Recovering Data

Yesterday I was on FIRE! Damn, I was so good I wanted to boast about it.

But as usual, it wasn't really me, but the tools I was using. Most specifically Ubuntu. I know I've gone on, sometimes at annoying length, about how brilliant this is, but I have to start the process again.

This is what happened:

Yesterday I received a call from one of the teachers at my school, begging for help. Her laptop had been in the middle of some routine Windows updates (an every day occurrence, if my PC is anything to go by), when it'd re-booted, and would no longer boot up. It'd get halfway through the boot up process, you'd even get the Vista progress bar, but then it'd restart again. Windows itself suggested putting in the original Vista disk and choosing Repair once it'd started.

However, and oh my god this is the most annoying thing on the face of the planet, probably deserving of it's own rant in my main blog, the laptop had been bought from Tesco, but did not have an OS disk. Given how many pages came up when I googled "Vista repair" telling you to boot from the OS disk and select repair, you'd think that this would be one of the fundamental requirements of a new system, whomsoever supplied it. She did, as it happens, have the Vista OS disk supplied with another machine, but sadly the OEM disk for the Mesh machine refused to work in the ACER laptop. Really, it's all very well trying to stop people stealing the software, but all I wanted to do was repair the installation. This took me quite some time to find out anyway, firstly because the PC was set to boot from the HD first, and secondly because the DVD was so grubby I had to clean it thoroughly before it would do more than just make funny noises in the drive.

"So, how much data do you have on the disk, and how much of it do you REALLY not need to lose?" I queried of my luckless teacher. Her reply that there wasn't very much, but that it was all quite important, was really to be expected.

Many laptops, I consoled myself, are supplied with a "restore to how it arrived from the factory" image, nowadays placed in a hidden partition, so you can't do as my father did, and delete it, because you're convinced that you can't live without that massive 9.8Gb of your 250Gb disk. A short while later, armed with the necessary keypresses to start the factory restore, I was informed by the user that while she might, at a pinch, be able to find the data again, it'd be very inconvenient, and couldn't I do anything to get it.

Well, in theory, you can boot up a PC with a live version of Ubuntu, see the disk, and copy to a USB stick. Can't you? I wasn't sure, because I'd supplied an Ubuntu live disk to one of my students in the past, when he was having trouble accessing the disk, but he'd reported back that he couldn't access the hard drive at all. OK, Ubuntu has moved on since then - remember earlier this year when I reported that my phone became a modem for the eee PC without any kind of real work on my part? Maybe later versions of Ubuntu would, indeed, allow access to the hard drive. I suppose it's always possible that the student had either been not quite as clever as I'd assumed, or perhaps his disk was royally mullered. Remember that's the technical term.

So I moseyed over to the Ubuntu site, downloaded the latest ISO, burned a CD-r, and shoved it into the laptop drive. In moments the PC was showing the familiar brown (really, not a flattering colour) desktop, and seconds after that I was wading my way through the mess of stuff on the local hard disk. I put in a USB mouse to assist with copying data over, inserted my USB stick and saved the day. Well, Ubuntu saved the day.

After that I went through the time-consuming process of restoring to factory image and running through the "I see you've not run Vista on this machine ever - let's go through the patronising process of asking painfully silly questions to set up the machine in a way that the manufacturer should have done before selling it in Tesco in the first place" task. And the equally soul-searing "Windows is unprotected, because you wouldn't let us install the poxy 90-day trial of Norton" and "There are updates to install, click here to spend, quite literally, hours downloading and installing cumulative updates, only to find, on reboot, that you've still got a small handful we didn't bother to install first time round" tasks.

After which I was able to copy the data over to the laptop, and press it back into the hands of the, initially happy, user, who was surprised I charged £40 for this! Despite trying to console her with the sure knowledge that PC World would not only have NOT bothered to attempt to save her data, AND they'd have charged twice as much, I don't think I'll be getting any repeat business from her! I felt that 2 hours at my "what I charge the teachers" rate was not wrong, since I was able to (and actually did) wander away from the PC during the "factory restore" and "Widows Update" parts.

While I may be feeling pretty good about my own skills, my gratitude has to go to Ubuntu for actually being such a fantastic OS.

Nokia N78 as a modem on Ubuntu EasyPeasy

I recently managed to install Ubuntu Easypeasy by following these instructions, the other day. A week before I finally succeeded in doing this, I had spent a whole day googling to try and find out how to install this software. I always say that finding information on the internet is as much about being able to ask the right questions. However, that day I'd been unable to frame the question correctly, and every page I'd opened had been wrong. And yet a week later, 10 minutes googling provided the above information.

