Technical notes and miscellanea http://www.tstotts.us/wp Some notes by Timothy Stotts Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:30:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Dissecting a laptop hard drive http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2012/01/24/dissecting-a-laptop-hard-drive/ http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2012/01/24/dissecting-a-laptop-hard-drive/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:20:59 +0000 Tim http://www.tstotts.us/wp/?p=32 Read more »

]]> In 2003, I purchased an Apple Aluminum Powerbook G4. The hard drive is what was standard at the time: ATA-100 2.5″ / 1 cm. Planning to recycle the nearly working, but now antiquated, machine, I decided to remove the malfunctioning hard drive and recycle it separately, ensuring that personal data is erased. The iFixit hard drive replacement guide presented a useful set of instructions for opening the computer.

Unfortunately, this is the second hard drive to die since purchasing the machine. I suspect that the machine overheats as Mac OS X keeps the fans running at a very low (and quiet) speed compared with what they are capable of. Replacing the hard drive and battery is 2/3 the cost of buying a new Windows 7 machine, so this laptop will be recycled.

Having never opened a hard drive before, I decided to take a look inside and observe the dual platter layout of this 2004 hard drive model. The capacity of the drive was 80 Gigabytes.

]]> http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2012/01/24/dissecting-a-laptop-hard-drive/feed/ 0 GIT and SSH integration in Eclipse IDE http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2011/11/25/git-and-ssh-integration-in-eclipse-ide/ http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2011/11/25/git-and-ssh-integration-in-eclipse-ide/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:18:38 +0000 Tim http://www.tstotts.us/wp/?p=21 Read more »

]]> The Eclipse IDE has integrated support for the Secure SHell transport protocol and GIT revision control system. I use rsync.net for remote backup of personal data, and also for hosting personal, private software projects. rsync.net provides manual GIT access over SSH for any account.

While setting up a remote shared GIT repository I noticed that my password-protected 4096 bit RSA OpenSSH key was not compatible with the Eclipse IDE. I generated a 1024 DSA key from within Eclipse, added id_dsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server, and then was able to use a private key from within Eclipse.

Eclipse SSH configuration

]]> http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2011/11/25/git-and-ssh-integration-in-eclipse-ide/feed/ 0 Rethinking the web site http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2011/08/27/rethinking-the-web-site/ http://www.tstotts.us/wp/2011/08/27/rethinking-the-web-site/#comments Sun, 28 Aug 2011 03:20:40 +0000 Tim http://tstotts.us/wp/?p=10 With the inexpensive services now available on the Internet, I have decided to subscribe to shared hosting for my web site. This site will be my new public presence and http://tstotts.us/ will be the primary domain rather than http://tstotts.net/.

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