Back to the Futurama

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I had to go with the wholly unoriginal headline, but this news (thanks to JL) makes my day. I'm glad they are reviving Futurama, hopefully it'll replace the crap that is Drawn Together\ \ The 'Futurama' is Now: Comedy Central Revives Series (TVWeek)\

Five years after Fox canceled the animated comedy, 20th Century Fox TV has officially struck a deal with Comedy Central to produce 26 original episodes of the Matt Groening series. It will return as early as mid-2010.

Tags: Television

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Actual data helps improve interface design

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We're guilty of using guesses/gut feelings when putting a site together. Nielsen reminds us that even a few data points can help make better design decisions.

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

The general guideline is to use relative font sizes that let users resize (if they know how), but to display big and legible text as the default. This conclusion is based on numerous observations that show that many older users don't have the skills to resize fonts.

Tags: Web Design

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Thank you, dd for saving and restoring my MBR

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I finally got around to upgrading my dual-boot desktop PC to running Windows XP. It was just about time, the version of windows I was running was no longer supported and more and more software requires Windows XP nowadays. I also wanted to start using my Windows partition for more than World of Warcraft and occasional IE6 Testing.  Mini-rant: One might think that, by now, Windows would play nicely if you are installing it on an existing dual-boot setup and not do rude things like naively overwrite your Master Boot Record. If one thought that, however, one would be very naive indeed.

The common wisdom, when setting up a dual booth system, is to install Windows first, then your other operating systems, since the latter are smart enough to setup a menu at boot time to choose which OS to load.  That's find advice for a fresh setup, but if you have an existing system you have to take one precaution that will save you time and headaches. First, make sure you have some sort of Linux "Live" or Install CD that you can boot from after Windows is setup. Second, before installing Windows, you'll want to backup your MBR to some removable media, like a USB disk, so that you can restore it after Windows does its thing.

To backup your MBR, use the dd tool, keep in mind you'll need to change the input and output files to reflect your own system:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/usb1/sda-mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

Likewise to restore it, boot your rescue disk, insert your flash drive and run the following to copy it back to the boot drive

dd if=/media/usb1/sda-mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

This worked for me, but it could be a bit more intricate. I followed the advice found here and here.

Tags: Linux, Windows

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