Buy The Book
Non-sports post.
The way the Heading Styles worked in 2003 and earlier was very logical (built-in dependency to the parent). When I tried to apply headings in 2007, this logical condition no longer existed. Anyway, for those of you in the same boat as I was, this tutorial was tremendous.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html
I go out of my way to always do a proper eject of the flash drive, to the point that I will do a shutdown if for whatever reason I can’t get the eject done properly. Except today. I rushed, I pulled it out of my computer. And when I get into the office, the good news is that most of the folders were fine. The bad news is that the one folder that I always use was corrupted.
Now, I learned my lesson from last year when my flash drive just died to make sure I backup on a weekly basis, rather than sporadically. Anyway, I still wanted to know WHAT I lost, and if I have to bother doing an automated recovery, or simply manually recreating whatever I lost.
And this is the software I found from Get Data:
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
What a fantastic piece of software. It scanned my flash drive, and reports on everything it could find, including giving me a preview of the files. Based on the preview alone, I can recreate what I needed in many of the cases. In addition, it shows dates, and so, I just had to look for the files last modified since my last backup. And you can even export the names of the files (and dates, etc).
And all that is free.
For 70$, you buy the Pro version, and it’ll recover all the data it can for you. In my case, since I made a recent backup, and whatever was not backed-up I can recreate manually, it’s not worth it. This time anyway. But, it may be useful in the future.
I also wanted to highlight this software for anyone who has experienced some corrupt drives, or may in the future.
I presume that there are other enterprise standard software for around that price. But this was the first one I found that gave you all the preview capabilities it did for free. And for that alone, I give it two thumbs up.
NOTE: This post is *not* an advertisement.
Ugly weekend for me. As best I can tell, a virus, planted as privacy.exe, executed on my machine. It was one of those that makes it look like it’s a Windows Security file, makes it look like it’s finding tons of viruses with on-screen prompts, when it itself is the virus. I had one of these a year or two ago. (I may have blogged about it, and I used Malwarebytes to kill its cousin.)
Anyway, this one was worse, as it latched onto some key .exe files, including iexplore, the virus scanner files, etc. I was able to clean most of the computer, including manually going into the registry. I was able to backup all my data files to my laptop, through the network connection.
Then the weird part. I ran my virus scanner one more time, and it found more files that were infected. Avast moves it to its “chest”, and I can see the file names. None of them were “critical”. I researched each one. But, after that happened, I had no more network connection.
I tried to do a System Restore to earlier checkpoints, but they all came back with a message that Windows could NOT restore. I ran sfc /scannow, but it kept prompting me for the XP SP3 install disk, as well as XP CD2. My computer was pre-installed by Dell, and I just had the Dell installation disk. I copied the I386 folder from the install disk to my C drive. Re-running sfc /scannow, it stopped prompting for XP SP3 install disk (presumably, it liked the new I386 folder), but it still kept asking for XP CD2.
This is where I am at: everything works fine, except for my network / internet connection.
Investigating further, my options when I get home are:
1. Installing WinSockFix. This looks promising.
2. Get into Windows Safe mode, and then run System Restore. This looks reasonable.
One thing: I have a wireless keyboard, and those drivers must load late, because I can never press F8 to force myself into Windows Safe mode. My unusual solution to that is to simply powerdown, rather than doing a normal shutdown. Usually Windows recognizes that something unusual happened, and prompts me to log into Safe mode. If you have other suggestions, let me know.
3. I had also bought the Windows Vista upgrade. At the time, they were doing the switchover, so I was one of the last ones to buy XP. So, for an extra 10$, they sent you the Vista upgrade disk. I was going to therefore do that upgrade.
Weirdly, when I tried the Dell assistant for that, it said that I couldn’t upgrade from XP. But, that’s exactly what the Vista upgrade disk was for. The only thing I can think of is that the XP I bought was a “Media Center”, and by now, since I’m at SP3, it may no longer qualify as upgradeable.
4. I didn’t know, but XP3 is available for download as an iso file. I’m not sure what that means yet. I was hoping that maybe I can turn that into an install disk, and then running the sfc /scannow, and when it prompts for the XP SP3 install, and the XP CD2 install disks, then I can just use that.
5. Worst-case, I simply start clean. I backedup all my data files and favorites. I will inventory all my apps to restore. And then, well, re-install the OS and everything else. Not something I particularly want to do, just so that I can get my internet connection working.
