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Towing Scam | 01-28-2010 - USB Drive Data Recovery For a handful of years now we have had problems with people losing their data on their USB sticks. USB memory sticks are nice and small, but seem to lose their ability to store stuff after 2-4 years. We've used R-Undelete for years before USB sticks got big. The problems is that R-Undelete only helps with deleted files on hard drives. For the past year we've been recommending DataDoctors since it was the only option I knew of. In some cases, they can be really expensive. Yesterday, Mark decided to try to find another program that would work specificly with USB Drives. BadCopy Pro was program that stood out ahead of the pack. He used it yesterday with some really good success. Usually, windows would detect it as empty and just ask if you want to reformat. With BadCopy Pro it seemed to get past that error and actually let you recover the files. I still have some testingof my own to do with it, but it was definitely worth mention on my blog to remember in the future. (0) Comments 12-21-2009 - Setting up courier-pop3-ssl For a while now I've had users asking if they could have POP3/IMAP4. I've been dragging my feet cause it adds more of my time to support their login configuration. Funny questions like "What's my username?" and "What's mypassword?" and "What are my inbound andoutbound servers?". Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, just do it anyways. Well, I found a great tutorial that answered my questions in a clear conside way. Towards the end when it mentions that if you want to force SSL for the POP3 connection then just stop the courier-pop-ssl service... I felt stupid. The whole time I thought courier-pop-ssl rode on top of courier-pop. It even had a quick way to remove it from startup. (0) Comments 12-16-2009 - MakerBot Cupcake CNC I've had a way ton of things going on in my life to has slowed me down on posting on my blog. A couple days back my friend Chris told me about it. I kept on meaning to look at it, but kept on forgetting. Finally, I looked at it today. The MakerBot Cupcake CNC is awsome. 3D printers can run $50,000. This one you assemble yourself for under $1,000. It's been a while since I've been impressed with something like this. Basically, it allows you to print plastic parts based on a 3D frame image you create on a computer. It looks like they are having a hard time meeting demand since mid January is the next date for new shippments to go out. Even though I have a big family to support, I am going to save all my pennies to buy one. (0) Comments 10-16-2009 - Mersenne Prime Numbers Just recently I saw posted a new Mersenne Prime number had been found. I knew that prime numbers were important to encryption and the theory that numbers were so big that it would take forever for a computer to solve it by trial and error. What I didn't know was the EEF was paying $100,000 for the number found and there were two other prizes at $150,000 and $250,000 still unclaimed. Now for the real great part of the story, after reading through wikipedia it was posted that a Dell OptiPlex 745 was the machine used to find the latest Mersenne prime number solved. LOL! No way! On EEF's website itself it states that using super computers or ditributive processing seemed to be the only practical methods left for finding more Mersenne Prime numbers. I verified on UCLA's website just to make sure someone wasn't tampering with wikipedia. It appears it was just the main controller computer and that they had atleast 75 other machines in the lab running the program when they weren't in use. (0) Comments 09-04-2009 - Adobe Flex Probably over a year ago I had some friends entertaining the idea that it would be better to use flew then javascript. There reason for this was compatibility issues. This made sense since Internet Explorer and Firefox have little differences, that if you are not aware of can cause a huge headache. Then there is Safari on Mac which is another added combination of problems. Anyhow, here it is a year later. I was asking them "Did it fix the compatibility problem"? Their response was interesting. They said a browser compatibility problem is a rare issue. After thinking about it, it made sense to go that direction. For the most part, new computers are already loaded with the latest version of adobe flash. So even if at that moment a year ago not all machine would be instant compatible, over time they will be. This has caused me to re-evaluate what I know in the computer world. It is important enough that I have decided to learn flash on my own. The good news is that after you've learned 3 computer languages, then the rest seems to come a lot easier. I think this will put me at 11 computer languages, but who really is counting at that point? I have found a link to a webpage that gives an overall view of all the components of Flex, and thought I should make note of it. (0) Comments 08-06-2009 - Exim Catchall Account Why would someone want an exim catchall email account? For me I wanted to automate search features and different functionality via text messages and emails. I looked and looked for a really good tutorial. I finally found a good example that worked correctly. A good hint for auto-processing is the use the .forward file in exim to run a custom script or program. I still have to find a way to filter and ignore all the spammers out there. I can't imagine the load on my server I'll get if I don't filter the weasels. (0) Comments 07-31-2009 - Recovering Old Archive Files A couple months back my my boss Eric handed me some 3.5" diskettes and said that there were files from Lila on them. Lila was the founder of the company I work for. Lila has been passed away for sometime now, so recovering the files has a certain irreplaceable value to it. So I open up each disk and only see one file on each disk. They all take up the majority of the disk. The files are labeled CC90921A.001, CC90921A.002 and CC90921A.003. Good gravey! This didn't start out very easy. So I open up one of the files in a text edit to see if the header of the file can expalin anything. Tada! I found the following: NORTON Ver 1E After just a little search engine help I discover the following webpage explaining MSBACKUP and MWBACKUP. This is great, but neither program runs on XP these days. A custom DOS installation on a beater machine seems to be the best choice without causing problems with my main desktop machine. I was able to create a DOS 6.22 boot disk from bootdisk.com. On another diskette I copied the MSBACK62.EXE file from this MS-DOS resource page. It's self extraction file the unpacks a bunch of other files onto the c: drive. From there I was able to run msbackup.exe and start the ancient ms-dos program. The most important part to remember is that some catalog file is needed to recover. Make sure to use the last disk of the backup to rebuild the catalog file. There was talk about some spacing problems between DOS 6.2 and 6.22, but I was lucky enough not to experience those problems. (0) Comments 07-10-2009 - New Disease Fighting Idea With the stock market constantly down, and the world seeming to be falling apart... sometimes there is an idea that stands out with a shimmer of hope. After watching this video at TED I decided after months of nothing on my blog, it was definitely news worthy. It was worth the 2 minutes of my time. (0) Comments 04-23-2009 - UTF8 and Your Database Most people reading my blog probably are scratching their heads now at this entry. What the crap? UTF8? Well, let me explain. There has been a problem that has crept up with the postgres database that I've been using. Somewhere along the way they switched from UTF16 to UTF8. What is means is that the extra character set isn't compatible. Extra characters such as the ' at the end of cafe'. Typically, the ' is more tilted to the right on the end of cafe'. This is isn't available in UTF8. I found this php link that helps filter out non UTF8 characters. http://us3.php.net/utf8_encode (0) Comments 03-26-2009 - PHP Charts Class I found this pcharts class for php and had to make note of it. It looks like they provide the code for a class to make it easy to integrate graphs and pit charts into your website. Rewind that, dynamic graphs and charts. It was important enough to make not of it to come back to someday. Hopefully soon. (0) Comments
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