had to crazy-glue them on, which caused them to disintergrate. Also, the connector was not silver, causing it to react with the gold-plated connectior of my MP3 player, which kills the sound.

So I settled on some Panasonic earbuds with a new-age design, which consist of a tube that direct the sound straight into your ear canal, and a rubber pad to make it more comfortable. At 40$, they were pretty expensive, but the annoying salesman told me that they were the best ones around. I don’t care much about how much I’m going to pay. Since I am using them for the most part of the day, they gotta be good. I pretty much want them to be loud, because an MP3 player running on a singe AAA battery cannot output that much power, and I also want them to have good bass response, because I like bass.

So, I setled on these Panasonic ones. They were

H am just a few months shy of having completed 3 out of 4 years of my software engineering program. I have been through the ‘filter’ courses – courses that are there simply to filter out students that are not competent enough to complete the program. Although many people think these courses are useless since you can always refer to these notions later when you need them, but I agree with filtering people, so as to prevent any dumbing-down of more advanced courses. I like what I am doing, software engineering. I like to be challenged. Give me the tools I need, i.e. the knowledge, references, etc., and I sure can come up with something great!

I am just finished doing an open book midterm, a rarity in my program. Actually, it was an open laptop midterm! The focus was not on being able to spit out certain notions, but to be able to use these notions relating to user interfaces to comment on stuff. This is much more interesting, and useful. I think I did great, read the questions properly, and answered as completely as I could. We’ll see what that does One think I am sure of is that they will be examined by an open-minded prof that knows his stuff.

Today, March 6, 2006, your RealAge is 30.4!

What’s making me younger:

Distances traveled
Good oral hygiene
Limited or no secondhand smoke exposure
Parents relationship
Medication use
Lycopene levels
Diverse diet
Healthy resting heart rate
Potassium levels
Optimal grain level
Correct fruit servings
Strength training level
No drinking and driving
Nonsmoker

What’s making me older:

Low vegetable intake
Low unsaturated fat
Lack of flexibility exercises
Flossing habits
Low omega-3 intake
Folic acid intake
Daily vitamin
High BMI
Driving speeds
High red meat intake
Lack of daily breakfast
Blood pressure control
Calcium intake
Vitamin E intake
Vitamin C intake
Have cholesterol level measured
Social network and stress
Too much sleep

Up to now, I have to say that Gmail has proven to be a great, reliable e-mail service.

Lately, however, there has been an introduction of new features, some which I am not very fond of.

About 2 weeks ago I embarked on a diet to lose some weight. I used to eat like crazy, probably swallowing 5000 calories worth of food in one day. I’d binge on junk food, go for second portions, frequently eat fast food, and engaging in all sorts of unhealthy eating habits. Well that’s what made Spiro so… big!

So, right now I am limiting my calorie intake, and I watch what I eat. Actually, it feels weird and obsessive now that I remember, and can tell you exactly what I eat during the day, without really thinking about it. It’s actually not as difficult as I though it would be. The more difficult part is leaving the kitchen after I’m done eating, but once I’m out of there, I don’t go back. At times I do feel hungry though, particularly on my way home from school when I finish late, and if I go to bed too late. In that case I have to bring along a healthy snack, because everything available at Concordia’s vending machines, except for diet soda, is just calorie-packed junk food. Seriously, they should do something about that!

Anyway, I have lost 9 pounds since I started regularly weighing myself on Sept. 22, so my Excel spreadsheet tells me (mm… maybe I should consider using google spreadsheets for that)… Interessant…

I have bashed Microsoft over and over again, in past years for their laughable security. Security is one issue that has hit them real hard. Today, I am convinced that they have definately gotten the message, and they are definately doing something about it. I think their efforts are a great deal or progress towards safe computing.

One of these elements is locking down the kernel, which is the core of the operating system. This will thwart a lot of threats that attempt to gain control of the system by injecting themselves in the kernel. Why do they want to do that is simple. By modifying the kernel, these threats can hijack your system and operate in stealth mode, hiding their files, their processes in memory, spy on you and do all sorts of nasty things.

The only problem though, is with antivirus companies. They will not be able to legitimately access the kernel for their functionning. They won’t be able to gauge people anymore with their stupid expensive software, so of course they are not happy..

I always thought that Windows should have an antivirus and firewall integrated in it, as it would solve many problems for beginners that don’t know their way around and are constantly told by salespeople thay they must by software X to solve problem Y. After all, Windows includes Media Player, Internet Explorer, WordPad, MSN Messenger, and all sorts of utilities.

I believe this antitrust thing has gone too far. One thing I have a problem with is politicians telling software people what to do. Politicians and courts should admit that computers are not their field and back off. We live in a free society, and thus it’s a company’s sole perogative to decide what products they are going to release and what they will be made of.