Backup, Backup, Backup
Yesterday I got a call from my dad asking if there was anything I could do about the fact that his six year old XP machine wasn’t booting. I got that sinking feeling, and immediately headed over to see about downloading a copy of Knoppix, as it’s generally the best utility for recovering systems that appear to have died. Someone also suggested Ubuntu, which I had multiple copies of at home, so….
I didn’t intend to go over last night, so I left the Knoppix CD at work, and then when I made the decision to go work on the machine last night, grabbed a copy of Ubuntu, and my external hard drive, on the off chance that I’d have to pave the machine.
When I arrived, I powered up the machine and the external hard drive, to see where we stood. It was dead, all right, reporting that Windows\System32\Config\System was missing or corrupt. Dead registry. Great.
I rebooted with the Ubuntu CD in with the intention of backing up and reinstalling. But when the desktop came up, it wouldn’t (or couldn’t) mount the hard drive. The internal one. This was not good. Now I had to proceed even more carefully.
But at least I had a working net connection with Ubuntu running, so I headed out and tried to find some tips on recovering this train wreck. I found the answer fairly quickly (sorry, but I didn’t keep track of the URL), but it took me a fair bit longer to get it resolved.
There were essentially two solutions - copy the registry files over from the last restore point, or copy the *original* registry over the corrupted one. From 2003. Uh, let’s try solution #1 first.
After a fair bit of checking and double checking, making sure I had all the information I needed (because I obviously wouldn’t have a working net connection while attempting this) I was ready to give it a go.
Unfortunately, copying the registry from the last restore point didn’t work. The machine still halted almost immediately after the POST. I didn’t think about trying the one prior to that because I didn’t know how far back the corruption went.
So I decided to try the 2003 copy of the registry, and amazingly, the XP splash screen came up on reboot, and the machine booted into the desktop. I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, though. All of the drivers (and things like NAV) were no longer installed. But a quick run of the driver CD, and everything seemed to be back up and running.
The next task, of course, was to back up the My Documents folder to my external drive. Something that should have been done more frequently, and hopefully will be done so after this experience.
No matter how bulletproof (or new) your machine is, please backup everything that you can’t afford to lose. Photos, documents, music. All of it. Regularly. We dodged a bullet this time, but might not be quite as lucky next time.
Dealing with the Overload
Since moving to a different department at work, one that requires me to be away from my desk for a good portion of the day, I’m finding that I’m being far more selective about how I get my information.
Where it used to be common for me to get all of my feeds caught up completely, I’m finding that I’m more likely to just check one or two feeds and then move on. My primary point of contact now is Twitter, and maybe FriendFeed, although if that gets to be too much as well, I’m going to have to cull the number of feeds that I’m subscribed to there as well.
This is not the way it was supposed to be.
RSS was supposed to be something that made it a lot easier to get access to the information that you wanted, on your terms. Right now Google Reader has 45 subscribed feeds, including the Friendfeed one, which pulls in about 5 feeds on its own. And I can’t keep up. So I’m going to cut even more, although I don’t really want to.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying that I always have to get completely caught up with my feed reading in order to feel like I’ve accomplished something. Hardly. But I feel like I’m missing something if I don’t at least make a bit of an effort.
Evidently I need to lower my expectations, and look for more quality stuff. Twitter won’t be cut back at all, because that’s just a matter of starting the client and starting fresh. But for feeds, I’m going to be dropping quite a few, and just keeping the stuff that I consider to be crucial to bringing me the information that I want.
So, how do you deal with the overload?
Upgrading Wordpress Plug-ins the Easy Way
One of the great features that got introduced an earlier version of Wordpress was a plug-in that would actually check and notify you when newer versions of other plug-ins became available. Then it was just a simple matter of downloading the new plug-in, copying it over the old one, and calling it done.
But since Wordpress 2.5 was released, there’s a way to have it do the upgrades for you automatically, although you will need to allow the system to FTP directly into your account. I decided to give it a try, and it worked flawlessly. Without a doubt, it’ll make things a whole lot easier for some users who won’t want to take the trouble to upgrade their plug-ins manually.
Doing it manually is obviously a better method, for security reasons, but it’s nice to know that the feature is there if you just need to run a very quick update on a plug-in.
“Forced” Ads That Can’t Be Removed Suck
The other day I started looking for a new theme to use here at RTdN because I’d paid for the theme that was currently installed, and I wanted to use it on a different site. So the hunt began for a new look.
