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Archive for August 15th, 2008

Good publicity with Physics Students Uncovered

Aug 15

Posted by Lachlan in News | 2 Comments

Last night I participated in Physics Students Uncovered, a science communication challenge that kicked off National Science Week in Canberra. The goal was for five selected PhD students to present their physics research in 10 minutes, and keep it accessible and interesting for an “intelligent, but non-technical” audience.

It was exciting to present in the Shine Dome, home of the Australian Academy of Science, and I was very pleased with how my talk went. Under the pressure, I got a bit too excited with the introductory conceptual elements of my presentation and had to rush the second half more than I would have liked. However, I managed to get a special commendation as second-place. A fellow student from the Laser Physics Centre of our Research School, Amrita Prasad, gave a spectacular presentation on all-optical signal processing and won the $2000 prize.

As a publicity-oriented event, Physics Students Uncovered made the second page of the Canberra Times. I was particularly excited to have an image of me holding a very large diamond (fake) just over the page from the highlights of our Australian Olympic swimmers! Here are photos of the front page and the second page so you can see what the article looked like on paper.

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Un-deleting files on my ext3 “backup” partition

Aug 15

Posted by Lachlan in Hacks and Tricks | 1 Comment

Last week I learnt a very important lesson: a “backup” is not actually a backup if it is the only copy you have, it is at most an archive. In the process of tidying up the files on my external “backup” hard disk I deleted a few directories of photos from the beginning of this year. As I pressed the Enter key I was sure that I had a copy of those photos still on my laptop; but fractions of a second later I experienced a piercing wave of doubt. It was already too late.

After checking my laptop and finding that the doubt was justified, I remembered with relief that before heading over to Europe I had copied all my photos onto DVDs and left them in my office at uni (just in case something our house burnt down or something). I went to sleep mostly certain that I my accidentally deleted files were safe on discs at uni.

As you probably suspect, I did not have a copy of the photos on DVD. My DVD backups only went to the end of 2007, and I had deleted files from the first 2 months of 2008.

It is not a tragedy, as the main photos of consequence were from ASA Convention and I do have the best of my photos on the official DVD. However, it provided me with significant incentive to learn about data recovery on ext3 formatted partitions. I’ve included some of my discoveries below. Read the rest of this entry »

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