And so it begins…

As some of you know, this space was originally intended to host a project called EngaTiki. That’s still in the works, but life’s been a little hectic of late to really give it the kind of attention it needs. In the meantime, I’ve decided to take the tech and general howto content off of my livejournal site and stop boring my friends with it.

So this site will serve a couple of purposes. It will be a forum for my general tech and open source ramblings, a place to post snippets of code I think other people may find useful or interesting, and eventually, my developmnet blog for engatiki.

Welcome aboard!

Open Source for Academics (Part I)

*Or Why You Should Stop Using Word.*

Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft makes a decent word processor, in fact a decent office suite. Office has unsurpassed functionality, isn’t really as bloated as a lot of open source types would have you believe, and crashes far less than it used to. If you’re like me, though, you keep word processor documents around for *years*. If you’re even more like me, a lot of the stuff you’ve kept over the years is in a variety of proprietary formats: WordStar, Word for Windows, Word Perfect from various vendors, not mention some lord knows what salvaged from 5.25″ disks and tape (FormatII? I don’t even remember FormatII, but I’ve got files from it), and Word files of varying versions and vintages written on different platforms. The problem here is that we keep this stuff for a reason, usually having to do with bibliographies or citations (and of course just all that brilliance). But binary data ages very rapidly. It’s difficult for even new versions of the same software to deal with files that are sufficiently old. Footnotes do strange things. headers disappear. Page numbers print in weird places. Trying to import files from one platform to another or one application to another is even worse, especially if the original application is no longer in use. There are however other options, and we’re going to talk about two of them: [Open Office](http://www.openoffice.org) and [AbiWord](http://www.abisource.com).

In which our hero munges a CF card

Last week, I did something stupid (an unfortunately frequent occurrence). I was going through my digital camera trying to free up some space on the card and, so I *thought*, protecting the pictures I wanted to keep or hadn’t uploaded yet. When I hit delete, and confirmed that yes, I was absolutely sure I wanted to delete the pictures, though, I had one of those slow motion realizations that I hadn’t protected the most recent snapshots. What to do? Google, or course. But as it turned out, there are no free unerase options for removable media on Linux, and not many for OS X that looked reliable. Sometimes it seems, Windows users may have it better after all. After a little searching, though, I stumbled across a few fragments of C++ code that claimed to do the job. Thing were starting to look up. The only problem was that C code makes my head spin, and I wasn’t about to trust my un-backed-up pictures to some random code, even if a recovery process that involved paying attention to `gcc` output had appealed to me. Enter the savior of lazy programmers everywhere, Perl. One of the truly great and often overlooked things about using an operating system with unix heritage, whether OS X or a Linux or BSD flavor, is that it almost certainly has a default Perl install. Unless you’re a sysadmin or programmer, you may pass over this extrmemly useful tool most days in favor of flashier alternatives like applescript, or pre-built binaries from versiontracker, freshmeat, or rpmfinder, but it’s nice to know the power tools are there when you need them. And when you munge you data, you need them.

This how-to will cover recovering data from a munged CF or sD/xD card using only the tools built into your system.