Repairing RAR archives

August 20, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Software

A few days ago, I was downloading a series of hefty RAR archives from the server of a former client of mine (I had left a lot of resources there and forgotten to retrieve them after our collaboration ended). The download process was really slow, and after downloading hundreds of megabytes of stuff, I was prepared for a little trip down memory lane, so I started extracting the archives using the always good UnRarX. However, I was immediately greeted with a series of CRC errors. (This article explains what CRC errors are in the context of .zip archives.)

What to do? Re-downloading may have been an option, but the slow speeds weren’t encouraging. A quick search of the Web revealed that I could try to repair the compressed archives. With what, exactly? Well, this old MacRumors Forum thread pointed me in the right direction: going to RarLab and downloading RAR 4.01 for Mac OS X (from this page).

Yes, it’s a command line tool, but nothing too difficult or scary. After downloading it, you’ll have a rarosx‑4.0.1.tar.gz archive in your destination folder. Double-click it, and it’ll create a ‘rar’ folder. Inside this folder you’ll find some text files and two UNIX executables, rar and unrar. The process is now rather simple:

1. Open the Terminal.

2. Drag the rar executable on the Terminal window.

3. You have just executed the rar command. You’ll see a prompt like this:

4. Make sure there’s a space after the cursor. Type r then another space.

5. Go to the Finder, and drag the RAR archive to be repaired on the Terminal window. The Terminal prompt should look like this now:

Richard-XV:~ rick$ /Applications/Utilities/rar/rar r /Users/rick/Downloads/example.rar _

(of course your output will be slightly different. Here, rick is my Home folder and username, the “/Applications/Utilities/rar/” before the rar command is the path where the executable is located, and the “/Users/rick/Downloads/” before the RAR archive is the path where the corrupt archive is located).

6. After the archive name, enter another space, then start typing the path to the destination folder where you want the fixed archive to be saved. To keep things simple, I just entered my Home folder, like this:

Richard-XV:~ rick$ /Applications/Utilities/rar/rar r /Users/rick/Downloads/example.rar /Users/rick/

(Note the spaces. Also note that this should be all on a single line in Terminal.)

7. Hit Return. The repair scan will begin, and then hopefully the repairing process as well. This operation can last seconds or minutes, depending on the size of the archive.

8. If all goes well, you should have a new RAR archive in the folder you specified above. It will have a fixed prefix. In this case, in /Users/rick/, the file fixed.example.rar will be generated.

9. Remember that if you’re repairing a series of split RAR archive parts that need to be joined afterwards, you’ll have to rename the repaired files deleting the fixed prefix in their names.

That’s it. I was able to successfully repair a 526 MB, a 335 MB and a 614 MB RAR archives in a matter of minutes.

The ‘bet on webOS’

August 19, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Earlier today I was reading this brief piece on This Is My Next, titled Why HP killed its webOS devices, and while what Cathie Lesjak (CFO of HP) claims makes sense, I still fail to grasp the general logic behind HP’s strategy regarding webOS.

From the article:

To put it simply, the TouchPad and webOS devices failed to meet HP’s financial targets and unit sell-through expectations. And HP failed to “position webOS as the clear number two platform for tablets.” According to Cathie, HP’s “bet on webOS” would result in an even larger loss in Q4 if the company continued business as usual […] 

Ms Lesjak adds:

To make this investment a financial success would require significant investments over the next one to two years, creating risk without clear returns. […]

As I said other times, I’m not an analyst, and business strategy is definitely not my field. But simply as an observer, I can’t help wondering what HP was thinking all along since the Palm acquisition, and also why HP decided to acquire Palm in the first place. This ‘bet on webOS’, how did HP expect would pan out? 

They showed the TouchPad, the Veer and the Pre³ at the Think Beyond webOS event in February (and the photos taken by Engadget during their liveblogging well capture the atmosphere of a company which apparently believed in its products); the presentation was entertaining and, I’d say, rather well orchestrated (especially since it heavily borrowed from Apple’s keynotes). They teased the audience only to announce that those three fantastic devices would have been available ‘in the summer’. First mistake. 

The first of those three products to be available was the Veer, launching on AT&T on May 15, arguably the least powerful, attractive or interesting of the three. Second mistake.

Then the TouchPad, finally available on July 1, only in the USA. July and August, from what I’ve observed, are by far the slowest months of the year. Did HP really expect the TouchPad to be an exceptional success during this time of year? Third mistake. 

Many who reviewed the TouchPad pointed out some issues which — from what I’ve heard — have largely been addressed in the latest webOS 3.0.2 update. Now the TouchPad works a bit better, I hear, but it’s too late because the tepid reviews are already out there and sales have been disappointing. Instead of prematurely launching a half-baked tablet in a less than ideal timeframe, why not aim for a September launch of a more refined TouchPad? Fourth mistake.

I reckon this ‘bet on webOS’ has been developed like this: let’s make all the possible false steps to thwart our own products, and hope for the best. 

HP was in a unique position: the only Apple competitor to be in control of both the hardware and the software. It was a path worth risking for despite initial slow sales[1], instead HP just gave up. Without even launching the TouchPad outside of the USA. Without even trying. This, for me, is the most exasperating detail.

Now HP’s webOS VP Stephen DeWitt says that “We are not walking away from webOS” — I’m tempted to quip Well, perhaps it’s better if you just leave webOS alone instead of screwing it up even more, but really, I think that with this move, HP has shown how not serious it has been with webOS, how little it has believed in webOS, not to mention the blow to HP’s credibility as a company. How can you develop for (or buy products of) a company with this kind of throwaway approach?

 

 

  • 1. What do you expect to sell in August, anyway? I don’t know in the States, but here in Europe August is traditionally devoted to holidays — people go away, shops are closed, etc. — and is a really slow month, commercially speaking.↩

 

Ten months without Flash

August 18, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

At the beginning of November 2010, I removed Flash from all the Macs I use on a daily basis (I documented my going Flash-free here, here & here). The only exception has been the Flash plug-in inside Google Chrome, which I kept on my MacBook Pro for the occasional ‘just in case’ scenario. 

I’ve never been a fan of Flash, yet at first its removal — as opposed to using Flash-blocking tools such as ClickToFlash — seemed a bit excessive. “What if I can’t access certain content on a website because it’s in Flash?”, I thought. My fears didn’t last much, though, and not because I had left a bit of a safety net by not deleting the Flash plug-in inside Chrome. 

I don’t know whether my natural attraction to well-designed websites has always conditioned my browsing, but the fact is that I soon discovered I didn’t have one single full-Flash website in my bookmarks (well, except Typophile). And my browsing, after the Flash purge, has been even more selective. Which means, if I stumble on a Flash site, or on a site that heavily relies on Flash to deliver its contents, services, experience, without giving me any alternative (i.e. offering HTML5 contents after detecting I don’t have Flash installed), then I just browse away. Because let me tell you this: it’s 2011, and if your website still hasn’t got an HTML version to display at least its core contents, or to give me a basic idea of what it’s about, then you’re not worthy of my attention and my time.

In these ten months, I willingly opened a page with Flash contents using Google Chrome only under the following circumstances:

  1. The site, though mostly Flash-free, inexplicably featured essential parts in Flash (such as the Account Login interface);
  2. It was a Flash YouTube video I really really wanted to see (that didn’t happen very often);
  3. It was a Flash website whose link was passed on by a trusted source (read: worth seeing anyway);
  4. I wanted to access and browse Typophile.com.

Nothing else comes to mind. All in all, I very rarely felt compelled to resort to Google Chrome to enjoy something Flash-based and I never felt I was ‘missing out’ or having a somewhat crippled Web experience. The benefits of not having Flash installed (especially on older Macs) greatly outweighed the ‘drawbacks’. I put the word in quotes because, really, what drawbacks? Not being able to look at your super-cool, all-Flash, website? Or animated ads? Come on. 