Alright, now that I’m here, I’d love to hear from you Straight Arrows. You’ve always been a tremendous help, and I need your words of wisdom.
At my old job (which was when the economy was good), they used to hand out laptops at will. As a result, I’d get an upgrade every two years.
The way I normally worked the transfer of files is that I have one main external drive, and I have all my backups there by machine. So, I’d have Toshiba1998, Dell2000, Dell2002, Toshiba2005, etc to signify each machine and the files I had. I just couldn’t be bothered to create a proper backup system, because I had alot of overlapping files, and they were not in-synch. So, I did not want to replace one with another. Then, I’d create a Backup folder that moved those directories/files that I figured were unique from those directories.
Basically, it’s a mish-mash of a good backup system, and then a “to do” backups.
And I made sure that on SOME machine, those files existed still (so, files exist on the backup external drive, and one of the two working machines at home).
My head is spinning basically at what I’ve done.
I now just got a new laptop, and this situation is basically too much of a mess.
So, here’s where you guys come in. What I’d like is some sort of file comparison program that goes through all my files on the external drive and comes back with a report of those files that are duplicates somewhere else on that external drive. I do NOT want to see: compare this folder structure to that folder structure. What I DO want to see is: here’s my drive, tell me which files are duplicates.
Now, the duplicates can be just based on file size, and I’d be happy. I don’t want it by date, because sometimes the date gets thrown off by 1 hour due to daylight savings (or at least show the gap in date-time, and I’d love to see it if it’s off by 1 minute or 1 hour, which may still show it’s a match).
Anyway, looking forward to hear what you guys do.
Non-sports post.
Every time I have to re-order ink, I ask myself if I should just buy a new printer. There’s two reasons:
1. The ink cartridges costs me about 65$ to replace. My all-in-one cost under 100$, and comparable models can be had on sale for that low price.
2. I just know that, at some point, my printer is going to breakdown, in which case, I wasted money on ink. Since I always “buy ahead”, the eventual breakdown cost is going to be my inventory, plus half of the unused ink when it breaks down. That’s almost 100$ thrown away. (Let’s face it, I’m not going to resell the unused ink, and I’ll miss the 30-day window Amazon allows for returns.)
Basically, if I replenish the ink 3 times (almost 200$) plus my inventory cost (100$), that’s 300$ to reuse my printer 3 extra refills. Instead, if I just buy a new printer each time (!!), that’s 300$ spent.
What do you guys do? Do you replace your printer pretty quickly, or do you just keep forking over for ink?
(The other option is to not use OEM ink, but I’ve never tried that.)
Someone is reporting the Exploit virus while clicking on this site. We have MacAfee VirusScan Enterprise at the office.
Either that reader’s results are isolated, or our virus scanner is catching the virus without me knowing it.
Please report your experiences (good or bad).
At the office, they’ve disabled the flash-drive so that it’s only read-only. I’m not sure what they’ve pushed, or how I can detect what they did. Trouble-shooting tips from the Straight Arrows among you would be appreciated.
Yahoo Mail has recently (or that I noticed recently anyway) added an option so that you can link your mail from other accounts (GMail, AOL, etc). What they do NOT offer however is an easy way to link your other Yahoo Mail accounts (or, I don’t see it well enough here). I presume there must be tons of people like me, that has separate Yahoo accounts for separate personal/business matters. I love Yahoo, and am perplexed that they don’t offer this as an option.
I just got back from vacation. I’ll check out the site to see what’s been happening.
I’ll also go through my inbox. If you don’t hear back from me by mid-week, send me another email, thanks.
One of the Straight Arrow readers helpfully pointed out that the Atom feed preserves formatting, while RSS does not:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/atom/
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/rss_2.0/
Therefore, unless there’s someone who objects, I am going to point the RSS feed to the atom feed as of tomorrow. For the RSS feed readers, please try Atom, and let me know if Atom looks as great to you (and far better than RSS) as it does for me.
I have to buy a new PC soon. Seems every 4 years, I have to get a new one. Anyway, every time, I always have to look into deciding which processor I want. And, well, now the choices are multiplying.
So, I thought about you Straight Arrows. Presumably, some of you have researched this, so post your thoughts below. Don’t limit it to just Intel v AMD, but also within Intel, I see the have a whole set of choices. And then dual and quad. Your insights would be appreciated.
