Paul Hutchinson's Blog

Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer has blogged his favorite astronomical photos for 2006. His top pick is this awesome photo of Saturn taken by the Cassini orbiter.

I hit a problem when trying to get both Acrobat Reader 7 and 4 available under the WinXP “Open With” right-click menu. When ever I’d point the WinXP dialog to Acrobat 4 it would just use Acrobat 7 instead. The problem seems to be caused by both executables having the same name even though they are in different paths.

The solution is to copy the Acrobat 4 executable AcroRd32.exe and rename it, I named it AcroRd4.exe. Now the “Open With” selection works and I can choose either version to open a PDF.

On the other WinXP PC that I use regularly this problem didn’t happen. The only major difference between the PC’s is that the one that it worked on had Acrobat Reader 7 and the full Acrobat 7 program both installed.

IMHO, Mr. Walt Jung is one of the greatest engineers of analog electronics of all time. His IC Op-Amp Cookbook is a must have for any engineer who uses Op-Amps. I personally own two copies, the 2nd edition I bought in 1980 and the updated 3rd edition I bought in 1990. Unfortunately the currently available print editions are reported to be very low quality that is why the link above is set to find an older printing (like my newest copy). See the books page at Mr. Jung’s site for more information about this and his other excellent books.

The library section also contains PDF’s of many of Mr. Jung’s excellent articles and even a complete book written for Analog Devices. I am particularly excited to find his articles from The Audio Amateur magazine as I had to part with my complete TAA collection due to space constraints when I moved last year. Mr. Jung’s writing in TAA was one of the primary motivations for my career choice of electronics design especially my favorite work, analog circuit design. A very important lesson that was driven home from his TAA writings was the need for rigorous scientific methodology in assessing analog circuits especially audio circuits. The audiophile world has always had people who fall for pseudo-science, The Audio Amateur and especially Mr. Jung did a great job of debunking pseudo-science with science whenever it reared it’s ugly head.

I’ve been setting up my new Windows PC during the past month. I found a way to thoroughly confuse Windows programs, setup a user account then a few days later change the user name. Now the user name and documents and settings directory name no longer match and some programs get confused and crash. The cure is to delete the user and create a new one.

After letting Windows Update install IE7 I saw a security warning every time I ran a program located on my LAN. This site explains why and how to stop it:
Open file – Security Warning appears when you run a file from network share

I have not had many problems with Compact Flash cards since I started using them in 2000. One of my older 1G cards failed to read on a extremely hot day (>100F) a couple of years back but, I had backups of the data so it wasn’t a big deal.

Yesterday I had a failure that I think I caused myself. I suspect I had my trusty old Kodak DC-215’s power ON when I pulled out the 6 year old 32M Lexar CF card. When I put the card in a PC reader WinXP offered to format the card, yikes. I then tried it in my Jornada 720 and the camera with the same result.

This time the card data had no backup because it was pictures from a day hike with my brother and nieces. I really wanted to recover these photos so I started checking around the net for information on CF card failures and data recovery. I figured that good old hard disk recovery techniques should work since a CF card is organized the same as a hard disk. This article gives the essential information and I was about to do it when I decided to try out some of the applications designed to automatically recover CF data.

I tried out all of these programs, BadCopy, Davory, Digital Picture Recovery, Flash File Recovery, MediaRECOVER, mmCARD Recovery, PhotoRescue and, Smart Recovery.

The only program that was even close to showing me that it could recover the data was PhotoRescue. PhotoRescue did not show thumbnails for the files probably because they were in FlashPix (.FPX) file format. The files that PhotoRescue said it could recover were of the right size range for my photos so I decided to buy PhotoRescue and see if it would work.

PhotoRescue recovered every one of the photos and even recovered some long ago deleted photos. I highly recommend PhotoRescue, at only $30 it is a rare bargain in data recovery software.

A final note, after recovering the photos I let the camera re-format the CF card. To my surprise, after the re-format, all the photos were now accessible on the card! This indicates to me that the problem was fairly simple FAT corruption and that the camera’s format firmware is smart enough to fix some FAT problems on its own. If my suspicion of a FAT corruption is correct then why didn’t any of the other software that I tried even come close to recovering the data?