[CODE] How to alias commands in unix shells

One of those annoying things that takes more time to look up than it really should.

Example:

alias s='cd ..'

is one of my favorites.

If you need to know more details, man alias.

Checkdisk, and why it's a pain

Checkdisk, also known as chkdsk, is a Windows tool that scans your hard drive and checks for, and attempts to fix, problems with it. Generally speaking it can only be run after you restart, since it requires exclusive access to the drive in question.

The main way people use tend to use chkdsk is to right click on the drive in Windows Explorer, go to Tools and then click the button for Error checking. This will schedule a chkdsk for the next time your computer starts.

The problem with this is what happens when something goes wrong. For example, my computer was suffering from freezes that I suspected were related to my accidentally pulling out the power cord when plugging my external hard drive (ironically to back up my stuff).

Upon restart, it performs a chkdsk. When that finishes after several hours, it blue screens. When it restarts, it does a chkdsk again.

See the problem? If a chkdsk isn't completed successfully the drive stays "dirty", indicating that a chkdsk should be run on the next startup. This continues only a chkdsk succesfully completes, which is likely to be never unless you do something about it.

This is why you should do chkdsk from a safe mode command prompt so that if something goes wrong, you don't get into an infinite loop of chkdsk.

I can't boot into safe mode with command prompt, but that's another problem...

You also can't cancel a chkdsk that's already in progress short of restarting. Ctrl-c doesn't work.

[RANDOM] Google chatting to a cell phone

Some people out there know this already, but you can send Gchat messages to a cell phone. It's awesome and has no setup time- just punch in the phone number after you enable the feature in Labs.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/10/google_adding_text_messaging_to_gchat_in_gmail-2/

Go nuts!

[RANDOM] How to lock IKEA telescoping "A" legs

Ok, so this drove me crazy until I figured out what the trick is.

If you've ever bought IKEA furniture, in particular anything that has a choice between T legs and A legs, DO NOT BUY THE A LEGS.

The hassle it will be trying to adjust and lock those legs while keeping your surface level will drive you insane. Don't be cheap on this; spend the extra $50 or whatever to get the better legs.

However, if you do have A legs, like me, the way to unlock and lock them is counterintuitive.

Unscrew the legs CLOCKWISE (yes, that is reversed from normal) to unlock them. Adjust height. Screw COUNTER-CLOCKWISE to lock.

If you go to the IKEA website and find instructions, it will tell you the same thing. Go to page 40 to see the cartoon for it.

This drove me nuts because I've had this desk for a couple years and forgot that it's reversed (and lost the original instructions).

[RANDOM] Gmail conversation limit?

Apparently after a Gmail conversation reaches 100 messages, it automatically spawns a new conversation.

Either that or I'm going crazy.

At any rate, maybe this will be helpful for some obscure reason at some point.

[RANDOM] Northeastern students in a fishbowl

In my "Computers in Society" class, we talked about the effects of technology on our privacy, and what privacy really means. Privacy is hardly binary (private or public). There are varying degrees of privacy and many of them are based off of perception.

For example, donating money to a political campaign is a public act. For a variety of reasons it's important that donors give out their personal information. Most everyone seems to think that there's nothing wrong with that.

However, if you combine technology with "public" information you can get some controversy over ease of access. For example, California successfully passed a law to ban gay marriage. This website lists every single donor to that campaign by their name, profession, donation amount and marks their exact location on a Google map.

Is this illegal? Technically, no. All of that information is freely and publicly available at government institutions. Why is this a big deal? Most people don't have the energy to copy down thousands of names by hand from record books and post them on the internet on a map.

That's a great example of how people are fine with releasing information to the "public" as long as it's not in everyone's faces. It's analogous to permitting photos of your child's dance performance to go up in a public school's lobby, but making a fuss if they end up on the internet and gather millions of views.

Anyway, this leads up to the fun part of this article, which is how you, whoever you are, can watch Northeastern students online. For free. Really!

There are a number of cameras placed around campus that let you see public areas in real time.

The link is here.

Another student at Northeastern, Will Nowak, compiled all the videos together onto a single page for ease of use.

Is this too far, or perfectly OK? Enjoy the videos.

[TOOLS] Need to know what's taking up space on your hard drive?

A coworker of mine recommended WinDirStat, which is actually pretty cool. It ran pretty quickly (on a 240 gb hard drive that's 80% full, it finished in about two minutes). It tells you directory breakdowns of which is the largest folder, and allows you to drill down to see the files.

It also has a good visual graph of your hard drive, allowing you to see from a glance what types of files (and which, if you mouse over the section) take up the most space.

This only works on Windows of course. *nix users have easy console commands for this :(