Hi, this is Ryan Mikulovsky's personal webpage.
I'm a student at University of California, Davis. I have Geology blog. One of my biggest projects is creating a free community resource:
So if you're living in Chico, CA or about to move to Chico, check out the 100% not-for-profit Chico Wiki. There's lots of great information on restaurants, parks, and schools (including Chico State). There's even an events board. If you're just visiting Chico, check out the community brewed visitors guide.
You may also be interested in Open Street Map. Here is my OSM diary.
If you're studying geology and are a total computer geek, I have some ideas that maybe you have not thought of. But knowing how resourceful most computer geeks are, I'm sure you have done similar things.
DLMF is likely the best excuse to sell back your calculus textbooks (and perhaps later versions) since it includes definitions for calculus of single and multivariables. As well as anything else you might think of. So should you find a need to crunch direvatives, here is your site to remember all those fun rules.
Mnemosyne is open source software based on Python. It is an electronic flash card program that uses an algorithm which prevents wasting time on cards you know. It schedules cards based on a ranking of 0-5. 0 means you drew a complete blank and 5 means you know the answer immediately. What is truly great about Mnemosyne is that it supports LaTeX input and it is crossplatform. This means you can get through your mineral formulas decks on just about any system.
Mnemosyne lets you modify the LaTeX preamble. So you can add packages which can make inputing cards much faster. I use the package mhchem. It typesets chemical equations or formulas using input that is very natural for most people familiar with chemistry. It aligns numbers in equations very nicely. Get it and typeset your flashcards using that package. Its documentation is a very easy read.
LaTeXiT is for MacOSX. What better way to put your favorite TeX formulas into most any other OSX software. It is really fantastic. Double joy when you find that Grapher that comes with OSX can give LaTeX formatting for formulas that you used to generate graphs! Of course GNUPlot is probably necessary for your research papers. If you have OSX Snow Leopard, follow these instructions to compile GNUPlot.
The Periodic Table is a OSX Dashboard widget. It isn't a must have but damn is it convenient to find out very quickly ion charges and atomic mass! Now where is a good isotopes widget? ;-)
PDF-XChange Viewer is for Windows but free. Unlike Adobe Acrobat Reader (for the vast majority of PDFs I have used), but like OSX's Preview, it can do annotations. For slideshow heavy courses where the professor posts before lecture, this is a must have. It also has drawing tools and a highlighter. Be careful though as some PDF readers might get confused with abundant annotations and stack them atop each other and refuse to let you rearrange them.
On OSX v10.4 and greater, use rsync -aE /Volume/thumbdrive /Users/username/somebackuplocation regularly to backup your thumbdrives without copying data that has not changed. -E might not be useful copying off a FAT32 thumbdrive but it is there in case OSX can actually use those file attribute data on the HFS+ side. Definitely use it if you're backing up to a HFS+ external drive or vice versa. -a is archive mode which sets a bunch of flags that ensures you get a quality backup.
You assume all risk with this advice!
Of course, first you better make sure that your thumbdrive isn't write protected because you accidentally flipped a physical switch or used software. So double check the device for a switch or vendor provided software features. Otherwise read on...
I once bricked a USB drive after I loaded a boot image on it and then stupidly formatted it using Windows before fixing the partition table. The device ended up reporting "Write Protect is on" in /var/log/syslog.
Using Linux, hdparm reported
readonly = 1 (on)
Windows also said that the device was write protected and that there were no partitions to read. Unix software, such as fdisk also reported a distinct lack of a partition table. However, the device could be read at a low-level for file recovery but I didn't care about that.
I tried many things including hdparm -r0 /dev/sdc. Windows also refused to do anything with the thumbdrive (or pen drive). Finally I found a tiny application that worked like a charm.
Repair_v2.9.1.1.zip from Apacer. It is basically a repair tool meant for their thumbdrives but it doesn't care what the USB ID is (see lsusb on *nix systems). My PNY Attache was detected and the software fixed the drive right up using some kind of magic and formatting (it formats!). I hope that this entry on this page will help those that have had the same problem I did without spending half a day trying to find a solution. If the link breaks at some point and Google fails at finding the file, then contact me. I might still have it.
Oh, it is important to note that if you use this software and it is successful your USB key will now have an Apacer Technology device ID on Linux systems. For Windows it'll display in the Device Manager as a generic USB Flash Drive USB Device.
If nothing works, then get testdisk, use photorec_win.exe and hope it can accurately identify your most important files.