(Many websites still present an irritating behaviour; they assume you’ll enjoy the Flash version more than the HTML(5) version, so they put Flash all over the place and an Enter HTML site label lost in a corner, in small typography and in such a position you’ll likely overlook the link entirely. If anything, it should be the opposite. Or better, just auto-detect the lack of Flash plug-ins in my browser and switch to HTML(5) on the fly. You’ll be amazed at the amount of sites out there that don’t perform this check.)

IBM announces the very first cognitive computing chips

August 18, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

 

From the IBM Research blog:

4. These systems won’t be programmed like traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers will learn dynamically through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, emulating the human brain’s synaptic and structural plasticity (or the brain’s ability to re-wire itself over time as it learns and responds to experiences and interactions with its environment.)

5. To accomplish this new kind of system, IBM is combining neuroscience, nanoscience and supercomputing together to rival the function, power and space of the brain.

I find this stuff both incredibly fascinating and somewhat scary. With all the science-fiction literature we’ve been exposed so far, it’s hard not to imagine disquieting scenarios where the computers start being completely self-sufficient and take over the world. (But who knows, maybe they’ll manage to do a better job than us!)

See also The official IBM press release page.

Joe’s First Computer Encounter

August 16, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

The always great Lukas Mathis recently pointed to Jennifer Boriss’ blog, and it’s been a really interesting discovery. She is User Experience Designer at Mozilla Corporation and her article, User Testing in the Wild: Joe’s First Computer Encounter, was a fascinating read. It’s the account of her experience conducting a usability test with a 60-year-old man who has never used a computer.

The amount of things we tech-savvy geeks take for granted is staggering. She concludes (emphasis mine):

• There is little modern applications do to guide people who have never used a computer. Even when focusing on new users, designers tend to take for granted that users understand basic concepts such as cursors, text boxes, and buttons. And, perhaps, rightfully so – if all software could accommodate people like Joe, it would be little but instructions on how to do each new task. But, Joe was looking for a single point of help in an unfamiliar environment, and he never truly got it – not even in a Help menu

• No matter their skill level, users will try to make sense of a new situation by leveraging what they know about previous situations. Joe knew nothing about computers, so he focused on the only item he recognized: text. Icons, buttons, and interface elements Joe ignored completely

• We shouldn’t assume that new users will inquisitively try and discover how new software works by clicking buttons and trying things out. Joe found using software for the first time to be frightening and only continued at my reassurance and (sometimes) insistence. If he was on his own in an internet cafe, I think he would have given up and left after a minute or so. Giving visual feedback and help if someone is lost may help people like Joe feel they’re getting somewhere

• Don’t make too many assumptions about how users will benefit from your technology – they may surprise you!

I can confirm Boriss’ words when she writes that Joe found using software for the first time to be frightening and only continued at my reassurance and (sometimes) insistence. I’ve seen it first-hand some years ago when I helped in some computer courses for novices. The general approach of first-time computer users (especially of a certain age) was in most cases overly wary. In other words, they were constantly afraid of ‘breaking something’ or doing some kind of destructive action (not literally destructive, of course; more like “what if I make a mistake and cannot revert to a previous state?” situation). 

Another thing I noticed was that some beginners raised interface-related questions that caught me a bit off guard; exactly because, as a power user who is accustomed to computers and their interface paradigms & metaphors, I was taking for granted everything on the screen. For instance, a man asked me: “If this disk [pointing at the icon representing the boot drive] contains all this stuff in these folders [pointing at the other icons on the desktop], why is each folder as big as the disk? Shouldn’t the disk be bigger than them?”. Another user found the idea of deleting a document by dragging its icon in the Trash ‘intuitive’, but then added: “So why don’t I have to drag a document icon on a Photocopier icon to make a duplicate?”. Sure, you smile, but try to be there, answering these questions, before people who are not asking rhetorical or tongue-in-cheek questions and want straight answers right away.

I should write a full account of my experience at those courses, but meanwhile here’s the moral of the story: designing interfaces is hard. Harder than you think.