We have a saying in Poland like the one in the title of this post. Well… seems I forgot about it today (well… now it’s already tomorrow, so today means yesterday).

What happened? I bought myself a new shiny harddisk for my laptop and an external USB drive to put the old disk into use. That’s nothing bad of course. At least not on its own… But while preparing a working environment on the new disk I had the old disk hot-plugged to access its data. At some moment one of the volumes became inaccessible. The NTFS filesystem seems to be invalid and despite my tries to salvage the disk I was unsuccessful and it looks like I’ll have to say good bye to the data stored on that partition.

As it was a Windows installation and I rarely work on Windows there wasn’t much precious data there… Actually there was only one piece of valuable data there – one that wasn’t copied anywhere else… And now for the best part – what was that data? Well… not my bank passwords (thank God!) and not my PhD thesis (the risk of it being lost was minimal as the thesis doesn’t exist yet, but never underestimate the power of quantum fluctuations!). But unfortunately it was a final project of the diploma for the Qt Centre Programming Contest… What a shame… if I don’t find a way to access my data, I’ll have to make the diploma again and last time it took three months to do it

So… if anyone knows how to validate an invalid ntfs filesystem (standard Windows tools said it was unrepairable) without buying expensive software, I’d be grateful for any help in that matter.

Memo for today – Uncle Bill doesn’t like me.

I have just returned from my first scientific conference. It was PPAM 2007 held in Gdansk, Poland. The most important thing is that I went there not only as a “viewer”, but as an active participant, presenting my first paper — End to End QoS Measurements of TCP Connections. The article will be published in upcoming LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) by Springer. The article will also be published on my website after the print is complete. Here is the abstract:

This paper presents selected issues on quality measurements of TCP connections, seen from the end user’s perspective and not from the service provider’s point of view. The main focus is put on selection of parameters, which values are worth gathering, and can be gathered without disturbing end user applications. To verify the presented ideas, a measuring tool — QMP (QoS Measurement Plug In) was developed. QMP is placed inside the kernel of Linux 2.6 operating system as an extension to the packet filter. The paper shortly describes the tool and some experiments performed with it.