I thought that I’d found one, and I made it the active theme for a few hours while I worked on getting my ads configured in the footer. But when I opened the footer.php file, I was greeted with a copyright notice and a warning that any attempt to reverse engineer or decrypt the file was prohibited. Following that was a long string of encrypted gibberish set inside PHP brackets.
Uh, okay. I’ll just add my ads after that and give it a test. Hmmm….that didn’t work. I see other ads, though. Not ones I usually see. I decided to put the ads above the rest of the text in the file. Nope, that didn’t work either. Couldn’t see my ads. So I made the decision to remove all of the other text and just put my ads in the footer file. Upon reloading, not only were the ads not visible, but something in the CSS was now broken, and the site looked like garbage.
Putting the text back in made the author’s ads come back, and the CSS was now fine.
Needless to say, that theme is gone. I don’t mind an author putting links to their site or wherever to get a little credit, but there’s no way your ads are going on my site. Any ads that appear on RTdN are going to be by choice, and I’m going to have the final say.
It really is a shame, too, because I really liked the theme. But if I can’t use it in the way I want, I won’t use it at all.
That’s It for iGoogle
In the last couple of days I decided that I’d try using iGoogle as my start page in Firefox, rather than just the plain old Google page. I’d set it up in the past, so it was already populated with some stuff that I’d previously chosen.
This morning I went to add feeds from a couple of other sites that I wanted to follow on the page - Anywired and Zen Habits. But when I went to add the feeds, the app claimed that it couldn’t find those feeds. Excuse me? These are Feedburner feeds, so they’re even owned by Google (not that probably means a whole lot, though).
Then I tried to add my own feed. Nope. Can’t find that either. So, uh, what’s going on Google? I’ve decided to just go back to using the plain old Google page for a day or two to see if it’s a temporary glitch. If it is, I’ll give the iGoogle setup another shot. Otherwise, maybe I’ll look at something else. Netvibes, for example.
Patent Stupidity
From this post on the excellent Culture of Ownership blog, which in this case pulls its info from Ars about how patents are now being granted on certain elements of play in video games.
The example that they give is that Sega was recently granted a patent on the idea of "driving a car around a city with an arrow pointing towards the next destination". Excuse me? I’m pretty sure that it’d be easy to show prior art on this one, which would invalidate the patent.
And with very broad language being used for the patent application, it’ll be pretty easy for a patent holder to claim violation on something that’s only vaguely related to the issued patent. How stupid could it get? Think of a patent issued for the gameplay of a first-person-shooter. Or if EA were issued patents on the gameplay of the NHL or NFL franchises. From that point on, it’d be impossible for anyone to come out with a competing, potentially better game.
Uh, wait. Don’t give the NFL any ideas.
I’m not even a gamer anymore, and I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. And if you think that it’ll only happen once, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the near future you hear of a patent being issued to a new gaming company for something that’s been around in gaming for five or ten years. Count on it.
And then the same type of patent will be applied to a method of doing something in another type of application. Imagine, for example if Adobe were granted a patent for the method of creating a PDF by printing it to a specialized print driver. Where would that leave any of the many third party PDF generating applications, which pretty much all do it the same way? S.O.L., that’s where.
Hopefully this isn’t an idea that’s going to get a lot bigger.
Do These Lists Even Mean Anything?
The UK’s Guardian has released it’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs, and while I haven’t read enough of the top 50 to take exception with some of their choices, what’s more refreshing is that it doesn’t assume that all bloggers are white, American, male geeks. In fact, in the whole list, there’s really only about three that I would really consider ‘tech’ blogs - Boing Boing (#2), TechCrunch (#3), and Engadget (#16). The rest seem to be a balance of political, celebrity and personal blogs, with the odd sports blog thrown in.
I’m a little surprised that Digg wasn’t included, but it’s possible that it doesn’t meet the Guardian’s criteria to be defined as a blog. What I find to be an even bigger surprise is that a number of the political blogs focus specifically on the upcoming U.S. election - what are they going to be doing after the election in November? Start planning for 2012?
Anyway, after perusing this list, I thought I’d detail a few that I’d probably pick up. I’m already subscribed to Boing Boing and Engadget, and wouldn’t go near TechCrunch, so what you’ll get here are non-geek blogs:
- Kottke.org - an old time blog that goes back to the late nineties. It’s one that I’ve always heard of, but never took the time to follow.
