Month: February 2015

CrushPlan Saved The Day

Today when I turned on my Z800 Workstation PC at work, it won’t start. There was no beeps, no display and no warning, just a blank screen staring at me while the power was on and the fans were running inside. I tried turning on and off the power a few times with no luck.

There are regular data processing tasks I need to run for the day and they can’t wait until the pc is repaired. Usually it takes a few weeks just to repair a pc in my company. It seemed like I am in deep shit and it’s only Monday!  Instead of panicking, I simply logged in to another computer in the office and restored the data required for the project I am working on. It took about 5 minutes to restore and I started working on my scheduled tasks for the day.

This is all possible thanks to CrashPlan from code42. It is a great backup software with very useful features. It is very easy to install, setup and configure. Please go to the product web page https://www.code42.com/crashplan/ for more details.

The best feature I like and which saved me big time today is the ability to back up to your friends/coworkers computers. They provide paid service – cloud back up plan for unlimited storage space. I just use free feature which allows me to backup to another computer. And it worked great and left me with very satisfying experience. I would recommend this hassle free software if you are not already using anything yet.

“Could not load data from the data source” error in ArcMap 10.1

When working in ArcMap, one would encounter all kinds of wired-ass problems for all kinds of unknown reasons. One of them is when you are working on a map document for a while, and out of the blue, unable to open the attribute table of a layer or layers in the document.

The error usually occurs when you right click on a layer and click “Open attribute table”. Instead of showing the attribute table, ArcMap displays you the following message and an empty attribute table. The strange thing is you still can select the rows in the attribute table and you can see how many rows in the table as well. It is just that all the rows are now empty.

couldnotload

empty_table

There are a few ways to solve this problem. One easy way, which worked for me, is to export out the problematic layer to a new geodatabase and then import it back to your map document. I hope this is helpful to those who encounters similar problem using ArcMap.