one of my external hard drives, the one with EVERYTHING I REALLY, REALLY WANT on it has died…

Im sure this happens to many people, and often. What is one to do in a case like this?

Did you backup?

• OPTION 1: If it’s your backup drive that failed, the data will most likely still be on the related computer. Make another copy or backup. Problem solved.
• OPTION 2: If it’s not a backup drive that failed, do you have a backup of it? If not start backing up in future. Think about your recovery options, and the cost involved.

Data recovery options

Ok so you didn’t have a backup, and it’s critical data. If you manage to recover your data, you should consider that prevention is better than a cure.

• OPTION A: If it’s a mac, I use and can recommend Data Rescue by Prosoft Engineering. This software allows you to recover data from the HDD and costs about USD$100. You will need another external HDD (preferably two to clone your corrupt drive first) to recover data to. DON’T use the broken hard drive until the software and new HDD(s) are ready to go. This will cost about $300 for two new disks and the software but has no guarantee it will work, especially if there has been a catastrophic hardware failure.
  • if it’s windows, I can’t and/or wont be able to help or give free advice. Try a windows data recovery program as per option 3. If you want to engage the services of a professional to recover on windows expect $150 per hour.
  • Is it Linux, BSD or UNIX? If you disk is unmounted then try fsck -fy <yourdiskdevicename>
• OPTION B: Pay a professional data forensic service company upwards of $1000 to recover your data. Some companies, such as Prosoft Eng, may perform this task at a budget rate.

How much is the data worth to you?

If it’s not worth between $300 (for the software + new disk solution) to $1000+ then a last ditch effort is put the HDD in the freezer for 10 mins and see if it works long enough to get your essential data off it. Freezing it may permanently destroy the disk so I accept no liabilty for offering this advice.

Future prevention

Disks fail, it’s just a matter of time as to when. Always have at least one backup of ALL your data you can’t afford to lose. On a Mac, it’s as simple as buying an external disk that is about 1.5 times the size of your computers Hard drive, and plugging it in. The Mac will ask if you want to start backing up – and all you have to do is leave it plugged in when you use your Mac.

Even better is to backup in duplicate or triplicate with a copy “offsite“, e.g. at another location. Update backups regularly, with time between backups as long as you an afford to miss data. On a Mac, you can have one hard drive always plugged in, backing up with Apple’s Time Machine. Introduce a second Hard drive that you “clone” once a week using Carbon Copy Cloner, and leave that drive locked up at work. Now you have a primary backup and an offsite secondary backup.

Use paid “cloud” backup services such as dropbox (which I use for free), mozy, BackBlaze or iDrive. These will sync or backup your valuable data automatically into the “cloud”, and even in some cases between computers.

Good luck!

• Vendor: Novatel Wireless Inc.
• Model: GSM
• APN: 3netaccess
• CID: 1

I installed Snow Leopard as an Upgrade (not a fresh install) after having a CCC backup and a Time machine backup in place.

When I plugged in my 3 expresscard, 10.6 detects the card, initialises and populates the WWAN icon with “Telstra 3G: Not Configured”.

It detects the card as a “Novatel Wireless HSDPA Modem”, and automatically configures the Network Advanced settings of the card, as shown:

The question is: Why is the APN telstra.datapack setup as default?

I am able to change the APN to 3netaccess, which results in a successful connection to 3:

Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Initializing phone: ATE0V1&F&D2&C1S0=0
Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Initializing PDP context: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess"
Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Initializing with secondary command: AT$NWPDN=0
Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Dialing: ATD*99***1#
Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Waiting for connection
Wed Sep  2 15:38:25 2009 : Connection established
Wed Sep  2 15:38:28 2009 : Serial connection established.
Wed Sep  2 15:38:28 2009 : Using interface ppp0
Wed Sep  2 15:38:28 2009 : Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/cu.wwan
Wed Sep  2 15:38:32 2009 : Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.***.***
Wed Sep  2 15:38:32 2009 : local  IP address 115.130.***.***
Wed Sep  2 15:38:32 2009 : remote IP address 10.64.***.***
Wed Sep  2 15:38:32 2009 : primary   DNS address 202.124.68.182
Wed Sep  2 15:38:32 2009 : secondary DNS address 202.124.65.22

The annoying thing is the WWAN menu still shows Telstra when connected.


