Author: mark

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Services provided to major employers

Hicken Design provides services to major employers in Arizona and Texas

Over the course of the last 10 years, the brains behind Hicken Design have provided services to many large and small employers including Banner Health – the second largest employer in Arizona and USAA – the largest employer in Texas. Services have included UX design, UI design, web design and development, multimedia design and development, online learning design and development, instructional design and more.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your business thrive!

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Recovering data from my failed MacBook Pro Hitachi hard drive

I was in the middle of working on my MacBook Pro the other night when the hard drive began clicking.  The entire system froze and I was forced to power off the machine.  When I attempted to power it back on it would not boot.  I just got more clicking.  For two days this was the story.  The drive just would not spin up.  So I put in a new hard drive thinking that I would probably toss this drive in the trash.

I spoke to several people about it asking for suggestions on how I might get the drive to work.  I heard from 2 unrelated sources that keeping the drive very cool might help so I left it in a zip lock bag in the fridge last night. Then I plugged it in to my desktop machine and after a few clicks it freed up the spindle and spun up! Unfortunately Windows does not natively read HFS (the mac file system) but my my brother knew of a great little program called HFS Explorer which allows windows to extract files from an HFS partition while properly handling symlinks.   Super cool!  I’ll be recovering my data tody after which I don’t think I’ll trust the drive anymore. 

Specs on the hard drive:
Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00
2.5 inch
120 GB
5400 RPM
SATA

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PHP URL to File Path

I don’t know why it was so hard to find some code to do this.  I did a few google searches and couldn’t find a simple solution so here’s one that works…

function mh_UrlToFilePath($url="") {
  $sServerName = $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
  $sDocRoot = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
  $sUrl = substr($url, 0, strpos($url, "?")); // remove querystring
  $sFilePath = substr($sUrl,strpos($sUrl,$sServerName)+strlen($sServerName));
  $sFilePath = $sDocRoot . $sFilePath;
  $sFilePath = str_replace("/", "\", $sFilePath);
  return $sFilePath;
}