File Recovery

I ended up using 2 file recovery tools, magicrescue and foremost. Basically they grep through the disk blocks looking for specific patterns. This creates a huge amount of data to look through, but it seems like I was lucky and most (if not all) of the data was recovered. I tried using the sleuthkit some, and it seemed neat, but I didn't see how to apply the information it provided.

Starting out with Java by Gaddis

I had high hopes for this book based on the subtitle of from control structures through objects, but so far I have been disappointed. Instead of focusing on the design/control structures of a program it has begun with equal treatment to objects and the other nuts and bolts of running programs. Superfluous topics like combined assignment operators are included, and the order of precedence charts are wrong.

Chapter 3 is better, but still has extra topics like the conditional operator and printf.

Chapter 4 is ok, I would prefer to focus on only one type of loop to start.

I didn't look at detail at the rest of the book. In some ways I think I might prefer a book that used a restricted subset of Java and was algorithm oriented. A different language like Python or Perl might also be more palpable, but is not an option at this point.

academic database

I did an overhaul of the academic database this weekend, it took longer than I expected, but it made the feedback files more uniform and clear.

angel and csv

I had problem with angel exporting data, poorly. For some reason it lost some of the data, I think it had to do with a strange csv formatting problem, but it was unclear. It was annoying in any event. In hindsight, perhaps next time I will not export the answers, just the results. That should have less problems.

backup problem on www

I made room on www for some of the archived files on server, because server was running out of space. I got rid of the old operating system, and unfortunately the home directories. I had forgotten that I had not moved those over yet. Salvador may have lost some files, I'm not sure, I've emailed him and he wasn't sure. Most of the data was over written, but there are actually some tools to do recovery now, so if he needs to I'll give it a shot.

Oh, and I fixed the backup problem on www. It is unclear if it was because of space problems, or a problem with the script, but I got it working now. I'm still unhappy with the backup scheme in place, but I don't have time to devote to a more comprehensive scheme.

Resizing a partition

One of the machines that has been causing problems is finally usable. There is a larger hard drive on it, so I'm going to try to set it up so there are two partitions for the os and one for booting in an attempt to make transitions from one version of the operating system to another more smooth.

First I am going to resize the partition so I can make new ones.
I am using the guide at:
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions

Resizing a partition

One of the machines that has been causing problems is finally usable. There is a larger hard drive on it, so I'm going to try to set it up so there are two partitions for the os and one for booting in an attempt to make transitions from one version of the operating system to another more smooth.

First I am going to resize the partition so I can make new ones.
I am using the guide at:
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions