Toxic Byte

There used to be a directory on this site of other joke sites back when this was a joke site. I’ve removed it now. Partly because it was pointless and didn’t actually add anything to the net other than another link farm (woo!)

So I’ve taken it down now and left a memorial page (because I know it has been listed and don’t want a lot of people hitting the site on a 404 now do we?

Why did I put it up originally? Dunno really, I guess I thought it might promote the site, and maybe garner a few links back in the process. Directories really are pointless though aren’t they?

Yesterday I took out an old 8 Gig harddisk that I was using for linux and replaced it with a 120 Gig drive from an old PC we’re not using any more. A simple task you’d think! Well, not so. After an entire evening trying to get rid of the Grub boot loader that was causing the boot process to hang without the 8 gig drive there everything was fine…

…actually, no it wasn’t! Now the old PC doesn’t want to boot any more and this one won’t boot without running chkdsk for about an hour each time. So I’m gonna fix the damn thing, hopefully I won’t have to reformat it but I will if I have to.

Right then, I get lost of errors like this:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File record segment 3152 is unreadable.
File record segment 3153 is unreadable.
File record segment 3154 is unreadable.
File record segment 3155 is unreadable.

…and…

CHKDSK is recovering lost files.
Recovering orphaned file TOOLBAR.BMP (129929) into directory file 126219.
Recovering orphaned file IADVSNK2.CPP (133980) into directory file 126625.
Recovering orphaned file SIMPDND.DEF (136912) into directory file 126496.
Recovering orphaned file COMCLASS.H (140996) into directory file 125301.
Recovering orphaned file CONTAI~1.H (141080) into directory file 126323.

So why’s that happening. Perhaps I’ll do a delete on these files… well that don’t seem to work. Hmm, looks like a format coming on (…to be continued)

I’ve found suggestions that say run fisk with the /MBR option. But at a msdos prompt it tells me that:

'fdisk' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Which is a long winded way of putting it to say the least. BUT… after looking for another solution I read places saying DO NOT DO THAT! It’s a dos thing, not ntfs or something like that. Instead, they suggest:

fixboot c:
fixmbr

BUT DON’T DO THAT! Apparently, it ain’t going to work on NTFS. Hmm, then, what next. The foxboot, fixmbr and bootcfg dos commands just don’t seem to exist on my windows installation.

Ah, it seems that “fixmbr” is only available in XP Professional. AGH! (or it is and it isn’t or something). Well, I can’t run the windows xp recovery console because I’ve just moved house and I wouldn’t have a clue where the damn recovery discs are. Hope comes in the form of an emergency boot cd which I’m burning as we speak…

I had cause to analyse a query for the table names used in it before sending it off to the database. I don’t actually do it this way any more. But this is a solution using the SQL::Statement module from Cpan in perl

#
# First fetch table names from query
#
my $sql = “SELECT blah FROM blah, blah, blah”;

# Using AnyData rather than ANSI because ANSI catches reserved
# words even if they are quoted or fully qualified (bug in SQL::Parser)
my $parser = SQL::Parser->new(‘AnyData’);
$parser->{RaiseError} = 0;
$parser->{PrintError} = 1;

# Parse the table names from the query and clean them up.
my $statement = SQL::Statement->new($sql,$parser);
foreach my $table ($statement->tables())
{
    # remove quotes (") from table name and convert to lower case
    my ($table_name_clean) = lc($table->name());
    $table_name_clean =~ s/"//g;

    push(@table_names, $table_name_clean);
}

Like three bandits in a Mexican stand off they just stand there, still as moonlight. Eric Giguere, Joel Comm and the Rich Jerk, all nervously eying each other amongst the ruins of many books, e-books and “special reports”. There’s gun smoke all around and the sound of broken glass as people scatter. How will people know which book to buy, if any?

Well, something like that anyway. Three books really stand out lately, either due to their reputation, notoriety or even their content. Those books are:

• Joel Comm’s “What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense”
• Eric Giguere’s “Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program”
• “Making Money on the Internet” by The Rich Jerk

They’re all different enough to deserve their space on the market too. Think of the Rick Jerk book as an overview of things you can do to earn money, Eric’s book as an absolute beginners guide and Joel’s guide a series of methods and ideas to help you along as an existing website owner. Continue Reading »