I have a potpourri of things to tell you about this month. To start with, I want to relate the story of my friend Gary's computer upgrade experience.
As it happens, I'm still in contact with a bunch of my high school classmates. I almost never see them anymore, since I'm north of Boston, and most of them are still in Philadelphia, where we grew up. Nevertheless, we have a mailing list on Yahoo! Groups—which has been amazingly quiet, now that I think about it, since the Patriots beat the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
Near the end of last year, I got an e-mail of quiet desperation from Gary, who works for a reinsurer in New Jersey and likes to maintain his own computers.
Folks, Don't Let This Happen to You
I went to upgrade my computer yesterday. I bought an Asus motherboard, an Athlon 64 3000 CPU and 512 DDR400 memory. I powered down the computer, moved it to a relatively static free area (at least I think it was), disconnected everything, removed my old motherboard, etc., and installed the new stuff. Reconnected my hard drives and attempted to power up. I started to get errors regarding (I don't remember exactly) inability to boot.
To make a long story short, the disk was hosed after the upgrade. Reverting to the old motherboard didn't help: His disk was unreadable. The Maxtor installation information utility gave two error messages: BIOS Extension Support - FAILED and Partition Information - ABSENT.
Gary tried a bunch of things, but the disk was invisible to DOS and Windows. He then tried to restore from a Ghost backup set, and got "Invalid image" messages. I suggested that he talk to Ontrack or Data Doctors if he really needed to recover the information on the disk. A few days later, he filled me in on his progress:
I talked to Ontrack and they thought from my description of the problem that I might be able to recover my data using their EasyRecovery software (roughly $200). They have a demo version you can download for free that will analyze your drive and tell what is there but won't enable recovery.
Extending Enterprise Value with Web 2.0 In this webcast we will talk about how to simply build and quickly remix Web 2.0 applications and the role of the IT department and how they support mashups. We will discuss how IBM can help IT teams adapt existing enterprise systems as well as develop unique ones that can support end user driven mashups in a reliable, scalable and secure way. We will highlight a simple scenario adapting an enterprise information source for mashups and how to test it. We will also cover how IBM can help you build agile, fast and simple web applications based on dynamic scripting languages that dramatically reduces development time. Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 12pm PT / 3pm ET
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
