Sez : Dan Wilson     March 31, 2010 7:00 AM

When a hard drive crashes, you can lose all your data. Corrupt hard drives happen out of the blue and for seemingly no good reason. If your hard drive fails, what can you do?

One option is to call a hard drive recovery company. If your data is worth a lot of money to you, you can pay a forensic computer company to get the data off your hard drive. Before you write a check though, try a little Do-It-Yourself first.

What is going on inside the hard drive is a bunch of little platters spinning at high speed. When data is accessed or written to the disk, a little head (sort of like on a record player) moves to the right spot and does it's magic. The space between the head and the platter is very very tiny. Freezing the hard drive will shrink the head and the platter ever so slightly, often allowing you to read data.

Here is how I got the data off of a failed hard drive.

1. Remove the hard drive from the computer.
2. Place the hard drive inside of a zip top freezer bag. (don't buy a cheap bag.)
3. Place the wrapped hard drive inside of ANOTHER zip top freezer bag. (yes, you need to do this) (see figure 1 below)
4. Place the double wrapped hard drive in the coldest part of your freezer.
5. Leave the hard drive in the freezer for 12 hours at least. You want it good and cold! (see figure 2 below)
6. Once very chilled, install the hard drive in your computer and start pulling off data. Begin with the most valuable data.
7. At some point, the hard drive will fail again. When it does, mark the last successfully copied data, pull out the hard drive, double wrap it again and stick it in the Chill Chest for another 12 hours.
8. You may need to do this a number of times to get all the data you want, or until the hard drive stops working completely.

Double Wrapped Hard Drive

Hard Drive in the Freezer

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Sez : Dan Wilson     February 15, 2010 1:20 PM

A new ColdFusion User Group has started in Northern Virginia. Run by Denny Springle, this group will serve Northern Virginia's ColdFusion and Flex developers. The initial NVCFUG meeting, topic "CF Coding Standards, Code Refactoring and Code Re-Use", is tomorrow night, Feb 16th in Fairfax, VA.

So, if you are anywhere remotely close to Fairfax, please come out and support this new group!

Check out Meeting Information and NVCFUG information.

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Sez : Dan Wilson     December 24, 2009 4:35 PM

While working on some Model-Glue documentation we needed to convert an open office document to TracWiki format. I'm not fluent in TracWiki and I certainly didn't want to manually format 30-40 pages. Thankfully, there is an Open Office --> TracWiki conversion macro that will automate pretty much all of it. It helps if you used the Styles features of Open Office because the TracWiki will be cleaner, but no worries, it'll convert it anyways if you didn't. Here is how it works.

1. Open the Open Office document you want to copy text from. We'll call it the Source document.
2. Set the macro permissions to Medium or Low by going to the menu -> Tools -> Options -> Open Office.org -> Security -> Macro Security
3. Download and open the Open Office Template Macro (ODT file)
4. Remove all text in the newly opened ODT file.
5. Highlight the text in your Source document, copy it, then paste it into the ODT file.
6. Press the button with the correct format, the text will be converted to the correct wiki format and copied to the clipboard. (English is on page 2)
7. Paste the text from the clipboard into the edit box in your wiki.

You now have converted Open Office document text to wiki format.

The conversion picked nearly everything. I manually cleaned up white space issues and also added in code blocks around all the source code sections, but I was very pleased with the amount of work handled by the OpenOfficeToTracWikiScript.

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Sez : Dan Wilson     October 30, 2009 7:48 AM

This year has been a year of turmoil and also a year of blessings. Most years are like that, though this one has been particularly full of highs and lows. I wanted to take a moment to give a shout out to the most courageous woman I know.

My cousin, Erika Bogan was badly injured in a terrible car crash in early 2002 when she was ejected from the vehicle, suffered major damage to her spinal cord and was in a coma for 10 weeks. When she woke up, she found she was paralyzed from the waist down. Imagine for a moment, what it would be like to be riding in a car one second, awake in a hospital the next second to be told 10 weeks had gone by, and by the way, you'll never walk again.

Erika had a long road ahead of her. She had a lot of choices to make and none of them were easy. You can read more on her story on her blog.

Erika became an advocate for people with disabilities and became active helping and inspiring others. This year, Erika competed for and won the Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina 2009 title. She then competed against tough competition to win Ms. Wheelchair America 2009 title. We are all very proud of her.

