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Dr Hangman

Posted: January 20, 2010
New project on the way! I was working on a PHP/MySQL based Hangman, but I decided to switch gears a bit and make that a C#/MySQL application with leaderboards online. Why? Because of a class with the title Capstone Project. Here is an early view of what it will look like when everything is said and done.



Unlike pretty much all of my other projects, this one has a deadline. That means that I will have a working product in about 7 more weeks. I might even setup another page for updates. Depends on how bored I get over the next few days.

LaCie Big Disk Soft Clicking

Posted: January 16, 2010

I had this guy call me up the other day because his external hard drive stopped working. I told him it could be a few things and that I needed to take a look at it to make sure his data was safe. I got to his house, and a LaCie Big Disk 1TB external drive is hooked up to his iMac. I turned the drive on and started to hear a soft clicking sound.

Now then, because of the HFS/HFS+ filesystem that the Macs use, I had to install a few programs on my Linux laptop to attempt to read the drives: hfsprogs, hfsplus, and hfsutils. I don't know if I needed all of them, but I installed all three just in case. Once those programs were installed I plugged the enclosure into my laptop. Didn't even see that there was a hard drive there, let alone attempt to mount it.

So then I took the enclosure appart to find two 500GB hard drives. I took my SATA/IDE to USB adapter and plugged one of the drives onto my laptop and this time it recognized the hardware, but still refused to mount it. Same thing with the other drive. When I plugged the hard drives into my external power supply from my SATA/IDE to USB adapter I noticed that there was no soft clicking. This led me to believe that it was a power issue, so I told the owner that I would take it home and see what I can do.

Once home I took it apart again and unplugged only the two power cables to the hard drives. I then plugged one hard drive into the external power supply I had, and the other to a spare SATA plug in my desktop. I plugged in the enclosure's power supply and turned it on then used the USB interface on the enclosure to plug into my desktop. And like magic it mounted. I realized earlier that it wouldn't mount the external drives seperately, so I had a feeling that the drives where using JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), thus the need for me to use the enclosure's USB interface.

Now, I'm just waiting for the owner to return my message about what he wants to do (buy another enclosure, etc). I had searched around a bit about this issue and didn't find anything too usefull, so I decided to write this up in hopes that someone will find it useful.

News Page Tweak v2.3

Posted: December 20, 2009
This version is, for the most part, finished. I still need to do some testing before I release it though. I have that feeling like I forgot something rather important. Chances are I'll find out what I forgot when I'm updating the version I have on this page. If you want to test this version before I release it, let me know over in the forums.

On a side note, I'm not gonna be titling my posts by date anymore. Maybe it will look like I update more often. :P

December 20

Posted: December 20, 2009
I hate the snow, especially up here in New England. They don't take care of the roads up here like they do back home. None of the highways were plowed last night, so that made drivng home from work. I still can't believe my boss didn't close down shop earlier last night, it was dead.

But I finally made it back to my apartment. I had to park in a parkinglot last night because of the snow though. I took this shortly after I got back.

November 9

Posted: November 9, 2009


That about sums up how I feel right now. The other day I was working on my News Page tweak on my laptop, and the program I was using crashed while saving the main file. Come to find out, it had only saved the first 30 lines of code. I lost over a hundred lines of code and months worth of work in mere minutes. I was almost done with that version too.

Needless to say, the release of the next version is delayed further. I don't even know when I'll be able to work on it again, hopefully sometime within the next month or two.