Category: Uncategorized

Windows 7 repair boot loop

I was diagnosing a friend’s Dell laptop running Windows 7 the other day: every time it would boot up, a Windows repair wizard would come up. It would scan for problems, and find none. A system restore did not help, nor did SFC. I couldn’t even boot into safe mode. The repair wizard would start even after I recovered the OS partition from the Dell recovery image! That’s when I began to suspect that there wasn’t really any problem. I did some more searching online and decided to try bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot. Voila, Windows began to boot normally! Now, I wish I had tried that to start with since the system repair report didn’t list any specific problem.

Hard Drive Cloning Software

If you are trying to choose software to clone your hard drive, unfortunately I have to recommend Seagate/Maxtor’s MaxBlast over the open source Clonezilla. The now-current version of Clonezilla does not allow you to easily specify the size of the partitions on the new hard drive. It can only automatically resize all the partitions proportionately or duplicate them in the same size (which means if your new drive is bigger you have to enlarge your partition later). Of course if you only have one partition, it doesn’t matter.

The other thing is that Clonezilla showed a warning about one of the new partitions not starting on a cylinder boundary. That’s another issue that doesn’t occur with MaxBlast.

Removing contacts from Favorites

If you use an HTC phone (I have the Incredible) and have signed in to Facebook and linked your friends’ Facebook profile with their Google/phone contact, you may have noticed that it can be very difficult to remove a contact from the Favorites group once you have added them. This often means that the contact shows up on your People widget even though you don’t want it to. That’s because you cannot directly edit the group membership of the Facebook contact.

This has led to suggestions involving unlinking, editing the groups, then relinking the contacts. Or even clearing your Facebook account information and re-entering it. However, none of that is necessary.

Just leave the contact linked, and go to People, then Groups (at the bottom), go into the Favorites group (or whatever group you’re having the problem with). Hit the Menu button, then choose “Delete group member”. It will remove the contact, including the Facebook contact, from the group. Problem solved!

Rails inconsistency

I like Ruby on Rails, but the design is sometimes inconsistent.

For example, consider the “text_method” parameter to the collection_select helper method. The argument forces you to call a method on the model object which returns the text which is used in the select list. That’s ok when you only want to display a single field from that object, for example “name”. It’s not ok if you want to display something more complicated, because then you’re putting display logic into the model. You’re supposed to use helpers for that! Since doing it right would make it ugly and more complicated, I end up giving in and doing it the wrong way by adding a method to the model. It frustrates me.

Duo Melis

This blog is notably lacking in the subjects of music and art, so to help remedy that here is a video of the classical guitar duo I had the delight of hanging out with this weekend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMOB1BvpwY

They are amazing musicians, not to mention hilariously funny and smart. Besides hearing a totally INTENSE and inspirational performance, I got to hear really funny and endearing stories about their adventures. Susana is from Spain, while Alexis is from Greece, so they’re doubly interesting to talk to.

Unfortunately, writing about it tends to deflate the experience. But I will update if they are in Chicago again. Until then, check out their website http://www.duomelis.com/