- icanhascheezburger.com - As wildly popular as the lolcats have been, I never really checked into it to see what the appeal was. I’ve since changed my mind, because there’s some pretty funny stuff on there.
- CopyBlogger - okay, maybe this qualifies as more of a geek blog, but it doesn’t really cover the tech world so much as how to write about it, or anything else for that matter. A blog about writing online. Subscribed. Because I can use the help
Oh, and the title of this post? In the long run, I think the best reason for having lists such as these is to help introduce you to sites that you might not have heard of otherwise. So, yeah, they do serve a purpose.
Jeff Healey 1966 - 2008
Hearing that Jeff Healey had died of cancer yesterday on this morning’s news caught me completely off guard. First of all, I didn’t realize that he was only 41. He seemed a whole lot older than that.
But when I thought about it, the Jeff Healey Band was the first concert that my wife and I ever went to, back when we started dating in the 80’s. He was opening for Tom Cochrane and Rod Stewart at BC Place. I was there to see the JHB, and my wife was there to see Rod Stewart, so it worked out for both of us.
If you’ve never seen Jeff Healey play the guitar, it’s almost in the manner that you’d play a steel guitar. He played sitting down, with the instrument on his lap, and his fingers didn’t wrap around the neck, but he played with his fingers on top. It’s very unique to watch, especially when he’d jump up from the chair during a solo and found his way back to the chair despite being blind.
I’ll keep listening to the older stuff and start picking up the newer music that Jeff Healey put out, and just remember what that music meant to me, and how it changed the type of music I listen to.
Thanks, Jeff. Rest in Peace.
Upgrading Vista to SP1
Ever since Vista was released, and some hardware ceased to work with it, I’ve been waiting for SP1 of the OS, simply because it was said that it would contain more drivers, so there was a small chance that stuff that was busted might come back from the dead. Or, there’s a possibility that it wouldn’t make a difference at all. Only way to find out would be to install it and see. So I got a copy from MSDN and gave it a go. We’ll most likely be installing it on our Vista machines at work anyway, so best to get a little experience with it.
It goes without saying, but here it is anyway - please back up all data on your machine that you can’t afford to lose. There shouldn’t be any problems with running the upgrade, but wouldn’t you rather just feel safe that everything was backed up, just in case?
The whole thing really is fairly straightforward, only about 4 boxes before you just walk away from it and let it do its thing.
Microsoft mentions that it’ll take about an hour to run the complete upgrade, and, quite surprisingly, they weren’t far off. The whole thing was done in about 70 minutes. Ironic, when you consider that I’ve seen Vista estimate that it would take 18,000 *days* to finish copying or moving something on the system. Evidently Microsoft’s time estimation algorithm has gotten a bit better
So, after running the upgrade, what’s the final verdict? For myself, installing the upgrade didn’t revive any of my dead hardware (scanner, printer), although I did find workarounds for both that allowed me to use both under Vista. But that’s a couple of future posts.
If nothing else, patching your machine with SP1 when it comes out as part of Windows Update will get all currently available patches on your machine, and there’s rarely a downside to that. A lot of people didn’t want to put SP2 on their XP machine when it came out, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who would tell you why. It just makes the machine run better.
And in the long run, SP1 will be better for your Vista box as well.
Moving To A New Host
For the last few years, this site has been hosted by my employer, and while that turned into a pretty good deal for me, there were still a few things about it that eventually got me to thinking that it might be time to look for another host.
Security, for one. All that hosting was done for free, and could have theoretically ended on a moment’s notice. Or if I decided to move on to another position somewhere else, I wanted to ensure that there would be no downtime for the site. There was also the fact that uploads to my site had to be done over a secure FTP connection, meaning that I couldn’t just embed images in my posts when using Windows Live Writer, because it doesn’t support SFTP. I would have to upload the image to the site, and then point to it in the post. Not a life altering thing, but still…
So now the site is being hosted by BlueFur.com, a local webhost, and I have to admit to being more than impressed by their whole setup. If anything, their Wordpress configuration script was almost easier to run than the “5 Minute Install” promised by Wordpress.
And another great thing about them is that if you sign up with them, and enter promotion code rtdn they’ll even give you a 15% discount. Hard to beat, especially when the hosting starts at $6.95. So, give them a try and remember the promotional code to get your 15% discount: rtdn.
