Surviving a system crash

Yesterday my laptop failed to boot up. I had to go for a system restore. This caused an OS reinstall deleting all files on the C: drive leaving the D: untouched. The result - lost all pictures, all music, all audiobooks. Moral of the episode - store good stuff on D: more importantly take a back up.

I got in touch with iTunes and Audible. I managed to get back some of the songs and books from my iPod. Nothing could be retrieved from iTunes store. The reason according to the customer services was that the albums might not be stocked in store now. The good news was from Audible. I managed to get back all my audiobooks.

Installing the browsers, file compression systems and yes Microsoft Office was a pain. The good part of the story is that the computer is a lot faster than what it had been before the crash. All is well!

Adventures with wxMaxima

I was looking for a software that could help me with numeric as well as symbolic computations... something that could work like MATLAB and Mathematica, the two packages that I had some experience of using several years ago. I found the opensource wxMaxima which I downloaded from http://andrejv.github.com/wxmaxima/

Beginning Java

It has been a while since I started computer programming. The year was 1987 when in VII standard Computers were introduced as a subject. The course commenced with the origin of computers, leading on to the generations of computer, looking at the architecture and then moving on to BASIC language. My first project was creating a quadratic equation solver - with real roots ofcourse.