Dusty Jones

Ugh! It is getting harder and harder to find the right answer to technical problems on the first page of Google’s search results. I offer this here so I never have to search for the answer again.

When you are developing web applications, you sometimes want the user to be presented with a “File Save” dialog box to save a file on their computer instead of opening it in their browser.

To do this you add a “Content-Type” and a “Content-Disposition” header. For an Excel file in a Ruby on Rails application you would put these lines in the controller:

def download @headers['Content-Type'] = “application/vnd.msexcel” @headers['Content-Disposition'] = “attachment;filename=myfile.xls” end

If you do this Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer will download the file and save it to your desktop. If you click “Open” instead of “Save” in Mozilla or Firefox, Excel will open the file instead. Just as it should.

If you click “Open” instead of “Save” in Internet Explorer, Excel will complain that it can’t find the file. Unless Excel is already open. If Excel is already open the file will open normally just as it does in Mozilla or Firefox.

After 15 or so minutes of searching I was finally able to find the right search terms to illuminate the problem. Internet Explorer has some cache issues. To fix this, add a “Cache-Control” = “private” header.

The method in Ruby on Rails would become:

def download @headers['Content-Type'] = “application/vnd.msexcel” @headers['Content-Disposition'] = “attachment;filename=myfile.xls” @headers['Cache-Control'] = “private” end

I hope to never have to search for this again.

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People are always calling and asking me for computer help. When all else fails I seem to be the man of last resort.

Yesterday this guy that used to work with me called up. He was honest and began the conversation with, “I’ve got a computer problem.” I figured as much. His Windows machine wouldn’t recognize his hard drive. This is an easy one to fix, buy a new hard drive and restore from backup.

Like most people he didn’t have a backup. He did have some important files left on the disk. He wanted these files back so he took his computer to one of the local shops. They were unable to get his detect his drive.

He called me to find out about data recovery services. I have read about a few but I couldn’t recommend any. My information says they are expensive. Rates start in the thousands of dollars. These are companies that take your drive to a clean room and connect your platters to new electronics in order to get your information back. This wasn’t a solution for him.

A while back I read that a hard drive could be frozen, in your freezer right next to the asparagus, as a last resort.I mentioned this to him. He was skeptical but tried anyway, there was nothing to lose. A while later he called to say Windows was able to boot off the drive, but would lock up before he could get to his files.

I think this would have worked better for him if he booted from his alternate drive, my choice would be to boot into Linux, and had then used copied the data off as quickly as possible before the drive warmed up.

I didn’t offer any further help. There are two computers getting serviced in the garage already, I don’t need any more work.

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A small one and a half lane road winds from the west side of my place of employment around the far end of the parking lots and dumps into the parking lot for my building. This road is a private road built by my employer for use by the delivery trucks during the construction and fitting out of my building.

On Monday this small boat was left there.

On Tuesday afternoon, when I took this picture, it was still there. I don’t understand how this boat could be abandoned at my office. There are cameras in this parking lot, at least one per 10 meters. Security must have seen who left the boat. It can’t be easy to remove a boat from a trailer and leave it abandoned in a field without anyone noticing.

Well, I thought it wouldn’t be easy, but apparently it was. I bet they had a clipboard when they did it.

UPDATE The catamaran is still there on Wednesday. I took a closer look and it is missing the mast, sail, and some of the rigging is unhooked. I added an additional closeup image.

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A farmer has a $100 tax refund check. He wants to buy 100 animals and have some of each kind. Cows are $1.00, sheep are $0.50, and horses are $10.00. Obviously, we have 3 variables, the number of cows, sheep and horses. Unfortunately, we only have two equations:

s(0.50) + c(1.00) + h(10.00) = 100.00 [1] s + c + h = 100 [2],

where s is the number of sheep, c is the number of cows, and h is the number of horses. With this lack of information regarding the 3rd equation we know there will be multiple answers. Not being one for guessing I wrote this program

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $cow = 1; # cows for a buck my $sheep = .5; # sheep for fifty my $horse = 10; # horses for ten for (my $c=1; $c<=100; $c++) { # cows for (my $s=1; $s<=100; $s++) { # sheep for (my $h=1; $h<=100; $h++) { # horses my $cost = $c$cow + $s$sheep + $h*$horse; my $count = $c + $s + $h; if ( $cost == 100 && $count == 100 ) { print “Cows: $c; Sheep: $s; Horses: $h\n”; } } } }

and found

Cows: 5; Sheep: 90; Horses: 5 Cows: 24; Sheep: 72; Horses: 4 Cows: 43; Sheep: 54; Horses: 3 Cows: 62; Sheep: 36; Horses: 2 Cows: 81; Sheep: 18; Horses: 1

So how is a 7th grader, who doesn’t know algebra or programming, supposed to figure this out? Did I miss something obvious?

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