The Synthetic Librarian

Most systems are allopoietic systems. That is they produce something different from the system itself. A common example is a car. A car has many consituent parts that work together to produce a driving vehicle; no part of the system resembles a driveable vehicle however.

Compare this with autopoietic systems: systems that produce themselves. Living organisms are the most common example of an autopoietic system. Your body produces itself for example. Skin cells produce skin cells; people produce people.

See also the wikipedia definition of Allopoiesis.

Losing the data on your hard disk can be tragic. This video demonstrates one of the warning signs that your hard disk is about to die leaving you with little hope of every getting your data back. A common way for hard disks to “go bad” is for a mechanical failure to occur. Inside your hard disk are some disks that contain your data that spin rapidly, and some “read/write” heads at the end of a moving arm. The arm moves the heads back and forth over the surface of those spinning disks so that they can jump to the data you want to read or write. The movement of the read/write heads is controlled by a magnetic mechanism that is supposed to prevent the heads from going to far to the outside or inside of the disk.

If the mechanism controlling the arm starts to fail, there will be warning signs first! One of the warning signs is that you start to get disk errors more often. But just prior to the complete failure of the disk you might start to hear loud clicking noises and the occasional “bouncing” noise. These are bad signs. Some drives sound like they are clicking normally, so it helps to see and hear and example of a drive that has failed to know the noises you can expect. This video demonstrates that.

I have opened the casing to show the motion of the traveling arm. Notice that the noise appears to coincide with the heads hitting the black plastic on the outside of the disk or the metal circle at the center of the disk. The noise is not generated by the heads hitting anything. In fact, the noise is generated by a small piece of plastic located under the metal housing visible in the top left corner of the hard disk shown in the video. If you watch carefully, you can see a flash of motion near the top left edge of the disk during the video. When the arm moves toward the outside and goes to far you will hear the bouncing noise. When the arm moves to far inside the disk, you will hear the clicking noise.

A word of warning. NEVER OPEN YOUR HARD DISK. It will never work again if you do. This demonstration was done because the hard disk was already ruined and unrecoverable.

These noises sometimes occur just before it is too late; just before the disk dies forever. If you reboot, your computer’s BIOS may not recognize the drive. You will very likely hear those clicking noises repeated over and over and the occasional “bouncing” noise (heard at the very beginning of the video. Mechanical failures are not the kind of thing you can fix on your own. A data recovery company might be able to get your data back, but they will need to open the hard disk and operate on it in a clean room (the air and dust can ruin it).

So, what do you do if you hear the clicking and bouncing noises?

1. Do NOT turn off your computer or disconnect your hard disk
2. Immediately begin to backup the data.
3. When the data is backed up, consider sending the disk in for warranty replacement if it is not too old

If you cannot backup the data or the backup fails, you can do this:

1. Shutdown the computer and disconnect the drive.
2. If the drive is an external drive, power it off
3. DO NOT power the drive on again.
4. DO NOT try repeated to get it to work or to listent to clicking noise
5. The chances of data recovery are reduced if you keep letting that clicking noise occur
6. Find a data recovery company that you can trust and have them work on it
7. In the event of a mechanical failure, they will need to operate on the disk in a clean room. It will probably be costly but they may be able to recover your data
8. Again, if you keep trying to reboot your disk or repeatedly try to access it while it is clicking it might reduce how much data can be recovered.

Last Saturday (April 28, 2007) I gave a presentation at the Alberta Library Conference (ALC 2007) titled, “How to Get the Technical Support You Need.” I think many, if not most, people have had negative experiences trying to obtain technical support. Contacting a helpdesk leaves people feeling frustrated, ignored, or like they are getting the run-around. After dealing with tech support, people often feel as if they are expected to learn new technical skills or adopt a new language of three letter acronyms just to get a little help.

My presentation rejects the idea that people need to learn technical skills just to get a techie to help them. Instead I introduce management and communication skills that can be used to obtain better tech support.

The presentation is divided into three sections. First, I explain how helpdesks generally work following the Limoncelli (1999) 9-step/4-phase model. Second, I explain how to write a great support request that has enough information that tech support won’t need to ask a lot of question and give you the run-around. Last, I present some rules-of-thumb for effectively managing communication with tech support for those worst-case scenario problems.

All of the ideas are based on my nearly 15 years of experience in giving and getting support. The rules and advice are inspired by some of my worst-cases in getting support and I show how my advanced technical skills are not enough to allow me to get tech support: Managing communication is the key to getting good support.

The slides for my presentation can be downloaded and they contain commentary in the “notes” field that can be viewed or printed if you open the file in Powerpoint or OpenOffice. The presentation is covered by a Creative Commons license and can be redistributed and remixed as long as attribution is provided and you share-alike.

Many Shaw Cable-modem customers are having problems connecting to website at the University of Alberta using Internet Explorer. It is not clear what the problem is however there is a work around. One common symptom is that when attempt to visit a website that ends in “.ualberta.ca” you get a message that says “gateway error.” It is not known if this affects all of Alberta or just Edmonton.

If you are a Shaw Cable-modem subscriber, are using Internet Explorer, and are having difficulties access websites that end in “.ualberta.ca” or “.talonline.ca” try these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. From the Tools menu select “Internet Options”
3. Click the “LAN Settings ” button
4. Remove the check mark next to “Automatically Detect Settings”
5. Click the “OK” button
6. Click the “OK” button

These instructions were provided by James Woodward at the UofA.

If you are experiencing this problem but are NOT using Internet Explorer, or are NOT a Shaw cable-modem customer, I would like to hear about it. Please post a follow-up comment here.

CaSTA 2005: The Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis will be at the University of Alberta (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) this year. The conference will last for five days with one day each dedicated to technology and tools for linguistics, anthropology, digital editing, information science, and slavic studies.

The price is dirt cheap. $50 for the conference and $70 per workshop/day. If you want to attend for just a single day, they only charge for a day but let you go to the other conference events on that day as well.

I am hoping to clear my calendar to go to either the linguistics workshop on XML corpus construction or the information science workshop. See the program for details.

Tim Bray, co-inventor XML will be there and give a talk about the future of the Internet.