Entries for June 2006
June 3, 2006 at 4:20PM A note for anybody installing VLC on Windows 98
VLC is an excellent, resource frugal, open source, cross-platform media player. That’s a lot of adjectives. I can’t recommend it enough especially if you want a media player that plays just about everything and will work well even on older machines.
However, when installing it on my parents’ old Windows 98 machine last night, I ran into a problem. While it can work just fine on Windows 98, it requires a DLL, unicows.dll, that isn’t necessarily already on the machine and isn’t supplied with the installer. This is a support DLL for applications that need Unicode support on non-Unicode versions of Windows like Windows 98.
I looked around online for a copy, found one, checked it was safe and installed it. It works fine. I’ve written a small installer batch file and uploaded it and the DLL for anybody who might find it useful. You can download it here. Alternatively, download the The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems from Microsoft themselves.
June 4, 2006 at 11:21PM A few photos I took on the way to and from Enniscrone
Niamh and I went to Enniscrone today. I took my camera with me and took a few shots. Here’s a sample. The rest are in my Flickr account.
Whin Flowers
Being marginal land, you’ll find whins (aka gorse or furze) everwhere around the North West. The shrub is covered in spikes, but the flowers are quite pretty and smell quite good.
Wind Power
Now, here’s something we’ve plenty of! I don’t understand the objections some have against them myself.
Enniscrone Beach
I’m told we have some of the best surf in Europe, if not the world. Enniscrone itself is quite has quite a beautiful strand, and here’s a shot of it.
Travelling to Enniscrone
The Gap
The Gap is the northern end of Western Way.
Lough Talt
Only a few kilometres from my house, Lough Talt is a beautiful spring lake nestled right in the middle of the Ox Mountains. It’s great for brown trout fishing. Though the lake looks safe for swimming, it’s not unless you’re very careful: there’s some strong currents and sharp drops for the unweary.
Lislea
The village of Aclare is partitioned into two parts. On the north side of the main street is the townland of Lislea (meaning Gray Fort); and on the south side, where I live, is the townland of Carns, a reference to the townland being covered in cairns.
June 7, 2006 at 10:05PM How I’m going to publish feeds from now on
With my new weblog software (called Shibumi, if you’re interested) complete, I thought I’d explain how I’m going to be serving up my feeds from now on.
For a start, I’m switching over to Atom 1.0, but keeping the RSS 2.0 feed as a hidden fallback. If the client making the request says it can handle Atom, it’ll get it. If it doesn’t, it’ll get RSS 1.0. In addition, I’m going to start using the <content:encoded/> to serve post content rather than <description>, which I’m going to use for plaintext summaries. I fully expect this will break something.
Once I’m happy with how it’s working, I’m going to break it some more by adding code to utilise HTTP caching fully and use the Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers to serve up only the items required.
Updated: Meant to type RSS 1.0 rather than RSS 2.0. Also, here’s how I’m generating the RSS 1.0 feed:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xml:lang="en-ie">
<cfoutput>
<channel rdf:about="#XmlFormat(REQUEST.serverPath)#feed/">
<title>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.weblog)#</title>
<link>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.serverPath)#</link>
<cfif IsDefined("REQUEST.subtitle")>
<description>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.subtitle)#</description>
</cfif>
<dc:date>#MakeW3CDate(entries.updated)#</dc:date>
<dc:identifier>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.tag)#</dc:identifier>
</cfoutput>
<!--- Why is this necessary?! --->
<items>
<rdf:Seq>
<cfoutput query="entries">
<rdf:li resource="#XmlFormat(MakePermalink(published, slug))#" />
</cfoutput>
</rdf:Seq>
</items>
</channel>
<cfoutput query="entries">
<item rdf:about="#XmlFormat(MakePermalink(published, slug))#">
<title>#XmlFormat(title)#</title>
<link>#XmlFormat(MakePermalink(published, slug))#</link>
<dc:identifier>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.tag)#/#XmlFormat(slug)#</dc:identifier>
