Tag Archives: reference

Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive?

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This is a story of my efforts to repair the drive myself, my research into the question of whether or not users can repair modern hard drives, and the results of my efforts. If your drive is still detected in BIOS, you may be able to use software tools to retrieve your data. Here, we’re going to focus exclusively on hardware-related failures, and what your options are.

via Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive? | ExtremeTech.

Surf the internet for more than two minutes, and you’ll find people who recommend you do one of the following things:

  • Stick your hard drive in the freezer
  • Pop your hard drive into the oven
  • Give it a few taps with a hammer or rubber mallet

LOL. I have been desparate to try the freezer trick a couple of times without luck.

Natural Language Toolkit — NLTK 2.0 documentation

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NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning.

via Natural Language Toolkit — NLTK 2.0 documentation.

From: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/03/natural-language-processing-with-hadoop-and-python/

NLP is a highly interdisciplinary field of study comprising of concepts and ideas from Mathematics, Computer Science and Linguistics. Naturally occurring instances of human language, be it text or speech, are growing at an exponential rate given the popularity of the Web and social media. In addition, people are increasingly becoming more and more reliant on internet services to search, filter, process and, in some cases, even understand the subset of such instances they encounter in their daily lives.

NLP = Natural Language Processing

Choosing the Right Security Tools to Protect VMs

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As enterprises move towards virtualizing more of their servers and data center infrastructure, protective technologies—plentiful and commonplace in the physical world—become few and far between. When your Windows Server or SQL database is running in a virtual machine (VM), you still need to protect it from viruses and other attacks while providing the same level of access controls you have for physical servers. Let’s look at the different approaches to protecting your VMs, as well as the major issues involved with deploying these technologies.

via Choosing the Right Security Tools to Protect VMs.

Anyone seriously invested in virtualization is going to need more than one protection product. So before you dive into this marketplace, you should carefully consider the types of protective features you really need at present, and where you want to end up in the next 12 months. You should look at covering five different functional areas:

Quake 3 Source Code Review

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Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my “cycle of id”. After Doom, Doom Iphone, Quake1, Quake2, Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet:

idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live.

via Quake 3 Source Code Review: Architecture.

I was particularly impressed by :

  • The virtual machines system and the associated toolchain that altogether account for 30% of the code released. Under this perspective idTech3 is a mini operating system providing system calls to three processes.
  • The elegant network system based on snapshots and memory introspection.

Cloud storage: a pricing and feature guide for consumers

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Cloud storage services are cropping up left and right, all enticing their customers with a few gigabytes of storage that sync seemingly anywhere, with any device. We’ve collected some details on the most popular services, including Google Drive, to compare them.

via Cloud storage: a pricing and feature guide for consumers | Ars Technica.

I don’t normally post images here but this chart makes for a quick reference.  The linked to article has much more details and worth a read.

What intrigued me about this is the max file size.  This is probably set to keep people from building their own file containers (i.e. tar, zip, etc.) — which is what I hoped to do.  Dropbox allows for a max file size of 300MB, ICloud 25MB.    By building your own file containers gives you more local control over security of said files by allowing you to use your own encryption.  300MB seems suitable for even rather large databases.  Apps will have to be more frugal with a 25MB limit.  I need to start using my Dropbox account.  Will report more on this later.

handymath.com

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Our mission is to provide mathematical tools and solutions for technicians to aid them in their work. This website is dedicated to all laboratory technicians, manufacturing technicians, carpenters, mechanics, welders, electricians, plumbers, handymen, do it yourselfers, etc. It is our aim to apply practical mathematics.

via Mission.