Archive for the ‘it’ tag
Python to the rescue
I just wrapped up a big data conversion project at work. Essentially I had to take a lot of contact information from many varied sources and mash it all into one database. Just to make things interesting, I had to connect children to their parents, split husbands and wives into individuals, and there were many duplicate records. So what is a mere mortal to do when faced with such long odds?
Use Python, of course! I tamed the data with a number of scripts and a MySOL database. Also, I overcame inconsistently-formatted data with the power of regular expressions. Here was one of my favorites (for finding middle initials and parenthetical nicknames within first names):
\s[A-Z]\.?\Z|\(.*\)\Z
The resulting data is not perfect by any measure, bit I think I did a good job all things considered. It feels good to be done with that project.
Of Service Packs and USB Devices
I was living a nightmare when several users told me that their machines were caught in an endless reboot cycle after I pushed Windows XP Service Pack 3. After a log of digging, I found out that by unplugging all USB devices, the machine would boot up and run normally. However, if I plugged any USB device in, the machine would reboot immediately. The affected machines were ones which once had the original version of Windows XP on them along with an Intel chipset (all of my affected machines as of yet have also been HP/Compaq). SP3 broke the backwards compatibility with this old USB driver which was installed, hence the crashing. Here is the fix:
- Grab a PS/2 keyboard and attach it to the affected machine.
- Unplug any USB devices.
- Boot up and log in as an administrator.
- Using your keyboard navigation skills, open up the Device Manager.
- For each item in the USB section, choose “Uninstall.”
- Reboot the computer and log in again. XP will reinstall the USB drivers.
- Plug in a USB device and test.
- Reboot and connect all USB devices.
And the users rejoice!