<cfif summary neq "">
<description>#XmlFormat(summary)#</description>
</cfif>
<cfif body neq "">
<content:encoded><![CDATA[#Textuality(body, smiliePath, true, true)#]]></content:encoded>
</cfif>
<dc:date>#MakeW3CDate(entries.published)#</dc:date>
<dc:creator>#XmlFormat(name)#</dc:creator>
<dc:rights>Copyright © #XmlFormat(name)#, #Year(published)#</dc:rights>
<cfif link_url neq "">
<dc:relation>#XmlFormat(link_url)#</dc:relation>
</cfif>
<cfif via_url neq "">
<dc:source>#XmlFormat(via_url)#"</dc:source>
</cfif>
<!--- I know dc:subject isn't synonymous with category, but screw it... --->
<cfloop index="tag" list="#tags#" delimiters="`">
<dc:subject>#XmlFormat(tag)#</dc:subject>
</cfloop>
</item>
</cfoutput>
</rdf:RDF>
And here’s the code for generating Atom:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="en-ie">
<cfoutput>
<title>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.weblog)#</title>
<cfif IsDefined("REQUEST.subtitle")>
<subtitle>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.subtitle)#</subtitle>
</cfif>
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="#XmlFormat(REQUEST.serverPath)#feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="#XmlFormat(REQUEST.serverPath)#" />
<!--- The topmost one will always give the most recently changed one. --->
<updated>#MakeW3CDate(entries.updated)#</updated>
<id>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.tag)#</id>
<generator version="1.0">Shibumi</generator>
</cfoutput>
<cfoutput query="entries">
<entry>
<title>#XmlFormat(title)#</title>
<link rel="alternate" href="#MakePermalink()#"/>
<cfif link_url neq "">
<link rel="related" href="#XmlFormat(link_url)#"/>
</cfif>
<cfif via_url neq "">
<link rel="via" href="#XmlFormat(via_url)#"/>
</cfif>
<id>#XmlFormat(REQUEST.tag)#/#XmlFormat(slug)#</id>
<published>#MakeW3CDate(published)#</published>
<updated>#MakeW3CDate(updated)#</updated>
<cfif summary neq "">
<summary>#XmlFormat(summary)#</summary>
</cfif>
<cfif body neq "">
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
#Textuality(body, smiliePath, true, true)#
</div>
</content>
</cfif>
<author>
<name>#XmlFormat(name)#</name>
</author>
<rights>Copyright © #XmlFormat(name)#, #Year(published)#</rights>
<cfloop index="tag" list="#tags#" delimiters="`">
<category term="#XmlFormat(tag)#"/>
</cfloop>
</entry>
</cfoutput>
</feed>
I’m trying to do the right thing, but I’m cheating a bit with <dc:subject>.
June 9, 2006 at 9:49PM Popping P-s, Sizzling S-es, Audacity, and Hot Chip
In preparation for Bernie’s Wondering Moleskine project, I downloaded a copy of Audacity so that I wouldn’t screw up too badly and to make sure I was able to position the mike on my headset so as to avoid popping p-s, and sizzling s-es without needing a pop filter.
Now, the podcast element of the project is for me probably going to be a one-off as I really don’t like the sound of my voice and don’t believe anybody else would regardless of whether I’d have something interesting to say in them. But when I was fiddling with it, it popped into my head to try singing some bit of a Hot Chip song to test out mixing tracks a bit in it, so I sang the high and low parts of one of the lines from And I Was a Boy from School, specifically the line 3:56 into it. Here’s the result, with me signing harmonies with myself:
Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle... done!
It’s all just a bit of fun, and I don’t think I’m ever going to be offered a record contract... ![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif){kind=small}
June 10, 2006 at 4:17AM Collecting data for a visualisation of the Dála
Damien suggested on his site that it’d be nice to have a visualisation of the makeups of the various Dála over the years. Seeing as we’re going to need that for Vocal Voter, I thought I’d give it a spin. In preparation for it, I compiled an XML file listing the makeup of each Dáil, the parties at the time, which were in government, and so on. I don’t have a list of the sitting TDs, but that’s for another day.
The schema used is in flux. Some of the elements will likely be renamed, and I may list the each of the Ceann Comhairle properly.
I found this panoramic shot of the Dáil, which should help in creating the visualisation.
Update (June 21st)
The visualiser is online! More about it here.