The mission of Ms. Wheelchair America is to provide an opportunity for women of achievement who happen to be wheelchair users to successfully educate and advocate for the more than 52 million Americans living with disabilities. In her short term as Ms. Wheelchair America, she's:

• Served as Participant, Mentor and Speaker at Camp Discovery
• Learned to Surf, through Life Rolls On (Yay for surfing)
• Honored as Guest speaker for the Real Economic Impact Tour Kick-off on behalf of the IRS and the NDI along with Robert David Hall from CSI, at the National Press Club in D.C.
• Visited the White House

As we roll (pun intended) into the Thanksgiving holiday, I'd like to pause and give thanks to Erika for her inspiration to me and to the many people she's impacted with her life.

If you are interested in learning more about Erika, the Ms. Wheelchair America competition or advocacy for the disabled, you can:

• You can become a fan of the Ms. Wheelchair America on their Facebook page.
• You can donate to Ms. Wheelchair America via Paypal.
• You can follow Erika on Twitter.
• You can read her blog.

Erika Crowned Ms. Wheelchair America

Erika Before Speaking to the IRS and the NDI

Erika with CSI's Robert David Hall

"Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew." -Guillaume Apollinaire

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Sez : Dan Wilson     October 22, 2009 9:29 AM

I'm from Florida, as you know. Florida is home to Alligators, a much maligned animal that generally doesn't deserve such an awful reputation. My brother wrote me to tell me of a recent gator encounter on the beach last night. I'll let him tell the story:

So the kids and I decide to go for a quick walk on the beach last night before homework and dinner...

As we are walking down the beach we see some commotion up ahead and decide to walk down there and see what's going on. As we get close I can see a 7 foot alligator and a guy with a cast net on the freaking beach! This is my second encounter with gators on the beach, the first was surfing on Vilano and a gator swam by outside the line up. This one is equally as weird!

We get up to this gator and you can tell it is very tired from swimming in the ocean, the wind and waves have just beat his butt cause he wants nothing to do with us unless we grab his tail, then he lets us know without question that he is pissed. Tail thrashing, hissing, chomping of the jaws, the whole bit. So a lifeguard comes up to us and while talking to him he says he has to call a trapper who will come and likely kill the gator because it will be seen as a nuisance to humans. So my kids and this other fellas kids start talking about how we should save the gator. So between the kids, tourists and hippy residents down on the beach this guy (Paul) and I become the "gator savers". It's at about this time my kids decide I'm freaking nutz for the plan we hatch.

[More]

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Sez : Dan Wilson     October 8, 2009 3:09 PM

This blog hit over a million total views today. Well, I think it was today, I can't be sure.

Last week I noticed the page count was somewhere near 990k and I wanted to get a screen shot of when the site rolled over to a cool million. It looks like I missed it by a few hundred. Oh well, I guess I can try to pay better attention when I hit a billion. (Heh.)

So thanks to those who come and read articles from nodans.com. I hope you found them as helpful to you as they were to me when I wrote them.

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Sez : Dan Wilson     July 23, 2009 5:15 AM

I wrote about wanting the Plantronics Voyager Pro bluetooth headset a few months ago and left the reader with the promise of a review. Well, here it is.

In short, the Plantronics Voyager Pro is well worth the money. I paid $100 when I purchased it from Best Buy (the only place that had it in stock) and the price meant this headset would have to perform in the top 5% of all headsets for me to be pleased. The good news is the headset excelled in all categories. Stop reading this now. Go get one.

Things I like

• Super long battery life
• Very quick charging
• Very comfortable wear
• Good noise cancelling for constant background noise
• Seems hard to break

Things I don't like

• --- editors note: do I have to make up something to put here before I release this article? I want people to think I'm fair and balanced, not in love with this headset, which I actually am.

The headset I'm replacing

I replaced an Aliph Jawbone 2, which I didn't like at all over the Jawbone 1. Both Jawbones have less battery power than the Plantronics Voyager Pro and both Jawbones are likely to break when placed in a pocket, unlike the Plantronics Voyager Pro. Both Jawbones are likely to pop loose from my ear as well, whereas the Plantronics Voyager Pro is much more likely to stay on my ear, even if I shake my head like a dog, or a death metal rocker.

Info On The Plantronics Voyager Pro

If you want, you can watch this simple video demonstration of the Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset.

It looks like the price is holding around $99 dollars, pretty much what I paid for it. See results and reviews at the Google Products page for the Plantronics Voyager Pro so you might as well head to the local Best Buy and pick one up. After 2 months of continual use, I am completely happy with the Plantronics Voyager Pro and don't miss either my Jawbone 1 or my Jawbone 2 in the least.

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Sez : Dan Wilson     May 31, 2009 7:29 PM

I live and die by bluetooth headsets. Holding the phone up to my ear during a long conversation is as annoying as being covered in sugar water and buried in a Fire Ant hill. I'm just not very happy doing it.

I loved the Aliph Jawbone Headset. Apart from some issues with the charger, that was the most perfect headset ever invented. The Aliph Jawbone 2 was demonstrably worse in all ways, including call quality. I've been on the hunt for a new headset ever since.