While I was doing the install, I'd noticed that one of the options for networking was Mobile Broadband, leading me to believe that it would be quite easy to connect to the internet should I ever get my grubby mitts on my dad's Mobile Broadband dongle! Not, you understand, that I've been coveting my dad's dongle, really, much...

However, I don't have one yet, but I do have a Nokia N78! I've been happily using this to connect to the internet (for emails and a tiny bit of really small screen web browsing) since last summer, but I've always wondered if there was a way to use the PC suite on the eeepc, and thus use the N78 as a Mobile Broadband dongle of sorts. Sadly, according to my brother, who works for Nokia, no one had made a version of the software to run on Linux yet, so I shelved my plans for a while. But this weekend I decided to re-visit the idea, and spent a while googling to find out if this was possible.

I came across a couple of posts which involved lots of sudo commands. This one, for the N95, looked extremely concise, so I thought I might have a stab at that later on. The problem is that it's been well over 20 years since I was comfortable with Unix command-line tinkering, so I was quite nervous to just trust that I'd be able to get it to work (although I did console myself with the fact that I've still got the usb memory stick with the linux distro on it, should I completely bugger it up). My unease stemmed from the fact that I didn't recognise the commands (and after more than 20 years, why the hell should I?) and didn't know what each of them were doing.

This, however, is what I did!

1. Right-click the network signal indicator (connected to my wireless lan at the time)
2. Edit Network Connections.
3. Click the Mobile Broadband tab.
4. Add new connection.
5. The wizard will guide you through. You have to select your mobile network provider. I'm with O2, of which I had a choice of 3 - O2 (contract), O2 (Contract-faster) and O2 (prepay). I chose O2 (contract-faster).
6. When you click Next at this point, you can give the connection a name. I called mine N78, and clicked Apply.
7. Connect the phone with your USB cable.
8. When asked on the phone, choose PC Suite.
9. This is where I fiddled a little, because there seems no easy way to say, "connect this way". In the end I disabled wireless, and edited my newly created connection to say "Connect automatically". A message came up asking if this connection could use the key password, so I clicked yes, and blow me down! It worked.

And all without having to crack open a terminal window, and scare myself with the command line!

One of the reasons I decided to note this down for you is that, apart from, hopefully helping someone with this, I had to comment that this is the sort of easy "plug 'n' play" stuff Microsoft have been trying to get working this well for years!

Edit: I have to make clear, if you haven't already worked it out, is that I'm quite blown away with Ubuntu Easypeasy. This whole story just shows how completely usable this distribution is. While I love blowing my own trumpet, it's very clear that it wasn't my cleverness which got the job done.

Car Park Design - Rocket Science? I don't think so!

Yesterday my neighbours took me and my eldest girl to see "Inkheart" at the cinema. Since we hadn't been to the new Vue in Camberley, Jonathan was keen to go and use this new theatre, which boasted of "special" seats for only £1 extra per seat, and beanbags, for only an extra 50p per seat! Wow! As it happens, you really don't want the beanbag seats, because you're crowded at the very front of the auditorium, craning your neck to view the screen above you.

I think, for the beanbags alone, Vue win the "Fleece you silly" award for 2008. They've managed to find a way to persuade people to sit at the front of the auditorium, while simultaneously extracting an extra 50p per person for the priviledge! Awesome!

However, we're not here to discuss the wiliness of cinema chains, but the design of a brand new car park. I will say, right now, that I love going to Basingstoke (I know, who'd ever have thought it?) because I know where to park, I like the shopping centre, and I like the way the cinema is laid out when I get there. I find the car park fairly well designed, for a car park. I'm constantly astonished, however, at the total fuckwittedness of car park design. All in all, despite a certain oddness, the Basingstoke Festival Place car park is OK.

Sadly, however, the NEW car park in Camberley is not. Leaving aside, for the moment, the issue of the wanting to cram into the available space, as many cars as is humanly possible, there are certain laws of physics which were never meant to be broken. One of these laws, I'm fairly certain, although I have to check my "Laws of Physics" book, is that in car parks it's bad to make the cars travelling in different directions use the same piece of road. I'm talking "crossing the beams" bad. This new car park is BAD. While there are two lanes in which you can take a ticket, no-one's ever actually going to use the left hand lane, because in your attempt to avoid impaling your car on parts of the car park, you've already swung out too far to the right, and you're no longer capable of tightening up the turn enough. Similarly, there are two exit lanes, but the left hand one involves a shimmy between some concrete posts I'm not convinced most cars will be able to do.

And let's not even talk about the stupid concrete dividers which are supposed to stop the up-traffic from hitting the down-traffic - to avoid scraping your paint (for the 20th time), you'll find yourself swinging too far out, and either bumping up these dumb kerbs, or jiggling backwards and forwards to make the turn without hitting either the impatient people behind you, or another of the walls.

