Now the appliance requires a special power supply which costs about $50 to replace. This is too expensive, so I rather void the warranty and try to recover the data on the drive myself.

The Ethernet Disk Mini is essentially a standard ATA hard disk, coupled with a firmware running on a variant of Linux. Opening up the casing revealed that the disk uses a standard Serial ATA interface. (Some older disks may still be using a Parallel ATA interface.

So far, so good. I disconnected the drive from the casing and connected it to my PC. The next challenge was to discover how the data is stored on the hard disk.

The hard disk is divided up into 5 or so partitions, with one of them holding data, and the remainder holding the firmware and the Linux swap partition.

Originally I thought that the data partition was formatted as a FAT32 partition, but I was mistaken. It turned out that the more recent Lacie drives are formatted using the XFS file system.

Windows can’t read data from XFS file systems, which meant I had to somehow install Linux to read the data. Although quite involved, the instructions provided by polishlinux.org on installing coLinux on Windows did the trick.

And now I have all the data restored, and a spare 500GB SATA hard disk!

Just to keep you up to date, here is what it looks like earlier this week:

This is how Apple makes its money. It looks like the packaging actually costs more than the cable itself.

• actuarial.sty, which provides for symbols and other notation for actuarial, financial and statistical uses; and
• fce-thesis.cls, which is a document class file which provides a basis for typesetting theses in accordance with style guidelines set by the former Faculty of Commerce and Economics (now the Australian School of Business) at the University of New South Wales.

You can download these files from the Koinic Network’s LaTeX page.

Please note that none of these files are supported by anyone.

The issue relates to certain formulae which should return 65535 when it doesn’t.

That’s why most companies don’t upgrade software so quickly they have released. Imagine what would happen if critical financial computations were compromised by this bug.

I’ve released version 0.1 of SimpleID, a very simple OpenID provider written in PHP.

I am running an earlier version of SimpleID as my OpenID identity at http://koinic.net/

Send me bug reports!

It is timely because version 7 of Drupal will no longer be compatible with PHP 4.

(I apologise for the lack of sense of the above post for non-geeks. Thank you for your attention.)

Apart from finding out that I know a lot more people than I originally envisaged, it was rather interesting to see how much information people reveal themselves on social networking sites. Often you will find a person’s full name, birthday (including year), home town, e-mail and phone numbers.

That’s almost enough information to enable a malicious person to commit identity fraud.

One could argue that one could (and should) restrict access to this information to the person’s friends. But I wonder whether people actually check the visibility of their profiles, or consider this risk when deciding whether to accept a third party as a friend.

Food for thought. (Yes, I work in risk management.)