Advance

This past week has been a challenging week for me when it comes to using my computer. Last weekend my desktop got infected with a Trojan called VirtuMonde (read about it here ) and it took me almost the whole weekend to finally get rid of it. And then today I discovered how my laptop's Windows XP registry got messed up for some unknown reason. That took me another hour or so to get it fixed. And it was only made possible by a stroke of luck. I'll explain as we go along.

Installing Apache2 and PHP5 on different platforms can be frustrating at times because of the differences involved in each platform. Especially true when you are new to a particular Operating System. Just today I had to install both these two software on my fairly newly installed Ubuntu laptop. And it took me some effort to accomplish that, which for an experienced user would have taken minutes. For those of you who might travel on this road too, here is the quick way to get Apache and PHP5 running on your Ubuntu computer.

Today I have decided to update my Ruby Gem software from version 0.9.5 to 1.0.1. I have previously updated my Rails from version 1.2.3 to 1.2.6. And since my Ruby Gem is a couple of version behind, I thought I should do the same. It is a straight forward process that involves just one command line. (on my Ubuntu installation) Simple enough.

My dream of finding a perfect Operating System (or a near perfect) in Ubuntu was dashed today. So far I have had a pretty good impression of the Ubuntu user interface, and have not used anything out of the ordinary but a regular user usage. Today I was running a Ruby on Rail program that was supposed to do some rather heavy duty processing such as parsing a flat file and creating an XML file. And that application just "ran away" and left me in a situation where I was unable to regain control of my OS. The application has not crashed because I could see the hard disk light blinking away non-stop. My mouse pointer is constantly at the`wait state. When I tried to move the move, it was like nothing happened, and then it will shoot in the direction I was moving and then I would lose control of the mouse again. After a while, the application window became greyed out.

Though not often (thankfully), there are times when you may encounter errors reading your hard drive due to physical damage like bad sectors. Is it possible to recover the file that you are having problem reading? There is a free tool called Unstoppable Copier which attempts to recover every readable piece of that file and put the pieces together. It does this by ignoring all the error messages that one would have otherwise encountered while using standard ways and tools to retrieve data from damaged disks. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.