So why on earth is it so difficult to design a car park that doesn't annoy you. I know it's not - I've seen car parks which don't make me seethe. I suppose the question is - how do you design a brand-spanking new car park so badly. After all, you've got a vacant lot, and you're starting with nothing. You need to stop being so damn greedy, trying to cram in quite so many cars, and design something which isn't going to win the award for "Most Idiotic Car Park Design, 2008".

Well Loved Books

I've spent a happy evening watching the BBC's newest, shiniest production - The 39 Steps, by John Buchan. This is one of my favourite books, because it's such a super yarn - rather Boys' Own, if you will. As one known to read Biggles books, I expect you can see why I enjoy this one so much.

We all know the gist of the story - Richard Hannay, our hero, returns from some Engineering job in Africa, holes up in London for the first few weeks, but finds after a short while of hanging out at his club he's bored to tears, aching for some adventure. On the cusp of returning to his beloved Africa, he bumps into a chap called Scudder, who, throwing himself on Hannay's mercy, tells him he's a spy, and has information vital to the well-being of Great Britain! He mentions a plot to assasinate a high ranking foreigner, due on British soil soon, shows Hannay his Black Book, and is promptly killed by the very people against whom he's trying to defend the country. Unfortunately for our hero, Scudder managed to get himself killed in Hannay's flat, so Hannay goes on the run, convinced he'll hang for this murder (side note: clearly a lot more credence was given to circumstantial evidence in those days. Side note 2: I had to point out to my girls that while the last public hanging was in the 19th century, people were still being hanged in Britain until some time during the middle of the 20th century, although I can't remember when). Escaping to St Pancras, he boards the first train he sees, subconciously choosing a train bound for Scotland, a place he remembers with fondness from an earlier time, perhaps realising that he'll have a better chance to escape over-zealous policemen in the wilds of Scotland than in the middle of London. Much merriement ensues, with Hannay blundering round the highlands, and while Hannay is, in fact, captured at one point by the damn Bosch mischief workers, he escapes (explosions) to blunder another day. All this time he's working on the code in the Black Book, and eventually works out that the 39 Steps mentioned in the book refer to some steps down to the water in a town in Kent - OK, he had to have help with which town, and which flight of steps.

Now, I don't know the book particularly well, but I do know that the end of the story is NOT in Scotland. And I know that there's absolutely NO romance in the book. OK, I agree, it'd be a better book if there'd been a little flirtation. Every singly film/drama version of this story has included a toothsome wench to hang on Hannay's arm and either squeal girlishly, or, like the one this evening, dispense ascerbic advice and hair-pins (for unlocking handcuffs) with equal ease. That's one thing I'm not going to complain about - it's a poetic licence up with which I will put.

But why, for the love of Mike, do they have to change the story so much. Sure, it'd take too long to show that Scudder had, in fact, stayed with Hannay for at least 3 days before being murdered - and I seem to remember that he was stuck with a long knife. That's a good way to murder someone in a play - stuck with a knife ("Killed by pirates is good!", to quote a favourite film - guesses in the comments please), in fact, skewered to the floor! Brilliant. Guns seem to be so universally accepted nowadays that everyone has to be killed by a gun.

And while I'm prepared to endorse the inclusion of a lady, it's really time to stop being so PC about it. She doesn't have to be cleverer than our hero - sometimes it's nice to be looked after. There's a whole slew of adverts out there which annoy me to ranting point (although, like that letter to the RT, nothing ever happens about that, either) because they portray men as simpletons, and women as the saviours of the universe - and we all know who that is (easy one for you - "Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!") All we need do is look at the evidence. There are strong members of each sex, but back in 1914, your average lady was more likely to be a shrinking violet than a strident suffragette. And NO disrespect for those sterling ladies - they got us the ruddy vote, didn't they? And of course, in their rush to portray Victoria as a hard-as-nails, man-hating suffragette, they had to make Hannay look a little pathetic in her company, just in case we thought he may be able to manage on his own. This man has just returned from being an engineer in Southern Africa, do you think he needed a hair-pin weilding bint for that, for goodness sake? He actually has the balls not only to manage on his own, but look after himself, and think quickly on his feet to escape ("Es-cap-ay? I wonder what that means, it's funny, it's spelled just like the word Escape.") the police of England and Scotland, and some pretty determined villains.

It seems almost as if they should have called the play "The 39 Steps, a play based extremely loosely on the book by the same name, written by John Buchan." ("almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea" - the easiest of the lot).

All grumblings aside, I'd very much like to see them take on more of Buchan's works. The next in the series being Greenmantle, and a really good story. I can understand why The 39 Steps is so well known, but Greenmantle is an equally good book, and actually HAS some romance in it!