Technology

Recovery

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So I found a bunch of the video’s that I thought I lost. I still have the video tape originals for most of what I didn’t recover. that is the good news. the bad news is that I only found 30% on backup’s.

My Application backup CD’s also had some error’s on certain program’s. I think they were older versions of stuff, so I am not worried that much. The down side is that I have to go out onto the internet and get ISO’s for Red Hat, BSD, etc. They are gig’s and gig’s of downloads that I need to do again. I will see if I have any of the missing stuff at work.

This recovery has taught me some things. One thing to note is that burning a CD or DVD as backup does not always work. I was able to recover most of what I did have on DVD, but some stuff gave me errors on the restore. I am going to keep everything I have on two different disks. I will sync them regularly. I have wanted to do that in the past but never had a problem with my DVD and CD-ROM backups.

Data Loss

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I may have made a huge tactical error. I went to reinstall windows XP on my desktop at home today. I have 2 drives in it. A 18 Gig 15,000 RPM SCSI drive for the OS, and a 180 Gig IDE drive for all my stuff. So to reinstall XP I just formatted the SCSI drive and expected to just have the data stay safe on the second drive. I have done it before. Always no problem. Well the problem I realized after it was too late was that Windows trys to install on the first IDE drive it can find. It doesn’t matter what you set your system to do. I wanted the SCSI drive to be the master. It didn’t care what I wanted if an IDE drive was present. I lost everything. The correct way to do this was to have removed the IDE drive and built windows. I didn’t figure that out until I lost all my data.

Now I have backups. All my personal files (documents, photo’s, music, etc) is on my mac and safe. I also did a DVD backup 2 weeks ago. What I did loose was all the shows I pulled off Tivo and didn’t have a chance to burn to DVD. I also lost any programs I downloaded and didn’t get to DVD. The last time I did that was the end of July 2003. I am bound to have lost stuff that has changed since then. Not a catastrophic mistake, but a big pain in the ass. I also lost tons of backups that I had. I was doing a project where I took all my old backup CD’s and put them to DVD so I didn’t have so many disks lying around. That project is bust now that all the copies on the hard drive are gone.

I don’t know why I am so calm about this right now. I truly don’t know what really needed and lost.

One think I do know is that I am going out tomorrow and getting a 200 gig firewire hard drive to put my stuff on. I am not taking any chances again. I have been pondering buying one for a while, but now I am going to do it.

If this was at work it would never have happened. Why am I more careful with other people’s stuff compared to my stuff? I guess I cannot get yelled at for messing my own stuff up!

OK, now I am a little pissed that I screwed this up. Not much stuff is lost forever, but what pisses me off is that it will take me months to get everything and organize it the way it was. I think that is what pisses me off the most.

I am now making a DOS bootable disk so I can wipe the large drive again so it doesn’t have an OS on it. Then I can remove it and build my computer with the SCSI drive in it and then insert the IDE drive back and use it as a secondary drive. if you are asking why don’t I just use the IDE drive as my primary drive, the answer is that it has more space. I need it for my stuff. the 18 gig drive is large enough for my OS and applications.

Sleep Mode On A Mac

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Do Apple Powerbooks have a hibernate mode? I put my powerbook to “sleep” yesterday morning and ended up not using it till the train ride home last night at 10:30PM. It had run out of power while sleeping all that time. Not sure if the Powerbook is screwed up or if that is what is supposed to happen.

Treo 600 Rumors

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So the new rumor is that the Treo 600 is going to be available for GSM this monday. that is what they said about it last monday, but hey I am sucked into the hype. They won’t be in people’s hands monday anyway. It will take days if not weeks to ship them out. That is what happened with the Treo 270.

Until it is released I am using my current Treo 270 all the time now. I am forwarding my Verizon phone calls to the Treo. I have not had many problems with reception. Sometimes I don’t get calls when I get good signal, but I am not sure how often that happens. I need to look into it.

Projects Going On

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We are still working on our monitoring phone call system. The company that makes the software thinks they have an idea of what is wrong. I should have more information today. I always love buying stuff that just does not work!