Looking at the WWAN system file:

cd /System/Library/Extensions/IOSerialFamily.kext/\
Contents/PlugIns/AppleWWANSupport.kext/Contents/\
Resources/
less countryCodes.plist

“The agreement means Yellow™ advertisers can now potentially be found by more customers than ever before. They can be found in our print and online directories, over the phone, in a growing range of satellite navigation devices, on mobile phones, on search engines and on online mapping sites, which now includes the popular Google Maps”

Currently Google Maps in Australia uses the True Local business listings. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this, it misses out on the businesses who traditionally list on Yellow Pages.

In Australia it is considered a must to list your business using Yellow Pages since these are printed yearly and a copy delivered to every household (being regionally specific). The businesses who already list will automatically gain the benefit and not be charged any additional fees to appear on Google maps. With the rise of mobile devices using Google maps, such as the iPhone, the end user and the business both benefit from on the spot, realtime, and often locational based business searches.

The use of the business listings commences in the first Quarter of 2009.

When Bigpond started offering music sales a few years ago I was an early adopter and purchased music from their offerings. However it soon became obvious that the windows media DRM was a difficult beast to deal with. Windows users know only too well the pain of having to rebuild/reinstall a bloated operating system; the licensing for the Bigpond music files where often lost if you rebuilt windows and did NOT backup your DRM licences.

So I took the lesser of two evils and signed up to the Apple iTunes Music Store (iTMS), where although under a DRM system the licencing was more relaxed (5 Computers, unlimited iPods, burn to CD). Apple, specifically Steve Jobs, wrote about the restrictiveness that is Digital Rights Management, and soon thereafter started offering MP3 downloads. It took the music studios to start understanding the whole premise that DRM was not where the future lay.

Fast forward to August 2008, and today Telstra’s Now We Are Talking site has announced that MP3s are now on offer from Bigpond Music. Not only are they now DRM free, but they encode at a minimum of 256Kbps and up to 320Kbps for their audio tracks. For the end user this means close to if not indistinguishable from CD audio quality. The procrastinators I know who have shunned digital music no longer have an excuse to legally purchase their music.

Pricing is the same as the iTMS being AUD$1.69 per track and a similar price for albums. Downloads for Bigpond internet customers are also uncharged for data usage. A double bonus for some.

While I think purchasing music in this fashion is a good thing for the end user; if you care about the artists you should consider Magnatune. You wont find the latest top 10 tracks there but you will find fantastic music where the artist gets a large amount of the purchase price. They also allow you to pay an amount you choose for an album, or sign up for monthly unlimited downloads and streaming.

You can start purchasing MP3 music from Bigpond Music right away. Although it is not the entire catalogue for now, this is a correct step for Telstra in the right direction. Music sales figures do not lie!

In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) currently offers 5GB when you login into their product.

The counter on the gmail login page shows Over 7005.197177 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message. Well they are right there….. I don’t need to delete anything at this time – and probably never will.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders what it means to have your entire archive of communications stored in one place. Who can really access that 7 GigaBytes of mail, on US based servers in the current world climate.

The geek in me says “Its not really 7GB yet! GibiBytes people – Base-2!!!”

A Podiobook is an Audiobook delivered via a podcast. Evo Terra coined the phrase back in 2005 when podcasting was in its infancy. 2005 you say? Well sometimes I take a bit of time to come around to something good.

I’ve started listening to my first one. Descent – Book one of the 7th Son series by J.C. Hutchins (click through on that link to start listening to it as well).

The cool thing about this is when you sign up (instead of just subscribing to the feed I linked above) you can actually set how often the audio chapters get released to you. One a day or longer – and best of all it is Free!!! Well if you like the book you can and should donate an amount to podiobooks, and the author will get 75% of your donation.

Stuck on a train 3 hours a day? Run out of podcasts? Sick of your Music? Try a Podiobook.

I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.

The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:

Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres

Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.

Let me know how the site performs on the VM.

Seeing as it is International WordPress Day, I’ve written a new WordPress plugin that auto links a twitter at username (like @lantrix) in a post automatically.

Developed initally on WordPress 2.3, it has successfully been tested on WordPress 2.7.1.

Most of the other plugins out there either did this only in their “badge” or “widget” or where too full featured. This is a simple and quick plugin to get links in place to twitter people for the lazy blogger.

Visit my plugin page, give it a try and let me know what you think.

An example of this is the UK BBC news site, who a few months ago reported that their English site is available inside China for first time in a decade; but the point of interest is that the BBC Chinese site is also available for use within China.

