CompleteFusion

After installing Windows Vista or Windows 7, you have a 30 day grace period before activation is required. We've recently been having problems accessing our internal use license keys under our Microsoft Partner/Action Pack subscription, and Microsoft has been slow to resolve the underlying technical issue. Unfortunately, a coworker installed Windows 7 about a month ago, expecting the issue with license keys to be resolved within 30 days.

If you need to renew the 30 day grace period, it is possible to extend it twice – providing up to a total of 90 days to obtain a license key. To extend the activation time for Windows Vista or Windows 7, launch a command prompt with Administrator privileges and type: slmgr -rearm

I've needed to recover deleted files on ext3, FAT, and NTFS file systems in the past, but I recently needed to recover a previous version of a text file I had overwritten by editing and saving it. I initially thought I might be able to recover it either by accessing the inode used by the previous version of the file, or by looking at ext3's journal.

Unfortunately, I had used nano to edit the file. Apparently, nano saves files by truncating and overwriting the file, reusing the same inode. Also, I quickly realized ext3's journal wouldn't help because my file system was mounted using data=ordered, not data=journal. From the ext3 FAQ:

1. data=journal: Journals all data and metadata, so data is written twice.
2. data=ordered: Only journals metadata changes.

Ultimately, I was able to recover the file with some help from stat, debugfs, and blkls from The Sleuth Kit. Before getting started, you'll need to install The Sleuth Kit. On Debian, it is available as a package, so: apt-get install sleuthkit

First, check the inode being used by the file: stat file.txt | grep Inode

This should return a line containing the inode, like: Inode: 1474575

Next, backup the file, then delete it:
cp file.txt file.old
rm file.txt

Run debugfs /dev/sda1, replacing /dev/sda1 with the hard drive the file is on. From the debugfs CLI, run stats and check its output for "Blocks per group". On my system, and most of the time, this is 32768. While still in the debugfs CLI, run imap <inode> to get the block: imap <1474575>. In my case, the block was 5898242.

Once you know the block the inode is in, and the number of blocks per group, create a block range: 5898242+32768-1 and use blkls to copy the block to a file: blkls /dev/sda1 5898242-5931009 > tmp.dat

Finally, open tmp.dat in your favorite text editor or use grep to search for the overwritten version of your file.

For more details about ext3 file systems and recovering deleted files:

1. Recovering Deleted Files on an ext3 File System
2. Data Recovery on Linux and ext3

As you may already know, I'm the Director of IT of WorldLingo, one of the leaders of online translation and localization. In addition to working with great people, I also have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology on a daily basis.

One of our newest projects is the Multilingual Archive, a constantly growing repository of translations of some of the world's best freely available information sources. Initially, we have translated approximately 2.8 million English Wikipedia articles into 8 languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian, Korean, and Japanese. Translation into Italian, Swedish, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Greek will be completed in the near future, and additional information sources will be added on an ongoing basis.

To create the Multilingual Archive, we leveraged WorldLingo's existing translation technology infrastructure and implemented Hadoop/HBase for storing the articles. Check out Lars George's blog for more information about our use of Hadoop/HBase.

I use Thunderbird for my mail client, and have my client set to automatically update itself when new "Shredder" builds are released. A few days ago, my Thunderbird was updated to version 3.0b4 (beta 4). As of 3.0b4, Thunderbird has implemented a new globally indexed search feature called Gloda, which is turned on by default. After trying it for the past few days, I decided I preferred the old search behavior. To revert to the old search behavior, go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck "Enable Global Search and Indexer", and then restart Thunderbird.

Its often useful to know which browsers, screen resolutions, operating systems, etc. are most frequently used by your site's visitors. I was recently looking through Google Analytics reports for CompleteFusion, and thought it would be interesting to share the results.

To be able to draw some conclusions on browser and operating system popularity over time, I compared visitor traffic from two time periods: April 10, 2008 to December 31, 2008 and January 1, 2009 to September 23, 2009.