June 11, 2006 at 8:43PM Breaking teh Intarwebs
I’m not going using my new design quite yet because, while it works fine for a weblog, it doesn’t really work at all with the rest of the site. Instead, I’m going to stick with the current layout, refit it to work with the new engine, and move the data over.
Expect stuff to break.
June 12, 2006 at 12:38AM Depeche Mode: Enjoy the Silence
Still a great song, and always will be. In retrospect, the video itself is a bit dodgy.
June 13, 2006 at 8:07PM Charles J. Haughey dead
Haughey was one of our former Taoisigh (Heads of Government, pronounced /ti:Si:C/, the plural of Taoiseach, pronounced /ti:SAx/, at least where I’m from) and died earlier today of prostate cancer.
It would be a severe understatement to say I have no great love for the man. He was scum. Pure, untainted scum. Lauded though he may be by some parts of society here, he, in my eyes at least, deserves none of it. He stole from us, lied to us, attempted to subvert the state, and many of the governments he was a major part of or lead slowly destroyed the country’s economy.
And yet he managed to preside over three governments. The last thing the man deserves is a state funeral.
It’s the passing of an era alright. This marks the definite end of Ireland’s modern dark age. Burn in hell.
June 14, 2006 at 6:56AM I give up! For now anyway
I spent the whole evening integrating my new Shimubi weblog system (which is quite, quite sexy) into the rest of the site, reworking the existing templates, redesigning a few bits and pieces, &c., so that I’d--in theory--be able to fire everything online and have no-one know the better (aside from some visual improvements and the like).
Or maybe not.
This server runs an ancient version of MySQL, 4.1.0-alpha. Yes, alpha. Despite the protestations of some, that string is hardwired into the binaries so if it says “MySQL 4.1.0-alpha”, you tried upgrading it and it still says “MySQL 4.1.0-alpha”, that’s precisely what you’re running. Now, there’s a good reason why this was installed on the server: there was a project that needed the extra bits and bobs MySQL 4.1.0 had, and only the alpha was available at the time. But it should really be upgraded to 4.1.20 at this point.
But I digress. Even MySQL 4.1.0-alpha’s meant to be able to cope with Unicode properly (problems with the PHP MySQL drivers cope with UTF-8 notwithstanding). So I tried setting up the new tables, starting with:
CREATE TABLE shibumi_comments (
id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
entry_id INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
posted DATETIME NOT NULL,
poster VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
email VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
homepage VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
body TEXT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
KEY entry (entry_id, email(4))
) CHARACTER SET utf8 TYPE=MyISAM;
All peachy, you’d think. But no. Here’s the error I got: Unknown character set: ‘utf8’. WTF?!
So I tried SHOW CHARACTER SET and in contradiction to the error above, it lists UTF-8 as a perfectly valid character set.
So, what can I do? I’d love if I could convince one of the lads to either move me over to DCWEB2, but though that would gain me ColdFusion 6 and a stable, working version of MySQL, it’d probably lose me PHP, which I need for the ping proxy. Alternatively, somebody some evening could back up the existing databases on DCWEB1, uninstall MySQL, download and install a clean version of MySQL 4.1.20, and check the connections to make sure they work.
Two nasty alternatives remain: Use the binary character set, or see if I can use the PHP/MySQL/UTF-8 trick by treating anything I read from or write to the database as opaque binary data and leave the tables as Latin-1. Knowing my luck, CF5 attempts to be clever and silently converts UTF-8 to Latin-1.
Sigh.
June 16, 2006 at 10:09PM CF Tricks: preventing pages you don’t want executed directly from being executed
Here’s a question for you: do you have any .cfm pages in your applications that, if a user was execute them directly, could pose a security risk?
You might send all requests to one central dispatcher, which might in turn check the credentials of the user, and if they check out, include some page that might change a password, an email address, &c.
But what if somebody was to execute that page directly, bypassing the dispatcher, and so the security code, by POSTing or GETing the page? Though it might appear unlikely that somebody would go to all that trouble, the security hole still exists.
So how do you patch it? Pretty simple really. Take a look at the following code:
<cfif GetCurrentTemplatePath() eq GetBaseTemplatePath()><cfabort></cfif>
By comparing these two, you can check if the page the code is in is being executed directly by a user. I tend to plonk this at the top of any ColdFusion pages in my applications that might change the application’s state in some significant way. In my weblog’s code, examples of such pages are the files which write comments and new entries to the DB, and updating existing comments. Each of those pages starts with that line of code, and so they can only be executed through other pages.