A quick search, by my friend from within China, for tiananmen, dalai lama and taiwan yields links to articles that seems to make it evident that the so called Red Firewall doesn’t reset connections anymore.

Is this a show to the world that China is no longer the perceived oppressor of their own peoples right to information? A way to “shake-hands” with the world before the upcoming Olympics? This possible change in policy or network filtering may re-enable other people to test the status of the filtering once again.

Whether it will stay that way permanently remains to be seen.

People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading

After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006. This entry added information about Baron Cohen working for investment bank Goldman Sachs prior to becoming famous as an actor.

Three days later, on November the 17th 2006 an article appeared in the Independent with the same information. The article included Baron Cohen’s career information almost as a footnote, at the end of the article – possibly using Wikipedia as the source of his “Goldman Sachs” career and other family information.

On November the 21st 2006 a second anonymous user added information to the Wikipedia entry on Baron Cohen that his early career included work at not only Goldman Sachs, but JP Morgan. Doing a lookup on this users IP address shows that it belongs to an address block allocated to JP Morgan Chase & Co! Someone at the company either new it to be true – or didn’t like the fact that he had been listed as working at a rival company; showing this addition as a potential one-upmanship entry.

A number of months later, a wikipedian actually did his homework, and on the 23rd February 2007 removed the bogus career information stating:

remove Goldman Sacks career as it is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone interview or anywhere else I can find

But it was too late. From 2007 onwards the Wikipedia entry detailing his career has been modified in an on again off again fashion. As of April 2008, the Independent and the Guardian are now used where still used (but have since been removed and discussed) as the source of the information – external references that exist outside Wikipedia – albeit written after the initial entry to Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia references used to referenced these articles as the source for this career move from investment banking to acting; it’s deemed permanent information.

The anonymous Wikipedia entries appear to have been “jokes”, or methods of associating famous people with a company – by financial industry insiders. Not only in the case of the initial change on 14 November, but also in the additional change by someone at JP Morgan on the 21st November, and subsequent additions, removals and swapping of big-time rival company names from Wikipedia.

The bottom line is that NO verifiable information existed anywhere on the internet that Baron Cohen worked for any investment banks (Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan) prior to the 14th November 2006. The only person that can tell us the truth now is Sacha Baron Cohen himself.

In February I wrote on the user talk page of the first “prankster” about this issue, but only recently has an another anonymous user commented over at SlashDot on this exact information of the same article – It could even be the same person who started this as they say:

It is now down to the rest of the world to prove that Sacha Baron Cohen DID NOT work for Goldman Sachs.

All of these thing show how easy is this to do. But how many other times has this been done? Is it the corporations, insiders or just people who work in related industries having a laugh. I’ll leave you with this (long) quote from anonymous@slashdot…

The real Wiki-vandals are the companies, governments and lobby groups of all sorts that flood Wikipedia with their squeaky clean corporate profiles (yes, corporate governments), whipped straight from their websites … These entities are the true threat to the laudable goal of Wikipedia to provide a freely accessible forum for the production and storage of (hopefully well-referenced) articles for the masses and a forum that does not restrict the privilege of contribution to those that have jumped through the all the right hoops. … The printed word is no more reliable than the plasma. Lies may be propagated on Wikipedia, but not without debate. Politicians spouting their sludge find their propaganda sitting side-by-side with those that mock them… If knowing that anything in a Wikipedia article is as likely to be crap as correct, the average reader becomes more vigilant in clicking through to the supporting sources; then Wikipedia has served the purpose of bringing to the masses the healthy skepticism that is, after all, the cornerstone of all academic pursuits.
Dark eyes look down from ivory towers. Do they cheer or do they fear?

Update 20 April: since I wrote about this, and got slash-dotted, Wikipedian editors (and numerous slash-dotters) have discussed this entire issue; and the general consensus of the editors is that these two external sources are no longer valid. I think my point was understood. This may only be the tip of the iceberg and it is up to people checking their Wikipedia information to verify first, or remove – and be conscious of timelines!

The ADSL2+ upgrade of 907 telephone exchanges serving 2.4 million homes and businesses announced in February is now complete. This means millions of additional Australian families, businesses, non-profit organisations and government agencies across every state and territory can now enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband

This is a double edged sword. On one side it is a good thing that this increases high speed access to the end user; on the other side its Telstra. Even though I am a Bigpond Cable user, I would not recommend Bigpond ADSL2 unless it was last resort – for a number of reasons;

• high price for data plans (AU$59.95 entry level ADSL2 for 600MB per month!);
• uploads count towards your monthly limit; and
• if you are not on a shaped (liberty) plan their excess price is AU$150 per GB.

