Year: 2005

…and here was me thinking that I’d be able to maintain a relatively cruft-free machine for a while after rebuilding it. Nahhh. Give me downloads!

After Backup4All, Audacity, and Google Desktop, the latest adventure is Google Talk. I haven’t used MSN messenger or AIM for ages, but I have started using Skype (martinsutherland) recently for voice chat with my family. So it’s probably time I got hooked up with another IM service. The benefit of Google Talk is that it runs off the back of Jabber (XMPP, whatever), which is compatible with Apple’s iChat.

And there is a Mac Mini on the horizon. Oh yes. There is.

You can get me on Google Talk as sunpig@gmail.com.

I installed the new version (2.0, yet still beta) of Google Desktop yesterday, but I’m not feeling the love yet.

In its standard mode, it runs as a sidebar on your desktop. The sidebar contains a fleet of customizable widgets, such as a little photo slideshow, news headlines, weather (if you’re in the US), and email. I tried this for a few hours, but now that I’ve got this widescreen monitor, I kinda like having all of that space for me to use. The Google sidebar feels like too much of a bit out of my working space for not enough benefit. Maybe I’ll find space for it once more widgets are available.

The second thing, which was by far the more annoying one until I found out how to fix it, is what happens when you do a search query. If you’re running Firefox, the default behaviour is for the search results to loads up in most recent tab. You know, the one you were actually working in at the time? BIG nuisance.

Here’s how to solve that:

1. In the Firefox Tools menu, select “Options…” to bring up the options dialog.
2. Click on the “Advanced” tool button.
3. Look at the options group for “Tabbed Browsing”. This allows you to change what happens when other applications (like your mail reader) try to open a hyperlink. Change it to “a new window”, and off you go.

Now it’s actually usable. I still haven’t fallen in love with it, though.

Things that turned out to be easier than expected:

• Restoring my iTunes music library. Turns out that this was just a matter of copying back the “My Documents/My Music/iTunes” directory, which contains the two critical files “iTunes Library.itl” and “iTunes Music Library.xml”. Next step was to edit my iTunes preferences to point to my new music directory (I wouldn’t have had to do this if my drive mappings hadn’t changed). Finally, I re-authorized my PC to allow me to play all the music I’ve bought from the iTunes music store (grr… must re-rip to remove DRM soon). Job done. Plug in iPod, and go.
• Restoring my mail in Thunderbird. Before the crash, I had moved some of my email accounts out of Outlook and into Thunderbird, and I’ve never really worked with the mbox format before. Result: super easy. Copy the old mail file to the new directory, restart Thunderbird, and boom, there it is. No sweats. In fact, I’ve taken the opportunity to move all of my mail to Thunderbird now, and I’m liking it.

I’ve also installed Backup4All, and am using it as a proper daily backup solution. I never liked the Dantz Retrospect software that came with my big external disk, but Backup4All is excellent. Defining backup jobs is easy, and running them is smooth. Definitely a keeper.

I hope I’m not speaking too soon, but things are looking up. I got a SATA power cable and a floppy drive from the local Maplins, and I’ve got a fresh install of Windows up and running.

Even better, I ran Samsung’s low-level diagnostic utility (HUtil) on the faulty disk, and it was passed most of its tests successfully. The surface scan looked like someone had used the disk’s platters for serving up a buffet lunch, but it was still mostly readable. In fact, I’ve got it mounted now, and busy copying off all the data I can get.

Phew.

Lesson learned: backup, backup, backup. Disk failure is not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when”.

Okay, I’m going to expose my ignorance of current generation PC hardware by confessing that I thought that a single cable was enough to hook up my new SATA drive to my motherboard. Oh no. Not nearly enough.

Not only does it need a separate power cable, which wasn’t supplied with my motherboard, but the Windows XP installation doesn’t recognize SATA drives out of the box. You have to supply the drivers manually at the start of the install on a floppy disk mounted as drive A:. No, you can’t just stick them on a CD. How quaint.

As my PC doesn’t have a floppy disk drive any more, and we don’t seem to have a spare one lying around the house, the alternative to going out and buying a new one (do computer shops even sell floppy disk drives any more?) is to create a new Windows XP install CD, and slipstream the drivers onto it. Fortunately, there is a useful program called XPCreate which simplifies the process of creating slipstreamed disks.

Nevertheless, this means that my PC is going to be out of commission for most of the week. If I order a SATA power adapter this evening, it’ll get dispatched tomorrow, the postman will try and deliver it on Thursday, fail because there’s no-one at home, and I’ll be able to pick it up from the Post Office depot on Friday morning.

Sigh.

On the brighter side, I had been worrying about using up another authorization token for iTunes. Music you buy from the iTunes music library is authorized to play on up to 5 machines. You can manually de-authorize a computer, for example if you want to sell it, or move all your stuff to a different machine, but this is no use if your PC up and dies on you before you can do that. However, I just found out that once you have used up your 5 authorizations, iTunes will give you a button to instantly deauthorize all machines that were registered to play your music.

I haven’t bought all that much music from the iTunes Music Library, partly because of the 5 machine restriction. (And partly because AllOfMP3.com is much cheaper.) But knowing that there’s a big shiny “reset” button at the end of the road is a big a relief. You can only use it once a year, but fortunately my disks don’t tend to crash that often.

My computer had been acting a bit funky for the last week or so: it was freezing up occasionally, then carrying on after about twenty seconds, and a couple of mornings I got up to find it just frozen and died completely overnight. (I keep it on 24/7.) I thought it might have been because I’d been installing shedloads of new software recently (there was a freeze immediately after installing iTunes 4.9, and the matching iPod updater), and that it was time for a periodic Windows reinstall. In fact, it is almost exactly a year since I last did a nuke & pave. (I found the date with the “systeminfo.exe” command line utility–a nice little utility I hadn’t known about before.)

But no, it was the hard disk that was dead, instead. This morning the puter was dead again, and wouldn’t respond to a reboot. “A disk read error occurred,” it whined. “Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot. Please? Oh please, huh?”

Sigh.

On the bright side, the disk that failed was my system disk, which contains my Windows install, Program Files directory, and my Documents and Settings folder. Unlike the last time this happened, all of our photos are safe on a separate, secondary hard disk, so I’m not worried about those. All my code is sitting in SourceSafe on a different disk, too. The last full backup of my Documents and Settings is a couple of months old, but most of the stuff I do and write these days is distributed over the rest of the internet anyway, so I’m not too worried. The only thing likely to cause some pain is the potential loss of a few months of email, but seeing as I never reply to my email anyway, at least no-one else is going to notice.

(And my iTunes library xml file…hmmm…)

Still, I’m hopeful that I can recover at least some of the data from the drive. The BIOS recognizes it, so I’m hoping that it’s just unbootable, rather than completely shagged. I’ve bought a shiny new 160GB SATA drive to replace it, but I haven’t worked up the energy to go through the whole install process yet. That’ll be my fun task for Tuesday evening!

Sigh.