M635 J520

We have a couple of laptops that are still technically working, but we have moved on to greener pastures so we no longer need them. Around the corner there's a charity that reworks old tech, so the laptops are heading there. Prior to that I figured it would be a good idea to securely wipe their hard-drives -- by basically writing random garbage to them several times over. Luckily there are quite some tools made for that. After some trial and error here's what I ended up doing: 1) Found an old USB disk, fittingly sporting a Batman logo. 2) Formatted it as a FAT (MS-DOS) drive. 3) Downloaded the free ISO of Darik's "boot and nuke" data wiping tool (DBAN) from  http://www.dban.org/ 4) Dowloaded Unetbootin from  https://unetbootin.github.io/ and launched it. 5) Used this to turn the Batman disk into a bootable disk based on the DBAN ISO. 6) Due to a bug somewhere in this pipeline (Possibly Unetbootin? Or DBAN itself?), I needed to edit the " syslinux.cf...

Fattigfolket I'll be following the   Functional Programming Principles in Scala  course offered by Coursera this Autumn.   To get you started the good folks behind the course have provided lots of info on how to install necessary software etc. However, I ran into a problem, and it's subsequent solution, that I would like to document here. I'll be following the course a bit from here and a bit from there. Sometimes on my mac, sometimes on a linux laptop, sometimes on a windows machine. Anyway, I have my course files in my Dropbox and pick them up from there as needed on the various OSes. Problem was when opening the my scala projects in eclipse in OSX after compiling them under Windows, I got a cryptic " error in scala compiler null " and was unable to clean and (re)compile my scala programs. I realised that I was running JDK 6 on my mac and JDK 7 on anything else, so I figured that might have something to do with it. After following Mary Hamlin 's ans...