I think I finally am motivated to look into Proxy server software. Too many things are going on that I say if we had a proxy server we could figure this out, or we could prevent this. It is a pain to know a tool will work, but you just don’t have the time to set it up.

I found a flaw in the Windows 2000 Pro VMWare image I am using. I built it when I was learning about VMWare so I made the partition size too small. When I try to download large files to it, I get out of disk space warnings. I need to build a new one today. Howard also is trying to get a Red Hat 9.0 VMWare image. I found one I did that works, but I need to see if I configured it properly.

I want to do a VMWare image of Free BSD 5.1 also. I am not sure what to call the OS installs in VMWare. I guess an “image” of a disk is a close enough description of what it is.

iTunes For Windows

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So like allot of people I downloaded Apple’s iTunes for windows when it came out. Actually it was a few days after it came out since I was sick and didn’t read about its release for a while, but you get the point. It looked great, exactly like iTunes for Mac. The problem is that when I run it on my Thinkpad T40 it brings the system to a crawl. I cannot click or move the iTunes window when it is running. I am not sure what is wrong. I installed it twice to make sure nothing went wrong with the install. Still no dice. I am going to try it on another machine at home and then decide if it is worth the trouble. It just works on my mac!

I think that ends my bitch session about recent technology that I have dealt with…

iChat AV

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So I looked at the Apple iChat AV program yesterday. I have also played with it in the Apple store before. It is really cool. I think I would actually try to use it. The only problem is that it only works with other iChat AV users. I am not buying hardware for a chat system that only like 10 people use, and none of them are people I know. I do want to play with a net cam. It is a dead fad, but I think it was a good idea.

VMware Does Its Thing

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VMware does what it is supposed to do. I have been using it to download programs and other crap from the internet so I don’t get worms and stuff on my desktop computer. Well sure enough the VWware session I have that runs Windows 2000 Pro finally got gator. I just deleted it and copied the fresh VMware session of Windows 2000 Pro that I saved and was up and running in 20 minutes. The only down side was that I had to run the windows update to make sure the OS was fully patched. VMware is so cool.

Treo 600 Rumors

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The rumor is that it will come out tomorrow 10-27. You know what they say about rumors? Well do you? I think it is a toss up between no one has a clue and rumors tend to be accurate. We will see tomorrow morning.

On a good note is that T-Mobile has announced cell phone number portability agreements in preparation for Nov 24th’ FCC deadline. That is good news for me since that is who I use as my primary mobile carrier. I have an AT&T cell number that I love, but cannot stand there service so I will change the number to T-Mobile at the first opportunity.

This entry was written while listening to Life, In A Nutshell by Barenaked Ladies

Mac OS 10.3

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So I went out and bought the new Mac OS that came out Friday. This was actually the first time I purchased an OS without a computer since I bought the upgrade version of Windows 95. I wasn’t sure if the upgrade was worth the money? But I figured I would give it a try.

Being the good engineer that I am, I did a clean install of the OS. I totally formatted the drive and started from scratch. That meant I spent most of the afternoon backing stuff up onto my desktop. I got most of the stuff. I am usually good with backing things up. I just realized what I forgot to save as I was typing this blog. I had a bunch (like 3-4) blog entries that I wrote early this week and never posted them. They are lost forever. I think I got everything else. I burned my app’s to a DVD. I copied my MP3’s to my desktop. I lost the playlist’s in the process but I have all the music. I also copied my personal files to the desktop but in the end I just restored them from a DVD I make last week. I didn’t do anything since then anyway.

I just got through installing most applications I use. I am going to wait on putting the rest on. I have crap that I think I don’t ever use. I also went without putting a classic (OS 9) system folder on it. So far the 12″ Powerbook I have with an 867 MHz G4 and 640 megs of ram is running 10.3 just fine. I haven’t used many programs at once so the jury is still out on it.

More review’s as I use it.

This entry was written while listening to Like A Prayer from the album “The Immaculate Collection” by Madonna