Category Archives: Cool Links

Ultimate Boot CD

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Ultimate Boot CD saves the day again! This time, my 500 GB drive with lots of important stuff backed up to it randomly wasn’t being detected. Windows saw it as a raw, unformated disk, and Linux wouldn’t mount it citing disk problems.

Of course, I had some problems at first… It’s a 500 GB drive, which is greater than 137 GB. It’s also mounted over USB, thanks to this brilliant piece of technology. So DOS-based file tools were understandably a bit confused. I ended up throwing the disk in my old desktop machine, where it was used as a “real” IDE drive instead of a USB external drive. And it turns out that most of the programs can cope with it being 500GB.

Of course, this is one of those classic problems where I have no idea what actually “fixed” it. I ran a bad block check (which takes forever on a 500GB disk!), and was actually somewhat irritated when it finished having found nary a bad block. But as I poked around looking at other options, I found that filesystem tools were showing me files on the drive. All my old data? Intact!

Seriously, burn yourself a copy of UBCD and keep it with your computers. It’ll save the day. Previously, I’ve used it to reset computer passwords for a professor, and to fix a broken (err, missing) bootloader.

The Time…

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I’m pretty OCD and thus run an NTP server on this server. (It should respond to any hostname on this box.) Despite the server being in Texas, I keep the timezone set to EST.

So here’s a page displaying the time. Granted, having a clock that’s accurate down to a fraction of a second (synced to the atomic clock) is no longer that impressive. But tell me you’ve never wished for an easy way to find the correct time… Now you know.

Lost in Translation

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Check out this radio‘s description. It’s got excess value and pettiness! And a phrase-lock-loop. And “LCD aphellotropic lights of showing screen,facile operation in dark” has got to mean “backlit screen.” (Facile is Spanish for “easy,” no your mom jokes.) Oh, and you can’t forget the Auto-charger rabbet. And it comes with a chargeable battery.

Anyone else confused? (Bonus points: I tried to copy-and-paste a quote, and it carried over the HTML tags, which included at one point….?!)

Simple English

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I had someone on a forum I frequent ask me a question. It’s in broken English and he explained that he’s not a native speaker. In my reply, I tried to be sensitive to that by speaking somewhat simply. Not in a demeaning way, but in my attempts to learn Spanish, I learned very quickly that short sentences expressing one simple idea are much simpler than elaborate sentences conveying a complex range of thoughts, such as this one.

And that reminded me of the Simple English Wikipedia project, which I think should get more attention. They treat it like another language: there’s English, Spanish, Simple English, etc. A really awesome idea in my opinion. (Although the sexual intercourse page–warning, has an illustration of the process–is still pretty sketchy… Maybe because it’s not a topic that lends itself to being explained in simple, direct terms?)

I think “Simple English” is something everyone should practice, though. As some of the pages on the simple.wikipedia.org site show, writing in a simple manner does not necessarily require coming across like a dimwit.

Performance++

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I guess I’ve become somewhat of a performance nut. Truthfully a lot of the time is spent doing things for nominal improvements: changing MySQL’s tmp directory to be in RAM has had no noticeable impact on performance, for example. Defragging log files doesn’t speed much up either.

I was reading a bit about LiteSpeed, though. It’s got a web GUI to control it, and is supposedly much faster than Apache. I’ve got it installed, but I’m having some permission issues right now. (The problem is that changing them will break Apache, so I’m going to have to try it with some insignificant pages first.) It’ll automatically build APC or eAccelerator in. It apparently has some improved security features, too, which is spiffy. And it’s compatible with Apache, so I don’t have to start from scratch.

The base version is free, too. (But not GPL.) The “Enterprise” edition is $349/year or $499 outright purchase. To me, it’s not worth it. But if I were a hosting company with many clients, I might be viewing it differently, especially if the performance is as good as they say.

MiniAjax — An Awesome Site

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Web developers, check it out. My one complaint is that this is an awkward assortment of things ranging from little JavaScript snippets to free (GPL) apps to proprietary, expensive applications. But there are some very cool ones in there. (Psst! Heatmap is running on this site! It’s going to take a while to build up enough data worth sharing, but I’ll let you know when the time comes.) Some of the other ones are going to make their way into some projects I’m working on.