June 18, 2006 at 5:18PM The Political Compass
Seeing as the Political Compass came up on In fact, ah earlier, I decided to revisit it to see how much my politics had changed. Here’s my results:
My Economic Left/Right is -4.00, and my Social Libertarian/Authoritarian is -5.79, meaning I’m still a bloody hippie. I’ve moved a little right, and a little towards social libertarianism, but my results aren’t terribly different from the way they were a few years back.
Nobody’s too surprised, I’d say.
However, I’m a little annoyed with the results. I appears that just because I think the economy ultimately must serve the people rather than the people serving the economy, that makes me a lefty rather than centrist I feel I am.
June 20, 2006 at 4:58AM Dáil visualisation a go-go!
Yes kids, now you too can see the changing face of the Irish political landscape proceed faster than its usual glacial pace! After Damien’s lazyweb plea for an applet to visualise the representation of the various political parties in Dáil Éireann, i set to work hacking together some code to do just that. It’s online now for those of you who want a look.
It’s a bit ugly right now, but now that it’s functional, I can think about a nicer way of visualising the data. The data itself is available for download here in the from of a Java .properties file and I’ll make the source available once it’s in a state where I’m not cringing at the very thought of anybody else looking at it.
Updates
On Seamus’s suggestion, I made the background of the visualisation white and shifted the controls to the bottom. Damien suggested adding the slideshow button too. There’s a one second delay on each frame. The underlying code’s a lot better too, but I have to divvy up the actual visualisation code ‘cause right now it’s all just a big ball of mud.
And it’s now internationalised too.
And it now works properly in IE (having found a workaround) too and I abandoned the <applet/> tag for <object/> so it validates now. Stupid IE.
<linkwhore>Plugs will be greatfully accepted.</linkwhore>
2006-06-25: For all practical purposes, the applet is complete. Here’s a list of the changes made:
- Parties are sorted in a fixed order in the component chart at the top.
- Difference chart showing seats gained and lost added.
- Legend now sorts by whether the party is in government and by its fixed order. This also fixes a bug whereby parties would be omitted from the listing if they had the same number of seats (the list is stored internally as a
TreeSet: you can figure out the rest yourself). - Spent ages figuring out how to best spread the scaling error best between the various boxes in the component chart. It now no longer bounces around the place by a few pixels as it did with the old scaling method.
Ciaran mentioned below in the comments that some of the data is inaccurate. I’m going to look through the file again and correct whichever bits he mentioned.
June 21, 2006 at 6:57AM On the influence of the Celtic languages over English
It’s odd that an amateur like myself would ever need to correct a professional, but the recent Language Log post, “Speak we proper English?” needed it. Here’s what I wrote:
There was a small error in your recent Language Log post where you stated that English used the verb ‘do’ to indicate negation. It’s not. By itself, it’s used to indicate emphasis, as in “you do need to do such-and-such”. But couldn’t the use of ‘do’ + ‘not’ be better explained as a leftover of English’s V2 past?
And while I don’t know a huge amount about the Brythonic language, I do know a bit about the other Celtic languages, namely the Goidelic ones, specifically Irish. Irish uses the particle ‘an’ to form questions, and is unrelated to the verb ‘dean’. Example: <an bhfuil tú ag dul amach?> (”Are you going outside”). In Old Irish, this particle was ‘in’. Whether English somehow manage to pick up the use of verb inversion from some one of the Celtic languages (even though it’s not a feature by nature of the Welsh and the Goidelic languages by virtue of being VSO) and not French (where it actually occurs) is another matter.
However, one of the underlying points you made--English’s prodigious use of auxiliary verbs--is fine. This is a grammatical feature English could have realistically picked up from the surrounding Celtic languages. Ditto for the progressive.
Ooh! And appears I just found a bug in Textuality’s magic quotes code! Must fix that.