Browsers
Firefox: 61.95% -> 61.40% (-0.55%)
Internet Explorer: 30.61% -> 25.06% (-5.55%)
Chrome: 0.93% -> 5.69% (+4.76%)
Safari: 3.65% -> 4.74% (+1.09%)
Opera: 2.19% -> 2.13% (-0.06%)
Other: 0.67% -> 0.98% (+0.31%)

Operating Systems
Windows: 80.74% -> 67.08% (-13.66%)
Linux: 11.49% -> 22.87% (+11.38%)
Mac: 7.44% -> 8.92% (+1.48%)
iPhone: 0.07% -> 0.47% (+0.40%)
Other: 0.26% -> 0.66% (+0.40%)

Browsers and Operating Systems
Firefox / Windows: 46.88% -> 34.57% (-12.31%)
Internet Explorer / Windows: 30.61% -> 25.04% (-5.55%)
Firefox / Linux: 10.89% -> 21.55% (+10.66%)
Chrome / Windows: 0.93% -> 5.60% (+4.67%)
Firefox / Mac: 3.78% -> 4.87% (+1.09%)
Safari / Mac: 3.38% -> 3.86% (+0.48%)
Opera / Windows: 1.86% -> 1.46% (-0.40%)
Opera / Linux: 0.13% -> 0.65% (+0.52%)
Other: 1.54% -> 2.40% (+0.86%)

Screen Resolution
1280×1024: 21.98% -> 20.24% (-1.74%)
1280×800: 14.48% -> 16.73% (+2.25%)
1024×768: 17.00% -> 14.32% (-2.68%)
1680×1050: 18.06% -> 13.76% (-4.03%)
1440×900: 8.17% -> 9.76% (+1.59%)
1920×1200: 4.91% -> 7.26% (+2.35%)
1600×1200: 4.18% -> 3.22% (-0.96%)
1400×1050: 3.59% -> 2.47% (-1.12%)
1024×600: 0.46% -> 2.22% (+1.76%)
1152×864: 1.20% -> 1.74% (+0.54%)
Other: 5.97% -> 8.28% (+2.31%)

Java Support
Yes: 90.97% -> 83.55% (-7.42%)
No: 9.03% -> 16.45% (+7.42%)

Firefox and Internet Explorer, the mainstays of the browser market, both lost market share over the time period. The explosive increase in Chrome usage seems to show that Google has entered a real contender in the browser wars. Previously, Chrome was behind Safari and Opera in usage, and now it is solidly third in popularity among CompleteFusion visitors. It will be interesting to see if Chrome's growth continues or stagnates in the future.

1280×1024 has been a popular, fairly standard 4:3 resolution for quite a while, although it seems that widescreen (16:9) displays are becoming more popular since 1200×800 usage has grown (and surpassed 1024×768). Interestingly, there seems to be growth at the high end (1900×1200) and lower end (1200×800), but virtually nothing in between.

Also, I initially would have expected Java support to have grown over time, but Java support among CompleteFusion visitors has fallen by 7.42%. I'm not sure why, since an obvious correlation to browser usage doesn't seem to exist, but I suspect the main reason is that mobile browsers that lack Java support have become more popular. Additionally, it could be that people who have recently switched to Chrome, Firefox, or an upgraded version of Internet Explorer haven't installed the Java plugin for their current browser yet.

By default, the HTC Touch Pro 2's music library will only add music on the device to the library. Of course, it would be nice to be able to add and play music from a storage card, since the device's internal storage is relatively small. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy configuration option or setting to add music from a storage card to the music library; however, there is a registry value you can modify.

If you don't already have a preferred registry editor, I successfully used the "Smartphone 2002,2003 (ARM/PXA)" version of PHM Registry Editor. I used it to navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\HTC\HTCAlbum\Ignored, clicked the "Values" button on the bottom left, modified the path under "Music Gizmo1" to \Storage Card\Music, loaded music onto the storage card, and rebooted the device.