Harddisk scan at startup, Always!!!

For past few days, when ever i was starting my computer it always scanned D: drive for disk errors at windows startup. I always let it run to the finish but it just won’t go away. As soon as i reboot my computer, D: drive scan starts again . So today i spent some time on this issue and tried to fix the problem. If you will google for this you will probably find alot of articles describing how to fix this problem. One such article is XP always scans on boot but to my disappointment it did not fixed my problem. So i tried to fix the problem my self.

For every hard disk partition there is a bit which indicates weather the disk is in good state or needs to be checked for errors. At startup windows checks this bit and if a partition is marked as dirty an scan is performed. To check the dirty bit run following command on CMD

fsutil dirty query <Drive Letter>

As for me the drive was D: so i executed following command

fsutil dirty query d:

Turns out that the D: drive was marked as dirty. Now i begin to wonder even after running chkdsk so many times why my D: drive was not being marked as ‘NOT Dirty’. After looking around for possible reasons, i found out that i have configured my windows to create Page file on D: drive. That made some sense, because chkdsk probably won’t be able to completely fix D: drive because some portion of it was locked by the Operating System. So i changed the Page file from D: to E: and re-run the chkdsk. This time chkdsk took a little bit more time and after the scan, D: drive was no more dirty. To change the page file location

1. go to ‘Mmy Computer’ properties by right clicking on ‘My Computer’ icon
2. select the ‘Advanced’ tab
3. click the settings button in the ‘Performance’ group
4. It will open up a ‘Performance Options’ dialog
5. Select the ‘Advanced ‘ tab
6. Click the the ‘Change’ button under the ‘Virtual Memory’ group
7. this will open up a dialog, do the necessary changes and hit the ‘Set’ button.
8. Close the dialogs by clicking ‘Ok’ button

And for fixing bad sectors run following command

chkdsk /r <Drive Letter>

Website Update Scanner

I have to check my course web pages daily to see if there are some notices about the class or assignments. Doing this is annoying. That’s why i searched the Google and found this little Add-on, Update Scanner, for Firefox. Update Scanner automatically checks web pages for any updates and when an update is found, it notifies about the page update and highlights the changes that took place compared to previous version. At least now i don’t have to keep o checking my course sites like 2-3 times a day. Whenever there is a notice, Update Scanner alerts me.  This Add-on is for FF 3.0.*.

Seoul National University

SNU is ranked 50th in 2008 Times Higer - QS World University Rankings. Checkout university’s notice about world ranking. Today i am going to post videos about the university as i am also studying in Seoul National University.

Seoul National University 2008 Video

Seoul National University Video

The Future of Web

World wide web is evolving. It is becoming more and more understadable to the computers. Traditional web is getting more colors with semantics. They say an image is worth a thousand words then a video  may be worth more then a thousand pictures. Checkout following videos to have some idea about Semantic Web and Web 2.0

Introduction to the Semantic Web

Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us

SQL Developer – Java based SQL Client

Today i had to work with an oracle database and i did not had any SQL client installed on my machine, so i went to Oracle’s site and tried to download Oracle SQL Developer but my luck, i couldn’t signup because of some error on oracle’s signup page. Hmm … so i tried to look for some other website which might be keeping a copy of Oracle SQL Developer. It was the when i found out about this similarly named product “SQL Developer”. I downloaded and installed it. But before i could connect to the database i had to download Oracle’s JDBC driver and add it in SQL Developer’s driver list. Once that was done i could easily access the database. Checkout a screen shoot of the product taken from their website.

1. Main menu and tool bar

2. Database Navigator

3. Output window and Bookmarks

4. MDI (Multiple Document Interface) window area

5. Context menus

PS: I figured out that the problem with downloading Oracle Developer was because of some cache problem with my browser and i was able to download Oracle SQL Developer.

Screen capturing is now easy for me!!!

I have always been capturing some part of screen or an image of some file or pdf using the traditional ‘Prt Scr’ (print screen) button and then cropping and saving the image using the free image editor Paint.net. Though, capturing images using print screen is not a big deal but often i have to save 5 – 10 images from research papers and make presentations, so i googled for some screen capturing utility. I found ScreenHunter (Free Ver). First impression of ScreenHunter is great! As soon as you hit the hot key for screen capture it displays alignment lines on screen, you just need to drag on the screen and mark the rectangular area you want to capture. ScreenHunter will capture that part of screen and save it in a file. A little disappointment though was that while saving images, it does not asks for a file name instead it generates incremental file names which of course can be customized.

Google’s Mail Goggles

Google has launched a new feature ‘Google Mail Goggles’ in Gmail. It is an attempt to prohibit people from sending emails when they are drunk. How they do it is prety simple, when you write an email and hit the send button, GMail displays some simple math problems to solve in short time. The Mail is only sent when you solve the problems correctly. A unique way to make sure that you actually want to send that late night email.

By default Mail Goggle feature is only active late night on the weekend but you can customize it according to your needs.

You can install Mail Goggles by clicking on “Labs” in my Gmail account and selecting the Mail Goggles feature.

Finally, The Blog

I have been planning to update my site and make a blog. But couldn’t spare some time. It is great to post my first post on this blog. Hopefully i will keep on updating this. My website is http://babartareen.zxq.net.