xiven.com stating the blatantly obvious since 2002

Preventative measures

Following the untimely demise of my previous hard drive I have decided to create myself a RAID 1 (mirroring) array. On the one hand it seems like a waste of a perfectly good 80 GB of space (disk space is not that cheap you know), but on the other hand, I can at least feel a little bit less vulnerable with regards to something similar happening again.

Posted: 2003-04-30 16:25:57 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (3)

Everybody's dead Dave

My computer's hard drive is no more. It is a dead hard drive. It ceases to function.

It died last Friday night and it refuses to let me get my files off it.

Since I am not willing (or indeed able) to pay £700+ for a professional data recovery of the drive this is a summary of the situation:

Not too bad:

• Operating System annihilated. Well I needed to re-install anyway and I just love re-installing Windows (or at least it seems that way).
• All website works-in-progress wiped. Fortunately given the nature of web work, most of it was backed up on the Dreamhost web server ?

Bad:

• Entire mp3 collection wiped. I have a year-old backup of this so could be worse. It's given me a good reason to re-encode my CDs in .ogg format instead though.
• Games directory annihilated. Most can be re-installed no problem, but lost the FF7 saves that I made to help research for ffseven.com.
• Applications installs / hardware drivers / Windows updates etc. lost (and backups a bit too old to be of use). It's amazing just how much I need to install to have a computer that I can actually use:
  • VIA Chipset drivers
  • nVidia drivers
  • Updated SoundBlaster drivers
  • mIRC
  • Nero
  • Mozilla
  • Apache
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • MySQL-Front
  • PuTTY
  • TortoiseCVS
  • WinSCP
  • LeechFTP
  • UltraEdit
  • Winzip
  • Winamp
  • CDex
  • DivX codec
  • 20+ MB of Windows security updates
  ...to name a few
• Serial numbers for certain programs (eg. UltraEdit, mIRC) lost.

Very bad:

• Some nostalgic stuff (eg. old DOS programs that I wrote in Pascal 6 years ago, photos, screenshots of early versions of Voidwars) lost.
• Local e-mail archive lost. This archive contained all e-mails received over the past 2 years. No backup.
• Everything I'm having to re-download I'm having to do over a 56k modem.

So if you're wondering why I haven't done the export of the Galactic Report from the Voidwars dev game yet, now you know why.

Posted: 2003-04-14 07:36:38 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (1) | Comments (10)

Dog sanity

In case you were in any doubt that our dog is insane:

Posted: 2003-04-08 17:16:46 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (1)

Avril Poisson

Let's take a look at some of todays stories.

• QuakeNet announces suspension of normal operations pending legal action
• RFC3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header published
• BBC News reports on Shock tactics for anti-social mobile use
• Online comic Real Life starts spot the difference competition

That's all I've seen so far. If anyone else has any good stories they'd like to share, please do. No doubt there'll be more once the USA wakes up.

Posted: 2003-04-01 06:01:37 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)