Most influential computer books

Stackflow has a 3 year old post for voting the most important IT books. The vote can be found here. 

The top 10 books are:

1. Code Complete (2nd Ed) by Steve McConnell
2. The Pragmatic Programmer;
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
4. The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
5. Introduction to algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein) aka CLRS 
6. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
7. Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
8. The Mythical Man-Month.
9. The Art of Computer Programming
10. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools  

I've read the Refactoring and Design Pattern but not the rest of them. They are really good.  Hope to have to to go through them when I'm free.

Resizing partition for HP laptop

Last Sunday, I bought a new HP pavilion dv6 6024TX for my wife. She was quite happy with the new machine. The only flaw is that the whole 750G HDD has only one drive C. (There are 4 partitions but rest of them are for recovery purpose). So I take the responsibility to reorganize the partitions.

I did that before by reinstall the OS. But this time I decided to resize the existing partition without losing exist data and create a new partition on freed space.

I started to try Partition Magic of Symantec since I have used it long time before. Unfortunately, the product has been discontinued by its owner as described in this post.

I have to find another tool. After searching around on net, I found GParted. The tool is open source and powerful. It can be downloaded here.

In order to use GParted, system need to be boot under GParted itself. So a bootable USB is needed. I took the follow steps to setup a bootable USB

USB setup with Windows

• Download the GParted Live zip file.
• If you already have a partition of at least 200 MB in size on your USB flash drive formatted with a FAT file system then skip to the next step (3).
  Otherwise create at least a 200 MB partition on your USB flash drive and format it with a FAT16 or FAT32 file system.
• Extract all the contents of the zip file to FAT16/FAT32 partition on your USB flash drive. Keep the directory architecture, for example, file "COPYING" should be in the USB flash drive's top directory (e.g. G:\COPYING).
• Browse to your USB flash drive and as an administrator, click the makeboot.bat in the dir utils\win32\. WARNING! Makeboot.bat must be run from your USB flash drive.
• Follow the on-screen instructions.
  (PS: The above description is modified from: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/02/all-in-one-usb-dsl. Thanks to PDLA from http://pendrivelinux.com)

There are also other ways to create bootable USB. Check out this link to find more

After setup the USB, reboot system from USB.  In order to boot from USB, I need to enter BIOS(press F10 to enter BIOS for HP laptop) and change boot order. 

The system will start Debian Linux and eventually enter GParted. It is a X window program looks like this.

Then I can do tasks like resize a partition, create a new partition etc. The whole information about how to use can be found in Help Manual,

It's not end yet. As I tried to create a new partition on freed space I get this error:

You can not have more than 4 primary partitions

This is because there are already 4 there, one is driver C and the other 3 are HP_TOOLS, RECOVERY and SYSTEM. Windows has the limitation that a machine cannot have more than four primary partitions. 

So I have to delete one of them. I backup up the Recovery through HP tool Recovery Manager to 4 DVD. It was pretty straightforward and the instructions can be found here on HP support site.

After all this, I created a new partition and named it D drive.