June 22, 2006 at 5:39PM What really gets me about Fianna Fail
Posted this over on Gavin’s Blog, but it bears repeating:
All this has made me think about what really annoys me about Fianna Fail and their supporters. They call conveniently forget that Fine Gael and Labour spent at good chunk of the ‘80s trying to fix Haughey and Fianna Fail’s mess, and then Dukes basically sacrificed the party with the Tallaght Strategy so as FF would continue with the previous coalition’s economic policies.
But admitting that would require a degree of humility alien to FF.
June 23, 2006 at 1:14PM Trying out Rails at talideon.eu
Michele mentioned on Open that is giving away free RoR accounts to a lucky few, so I decided to give it a whirl. I requested talideon.eu, and once the DNS records propagate, I’ll start playing with it. I already have a project it might be good for.
Now, back to finishing those graphs...
June 24, 2006 at 9:18PM Electronic Renaissance version 2
I emailed this to Seamus earlier. It’s part of the plans to replace the code behind the Electronic Renaissance site with something somewhat more tractable. It’s being rewritten as a bliki of sorts with some extra CMS functionality on top. The site will use StableView, with a view going live if stable for 10 minutes.
Integral URL Schemes
/post/post_name/revision/ - Individual post/revision. /profile/username/ - User profiles. /published/year/month/day/ - All pages by date published. /published/feed/ - Syndication feed for above (Might not be exposed). /updated/year/month/day/ - All pages by date updated. /updated/feed/ - Syndication feed for above (Will definitely be exposed). /tag/tag_name/year/month/day/ - Pages marked with the given tag by date published. /tag/tag_name/feed/ - Feed for above (ordered by date updated).
Tags starting with user: refer to user profiles. They’re used for indicating authorship and ownership of pages. Pages marked as such can only be edited by the owner. DJ sets would be tagged as sets and news items as news.
Extra URL Schemes (Page Mounts)
Individual pages or sets of pages can be remapped to other URLs, for instance.
/news/year/month/day/ -> /tag/news/year/month/day/ /news/feed/ -> /tag/news/feed/ / -> /pages/home/
Application Modules (Application Mounts)
The gallery is the only one I can think of right now. It’ll be mapped to /photos/.
Other Modules
There may be a comments module. This can be combined with the rest of the site (and a little bit of extra functionality to divide the discussion into forum groups and topics) to turn the weblog side of the site into a forum.
June 27, 2006 at 4:59AM A miniature version of the visualiser
Adam Maguire’s suggested that I create a miniature version of the visualiser small enough to fit in a sidebar. Here’s a quick sketch of what it might look like:
Does that look ok? Or does anybody have any suggestions?
June 29, 2006 at 4:04AM I looked at the WordPress source code and something inside me died
Really.
I don’t know what to say.
I knew cafelog/b2--the engine WordPress is descended from--was hairy, but I thought part of the point behind WordPress was to untangle the godawful mess that it was.
Sure, it’s got a nicer interface. Sure, you don’t need to hack the crap out of it if you want to extend it or even just tweak the templates. But I thought it’d be better after all these years.
I was wrong.
Edit: Just so as nobody misunderstands me, I’m not saying that WordPress is rubbish, just that I’d expected the code quality to have improved much more than it has.
June 30, 2006 at 4:48AM The Middle Path: using the government to use the market’s short-term amorality to long-term public good
This was written in response to this post over on Gavin’s blog. It’s been edited slightly to fix a few mistakes and incomplete phrases. You might want to read the original post before this one, but it’s not essential.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that part of the government’s job is to preserve the freedom of the market--and I’m in good company in that regard--and that it ought to be useds as a bulwark against where the market’s great strength--its amorality--come into conflict with the best interests of society as a whole.
You’ve probably guessed that Soros and Schumacher are two of my heros.
To quote Mary Harney: “There’s only one thing worse than a public monopoly, and that’s a private one”. I’d argue that what we’re seeing here isn’t the legacy of a state monopoly, but the natural result of what happens when a company, any company, gets into a monopoly position. The great problem with eircom is that it ought to have been divided in two before it was privatised, with the half controlling the network made a non-profit semistate trust whose sole responsibility being the administration of the network, and rest of it privatised. At least then competition could have gone unhindered, with the trust selling off maintenance contracts for the network in return to access. But that would have been using the monopoly to encourage the market while keeping the government as much out of the business as possible.
