The Chemistry of Engineering

My company finally changed from MS Excel 2003 to 2007. Part of this late change is compatibility with other programs and of course the natural drive of some engineers to hack their own macros into a worksheet. If such a file proves useful to other engineers, suddenly a tool is born. This gets checked against a number of hand calculated situations and if the outcome pleases everybody the tool is ‘verified’.

Well if everybody has the skills and the will to write proper macro’s there is not so much of a problem. However hitting the record macro button and save whatever comes out is not a good practice in my humble opinion. But that happens a lot. continue reading…

In my last post regarding using a HTPC and fileserver for home entertainment, I was referring to Ubuntu Server Edition to use as operating system for the fileserver. Till that moment it seemed reasonable because a server edition was the best choice for a server.

However during installation a couple of annoyances came across. For example it does not come with a desktop environment. Since I am used to work on a desktop most of the time and do text based commands on a terminal window, I wanted some graphical eye candy in front of me. And because I normally rely heavily on the web to find out about problems, Firefox had to be available all the time.

So I decided to start using Ubuntu Desktop Edition. continue reading…

I had to create a new password to log into my work computer. The mail system in use is Lotus Notes, and there is a option to choose the same password for Notes and Xp. Some simple rules are applied to ensure everybody is using a strong enough password.

This requirement brought me to rethink something that hit me recently, the RockYou.com hack. It happened in December 2009 by a very simple technique, but the impact was disastrous. Over 32 million user account details were aquired and brought into the public. Later on Imperva issued an analysis of the passwords in use and the outcome was shocking. continue reading…

Last weekend I spend some good hours testing and digging out a hard disk that -I thought- had crashed. It turned out that Windows XP had some real problems with the disk, but Ubuntu was reading it correctly. Nevertheless I followed some guides on data recovery with Ubuntu and tried it on this disk.

The Windows XP filesystem is NTFS, which uses a table with all information about the files on the disk. If this table gets corrupted, Windows is not able to properly read the files anymore, but the files themselves are mostly still intact. There are some programs that ignore the table and look on the disk itself for the files.

Ubuntu has these programs in its software repository so I installed the required software with Synaptic which went easy. I tried Foremost and Scalpel, both read the disk entirely and check on header information. Foremost was originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations continue reading…

Last week I bought a Philips 42″ LCD TV. It is capable of showing Full HD content. Taken into account my ever growing collection of Full HD movies, and the growing use of Blue-Ray, we will be fully up to standards for the next years.

However my nature does not allow the purchace of a TV alone. There has to be more intelligence in such a step to be fully satisfactory. Therefore I planned to buy the components for a HTPC and fileserver along with the TV. Plans are to connect them together to get a full media network at home where every device shares its content with the others.

As always this turned out to be a quite ambitious plan, but it can be done. Others did it before me isn’t it?

continue reading…