Social media and Human Resources
This term I've got an HR course (Recruitment and Selection) and I'm writing a critique on an article about using Social Media in the Recruitment and Selection process. I'm also going to be doing a seminar in class about it, and came across this video in the process. I found it interesting, so I thought I'd share it.
Paul on 05.08.10 @ 09:51 AM EST [link]
Western Digital MyBookWorld conclusion
There's a bit more to the previously reported story about my failed network drive. After I retrieved the data I determined that one of the 500 GB drives had failed. So, I followed up with western digital's warranty program, and was lucky enough to find out that I was within the 2 year replacement warranty... by one month. Much to my surprise they replaced my 1TB drive with a 2TB drive. This is great because I can now mirror the drives for redundancy (like I should have to begin with) and still have as much available storage space as I did before.
After all that hassle I'm happy with how it turned out, and Western Digital wins in my books.
Paul on 05.05.10 @ 06:02 PM EST [link]
MybookWorld woes
So a while back I bought a 1tb mybookworld drive to store all my data in what I thought would be a secure and reliable solution. Well, about a month ago the drive crashed and I came close to losing all my data. I had the blue rings 2x500gb drive and unfortunately I had it set at raid0, meaning it was a 1tb linear drive (no redundancy). Well, I had a power failure and one of the drives got corrupted. The western digital software would not let me access my data as it thought one of the drives had failed. After much searching and some experimentation I was able to determine that the drive had not failed, it had just lost some data on one of the partitions. Anyway, after much searching I was able to find a solution and I thought I'd share it.
I required the following:
A drive large enough to backup all of the files (in my case about 360gb)
2 usb sata controllers (or a desktop that will allow you to plug in the drives internally)
ubuntu cd
Basically you need to plug in both of the drives while running linux and tell the computer to look at the 4th partition on each drive as a single linear space. Once I was able to do that I plugged in the new backup drive and copied everything over. After that its just a matter of reformatting the bad drive and starting over. It sounds simple, but was far from it. I was able to find instructions over at wikidot that eventually worked. The first set helped me access my files and the second to rebuild the drive when the western digital software was unable.
First step:
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/t-90514/
Basically I used these commands:
$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4
$ sudo apt-get install mdadm
$ sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sdb4
$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz
$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /media/xyz
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz
One of these commands didn't work, so I had to change the root password and login... luckily there were instructions further down the page
$sudo passwd
this is to change the root password so you can su to change to root
$su
use your newly created root password
search in /dev is there a mount of sdb4
try running
#ls /dev | grep sd
if you can see it on the list
then continue with
#mdadm -Cv /dev/md4 -l1 -n2 -c64 /dev/sdb4 missing
Anyway, it took a couple tries, but everything went fairly nicely once it became visible.
Ok, so after I finished copying all my data the web interface for the network drive wouldn't reformat the bad drive. So I had to rebuild it from some images that people had posted on another forum topic, here: http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/t-45881/how-to-backup-wd-mybook-world-ed-ii-1tb
1. Restore the sda_mbr. "dd if=sda_mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1"
2. Restore the partition table. "sfdisk /dev/sda < sda_ptable"
3. Restore the Image partition. "bzip2 -cd sda1_image.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sda1" do the rest for sda2, sda3, sda4.
If you get some error about not writable. You might have to follow step 4 and 6 above instructions. Make sure you change it back if you do this.
4. Not sure if you need to do this:
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda1
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda3
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda4
And that should work. Hope this helps anybody who ran into problems similar to me. If anything isn't clear please let me know (paul at paulgraham dot ca).
Paul on 03.29.10 @ 11:01 PM EST [link]
What's up with Nickel?
Here's some interesting Nickel graphs from metalprices.com. I think these add a bit of perspective to the current situation (check up to date news at google news). The strike (between the USW and Vale Inco) started on July 13th, and is in its 10th week. You will notice that prices are about where they were 5 years ago, but inventories are at all time highs.
Paul on 09.15.09 @ 09:34 AM EST [link]
Drunk Driving Masses
Here's a website I came across a while ago that I'd like to share with those reading my blog. Its stunning the number of stories that these people are able to pull from the media about impaired driving. These are only the tip of the iceberg, as many are only briefly reported in the media, like Kate's crash.
www.thedrunkdrivingmasses.com
Paul on 09.09.09 @ 12:45 PM EST [link]