Should the government have mandated several years ago, that all new housing estates be piped for fibre to the kerb or even fibre to the home technology?
Just so long as you put the responsibility on the people it should be on, namely the developers. But then again, they do everything they can to dodge out of providing the amenities they already have to provide. Putting it on eircom’s shoulders would be counterproductive though as they have no control over the developers.
It may have been sensible for developers to approach ISP’s or TV stations and offer a deal to cable homes with extremely fast connections, both to save money digging roads up again later, and give companies instant access to customer’s homes without a proxy like eircom - or even to enable a huge amount of homes to have technology that may not be available to them over copper.
If you assume that their primary desire is to provide housing rather than earn a few quid. But that’s not the case: once the houses are built and sold, their responsibilities to the residents are few. And their ability to do this is aided by the degree of speculation going on in the market; people buying a house for themselves might look for these things, but for property speculators it’s not so important.
South Korea has a number of advantages over Ireland: it’s very densely populated, far more so than Ireland if you leave out Dublin, and it’s outside of Dublin that the real problems with broadband penetration lie. Companies will use this excuse, as they do in the US, to explain away (a) the lack of demand and (b) the economic infeasibility of the enterprise.
A separate network administration trust could have helped encourage the kind of growth seen in Korea, but wouldn’t have required the kind of public investment the Koreans needed to make to achieve their goals. By creating a separate market for network mainenance, private competition for the contracts would have lead to reflexive growth of the levels seen in France at least. It’s about using the market’s greed to make a long-term good for all into a short-term good for its individual participants.
Markets are fundamentally shortsighted and greedy. This is what makes them so efficient in resource allocation, but it also what makes them blind to the long term public good, a point missed by both laissez-faire capitalists and anti-capitalists.
June 30, 2006 at 8:12PM My laptop is borked.
It just hung.
I don’t know why it hung when it did, but it did. I sat down in the living room to check my mail and read my Bloglines subscriptions. And it hung.
Actually, it wasn’t quite like that. It was more like as if it--a Latitude D510--had decided to run at 4MHz instead. The trackpad and keyboard were unresponsive and Firefox’s spinner was caught in mid-spin. Hitting the power button made it jump back to life for a moment or two, but that’s about it.
I left it for five minutes to see if it’d just hung temporarily. These things happen, after all. That didn’t help. I removed the battery and cut the power from the mains.
Again, I left it for a minute and went off to make some coffee. I came back, switched it on, but it made a clicking sound, like as if the harddrive was starting up and shutting down, and it turned itself off.
This is when I got worried. We’re talking here about an eight-month-old laptop here. This shouldn’t happen.
I came back to it a little later and it started up ok. For safety’s sake, I started it up in safe mode and ran diagnostics on the harddrive. It checked out ok, which is good. But then the keyboard and trackpad became unresponsive again, though the machine was still plainly still operating. I grabbed my USB keyboard and plugged it in. That worked fine, but my USB mouse didn’t work at all when I tried it. I rebooted the machine and started working on it again.
It was fine for a short while, and then it hung again. This time, nothing worked at all, so I cut the power. I came back an hour later, and it still wouldn’t start up. It starts for half-a-second and then shuts itself down again. ![[cry]](/images/smilies/cry.gif){kind=small}
To be frank, I’m at my wit’s end with it. I suspect the problem lies with one of the bus, the processor, or memory. My money’s on a memory fault.
In the mean time, I can still use my parents’ machine, a crappy old IBM running Windows 98. I’ll have to get the warranty details from the US and send it off to Dell. If they wipe replace the harddrive, I’ll kill somebody.
Why am I posting this up?
There’s stuff I’m working on currently that I do not have a backup of. Seeing as I haven’t done a backup for the past two month’s and this computer only has a CD-R/W and can’t read DVDs (which is what my backups were made to), pretty much all my data is off limits to me right now.
That’s a lot of data, and a lot of code, and a lot of spreadsheets containing billable hours that need to be paid to me.
I don’t know what I’m going to do in the mean time, but as you can imagine, I’m a little depressed. If anybody out there could help me in any way, or has any idea of how to fix it without having to give it to Dell for who knows how long, I’d very appreciative.