These cons mean that a non tech person getting ADSL2 could start of with the entry level 600MB plan, spend a few days surfing YouTube and having clocked up, lets say 1.6GB of usage, would be up for AU$209.95 for their initial monthly cost, on top of installation and hardware costs.

But in some cases this is the only ADSL2 on offer where previously there was none, dialup or very expensive wireless. Before Telstra commenced the turn on they made sure that “the Government … made clear it did not consider a compelling case had been made for regulating third-party access to the service”. Other ISPs don’t think so, even though I have to side with Telstra on this one. They are in the money making business for their shareholders. If these networks were to be available for the people, then the government of the day should NOT have sold off Telstra, but left it as a public utility.

Bottom line: Despite this new capacity and services, cheap, fast broadband is still unobtainium in Australia if you don’t live in a Metropolitan location.

read more | digg story

But recently they have updated their online maps, which can now be accessed as a Beta version.

While this is a good thing for local and businesses and content, in the time they took to bring this to market, google have already bought their Australian content “up to speed”. Is this too little too late from Sensis – or will the existing users who used the YellowPages and WhereiS content be happy for the improvement?

Try WhereiS maps BETA and judge for yourself.

Reading about gmail on digg led me to an un-dug comment (I gave him a thumbs up!) saying that for IMAP to appear your language in gmail had to be set to ‘English (US)’. So I gave it a try, as I had mine on ‘English (UK)’ for the spelling. I logged into gmail, went to my ‘General’ settings and changed the language to ‘English (US)’, and saved the settings.

Lo – under settings, the IMAP option was now enabled!

As a test, I thought I would set my language settings back to ‘English (UK)’ and see what happens. Would you belive it turns it back off again.

Re-activating IMAP is as simple as using the US variation of the English language again.

I’m not the first to notice this though.

I’m not sure if this activates or deactivates the actual IMAP on your account, but it certainly makes the settings show or hide it. I wonder why Google thinks that only US speaking people should have access to IMAP. All the gmail users in the UK or Australia – take note if you want IMAP! With 5GB available now, it is even better.

• Wikipedia articles
• IMDb titles
• Amazon products like the book I am currently reading
• inline videos
• RSS feeds from a site
• MP3s like this La Primavera track
• photos
• stock charts

…you get the idea…

They say the “Snap Shots” can bring you the information you need, without having to leave a site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, snap says it is as simple as clicking the Options icon in the upper right corner of a Snap Shot and opting-out.

If you want this for your own wordpress blog, check out the plugin

Today I looked and – USD$725.65 PER SHARE!. They have gone up 2% in one day. That gives Google a market capitalisation of 226.5 BILLION US Dollars. Microsoft still holds the lead (in the Tech Sector) on USD$343.63B.

Where will this madness stop? Will it be when we see economic collapse of the Western countries as we know them? Will it be 2012? There are changes afoot for sure.

As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two.

Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader. Thats blogs and news covered. Google is storing a lot of our data, so for now thats a good thing.

I’m lucky my iPod has all my music still, so tunes and pod casts are covered

The judicious use of Del.icio.us means all my bookmarks are already online.

This online decentralisation of my data should hold me out till I get the laptop repaired. Looks like with minimal effort, I am able to function without the laptop as an IT worker bee. It just goes to show how web2.0 is no longer a buzz word, but standard practice. Data out there, in communities.

On the theme of iTunes recovery, I had purchased iPodRip to get my music to the laptop. It didn’t work as advertised for me – The iPod Recover feature imported the songs to some temp folder, but never put them into iTunes. 2 hours later I had finished manually importing my missing 257 songs from the iPod into the CCC backup drive. A waste of $20? I will wait till the support team get back to me before I conclude that.

read more | digg story

In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) offers 1GB to their users, albeit in the form of a “Skydrive“. Skydrive is an online storage space.

Correction: Thanks to Taylor’s comment, I do note that as a Windows live user my inbox shows 5GB of space available. Methinks Microsoft are playing catchup! Too little too late? We shall see, as both services are still the most popular (where are you yahoo!)

As detailed in the comments, Microsoft were actually offering Windows Live users more than Gmail sometime over 2 months ago. As I use Gmail primarily it slipped by my radar.

As I use both, I may review them in detail sometime.