Today I found the Plantronics Voyager Pro and am ordering it right now. Rather than bore you with the details of how the Plantronics Voyager Pro deals with a barrage of noise, a cacophony of wind and other call quality reducers, I'll leave it to you to watch this simple video demonstration of the Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset.

Want one?

It seems Best Buy is the exclusive source right now. Amazon shows a month back order. I'm going to get mine from Best Buy today. If there is enough interest from the readers of this blog, I'll post periodic reviews of the Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset. Whaddya say? Do you guys/girls care about what I think of this product?

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Sez : Dan Wilson     February 23, 2009 7:49 PM

Through an accident, I blame the dog for this one, my entire documents folder got deleted this morning. To compound the issue, the folder was 'too big' for the wimpy Recycle Bin, so the files were permanently deleted. When I realized what had happened, I nearly went into shock.

Customer documentation, contracts, important pictures of aforementioned dog, all down the drain. I'm definitely going to have a bad day now...I thought.

After normal breathing resumed, I learned 2 things.

• System Restore does not help unrecover files
• I really should have backed up my computer

I'm calmly writing this blog post because I found Free Undelete by Recoveronix Ltd. Free Undelete will look for deleted files and directories and restore them to their former glory. Brilliantly simple to use, and priced at $0 for personal use, I am a fan for life.

Recoveronix Ltd has an entire suite of recovery products like:

• Recover Corrupted Word Document
• Repairs corrupted Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xla).
• Repairs corrupted Outlook mailboxes (.pst). The program also supports Exchange Offline Storage Files (.ost).
• Undeletes files from Outlook mailboxes. Recovery of messages removed from Deleted Items folder is supported for most occasions, but cannot be guaranteed.
• Repairs corrupted MySQL databases (.myd, .myi). Supported MySQL versions: 5.x, 4.x, 3.x, 2.x and 1.x
• Repairs corrupted Photoshop drawings (.pdd, .psd). Supported Photoshop versions: CS, 7.x, 6.x, 5.x, 4.x and 3.x
• Repairs corrupted PDF documents (.pdf). Supported are all PDF versions.

Get familiar with this list. I know grad students that would give their right arm to get back a mistakenly deleted thesis.

Important!! Read This!!

If you are furiously downloading Free Undelete right now to recover files of your own, pay attention to the following tips from the FreeUndelete folks:

Proper Usage Techniques

A deleted file is essentially an area on disk designated as free and ready to accept data (such as contents of some other file). Luckily, unless the area has already been overwritten, it still holds the contents of the deleted file. Due to this fact it is possible to undelete files.

This fact also dictates the following procedure for using FreeUndelete:

1. Stop any activity on the disk you are going to undelete files from! Remember that writing to that disk can damage the contents of the deleted files. Examples of disastrous activity include: copying files to the disk, installing programs there or running programs that use the disk as their swap media.
2. Download and install FreeUndelete. Whenever possible, save the setup executable and install the program to a disk that does not hold files you need to undelete.
3. Run and use FreeUndelete.
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Sez : Dan Wilson     January 26, 2009 10:57 PM

There are a number of ways to speed up a website. An easy one would be to compress asset files and compact the files. This has been widely done for Javascript files with popular tools such as JSMIN and Packer.

The general idea behind compression/combination is to reduce the number of characters that must be sent over the wire as well as reduce the number of HTTP calls that must be made. Each time a browser gets a request to download a JS file, there is a certain amount of overhead incurred in negotiating and completing the HTTP request. Combining all JS files into one file is a great way to speed up a web application.

Everyone Already Knows This, Right?

Probably. However, CSS files can often be as numerous and verbose as Javascript files. How come there no public outcry for CSS compression/combination?

There happens to be a compressor/combinator that handles CSS files, the YUI Compressor. For most web application developers, YUI Compressor is an annoying tool to use because, as a java application, it must be installed and run from the command line. Yuck!, right?

Scriptalizer, developed by ColdFusion luminary Aaron Lynch, is a web front end for the YUI compressor. Scriptalizer has handled Javascript compression/combination for a while now and is a nicely designed, easy to use tool. Aaron recently added support for CSS compression/combination. Now, dealing with CSS files is as simple as dealing with JS files.

How well does it work?

I added all 14 CSS files from The Health Challenge and compressed/combined them with Scriptalizer. Here are the results:

• Number of Files Before: 14
• File Size of All Files: 35.42 KB
• Number of Files After: 1
• File Size of All Files: 19.96 KB

As you can see, the reduction was significant. Not only have I cut the size of my CSS assets by ~50%, I have also removed 13 HTTP connections.

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