On more than one occasion, I have hit SUBMIT, only to see my post vanish into hyperspace. I don’t know the reason. It’s like the blogging software I am using, but it could be anything really. This has affected several among you.
The only suggestion I have: before you hit SUBMIT, copy/paste your post (or write it in Notepad, and copy/paste from there to here). If you are lucky, it might still be in your browser history and you can hit BACK.
Just be careful…
I’m loading the Retrosheet data right now. I’m interested to see what kind of performances others are getting, to see whether my machine needs to be improved, or even if Oracle is too much of a bear (or is pretty efficient) in its loading process. (I have to look into whether I’m logging the inserts, which I shouldn’t obviously.) Anyway, this is me, and I’m interested to hear from the others. I loaded all the Events files from 1950-2010 (using Chadwick output, meaning fields 0-96 and fields 0-62… note, Ted added two new fields at pos 17,18):
Total logical records skipped: 0
Total logical records read: 9185580
Total logical records rejected: 0
Total logical records discarded: 0
Run began on Sat Nov 20 16:24:34 2010
Run ended on Sat Nov 20 17:14:08 2010
Elapsed time was: 00:49:34.22
CPU time was: 00:12:27.70
I’ve got a Dell with Windows XP SP3; 2 GB Ram. The computer is nearly four years old.
A tiny note: I changed the font of the byline to super big and surrounded by a box to make clear which is by MGL and which by me. For some reason, a few people think that everything in here is by me, and I wanted to make sure that the distinction is obvious.
At the bottom of the main page, there is a link for the RSS Feed for comments. Add it to your favorite Reader, and let me know if things are ok or not.
I tried to re-create a view (which was successful), but for some reason when I do a SELECT, I got this crazy error:
#1356 - View ‘XX.YY’ references invalid table(s) or column(s) or function(s) or definer/invoker of view lack rights to use them
In order to get around this, I changed:
create or replace view YY as
into
create table YY as
This error seems old and related to bug from previous versions of PHP. I can tell you that my host, last week, upgraded our server:
Custom PHP
If you built your own custom PHP (or php.ini), it may be broken now. This is because the old servers used a 32bit architecture and the new servers are 64bit. Unfortunately, this isn’t something we can help you troubleshoot, but you’ll just need to rebuild your custom php (or php.ini) again using the new servers libraries.
While PHP has nothing to do with my creating VIEWS with SQL, I am using phpMyAdmin.
Thoughts?
French echie has a nice blog. Seems to be a kindred spirit, so I’m linking.
This is purely for those people who cut/paste things from emails and the like (where a forced hard-return is set after each line) and want to convert it so that that hard-return is removed. This is what I do:
1. find/replace all DOUBLE hard-returns with a weird character (I use ~~~). In my editor, EditPlus, that means setting regular expression on, and replacing \n\n with ~~~.
2. find/replace all SINGLE hard-returns with a space. That means \n becomes _ (where _ is really you hitting the spacebar once). Your whole document is now on one line.
3. find/replace all DOUBLE spaced with a single space. (Just in case step 2 added a space you didn’t want.)
4. find/replace ~~~ with DOUBLE hard-returns (to undo the damage of Step 1).
I figure there’s someone else out there that’s been bothered by this, and who ends up taking care of it manually. Now you have it a different way.
Feb 11 11:54
Who is Jeremy Lin?
Feb 11 11:27
Reader Mail of the Day: Why do we need X years of fielding data? And what about outliers?
Feb 11 10:29
Dwight Evans
Feb 11 08:56
MGL: Today on Clubhouse Confidential
Feb 11 02:12
Performance through the ages
Feb 10 23:01
For Your Soul
Feb 10 21:07
Hero of the month: Brittney Baxter
Feb 10 18:32
Moneyball at Villanova
Feb 10 17:00
Psst… wanna intern in Canada?
Feb 10 15:01
New PECOTA
THREADS
February 11, 2012
Clutch analogy
February 11, 2012
Who is Jeremy Lin?
February 10, 2012
Jose Molina
February 10, 2012
Reader Mail of the Day: Why do we need X years of fielding data? And what about outliers?
February 10, 2012
Performance through the ages
February 10, 2012
Hero of the month: Brittney Baxter
February 10, 2012
Win expectancy charts used in football… in 1983!
February 10, 2012
Dwight Evans
February 09, 2012
Psst… wanna intern in Canada?
February 08, 2012
Moneyball at Villanova
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