Saturday, February 16, 2008

Update on the hard drive


I just got back from Best Buy and they were able to get all the data off on to a external USB!

So now at least I have all my latest documents!

Still no computer - sigh.


Well its the start of the second week without a computer. I keep reading rumors that a new macbook pro is coming soon so I am going to hold off a couple of weeks before I give up and get another computer.

Since there are precious few games on my wife's computer (I installed freecell on it myself) I have been catching up on movies on the weekend. Last week I watched Terminator 3 and Transformers. Both excellent in my humble opinion. And last night I watched 1408 - not as good as I was expecting but okay.

I got a drive enclosure last week and when I pulled out the hard drive from the HP I found it had a non standard connection! I know I should have pulled the drive out first and verified but I always thought it was IDE and SATA. I gave up and took the hard drive to Geek Squad to pull the data off the hard drive. I will pick it up later today to see if they were able to do it.

I got my first accessory for my computer to be: a Drobo Basically its an external drive on steroids. Its an external case with up to four hard drives. As long as you have more than one drive in the drobo it will insure that any data written is always written on two drives. Plus if you have multiple drives you can hotswap any one drive. So hopefully a hard drive crash will be extremely unlikely. I will be using that as my time machine for my new mac plus to hold all my old photos. I am starting with two 500GB drives (which because of the redundancy I will have 464GB free) and when it starts getting full I will add two more drives. The only downsides that I have been able to find researching the Drobo is that the initial writes of large amounts of data are VERY slow as its figuring out where to put everything. And the big downside is that if the drobo itself ever fail the only way I can get the data off the hard drives is with another drobo (so if the Data Robotics company ever goes under I will need to either pick up another drobo quick as a backup or I need to get a very large drive and copy off the data IMMEDIATELY).

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The laptop is dead - RIP


My HP laptop finally passed away yesterday. It was working good yesterday at lunch but when I tried it in the afternoon it would not start up. Fortunately I backed up the hard drive back in December so all I lost was a couple of months of photos (and the best of those were uploaded on fotki).

I am currently using Chris' laptop, she very graciously volunteered, and plan to get a new macbook pro as soon as the new model comes out in late Feburary/early March.

When I get a chance I will get a drive enclosure for the notebook and see if the hard still works. If it does I will get the photos that I did not save. If it does not work then odds are that was the only thing not working on it so I will get a new hard drive on ebay, install it and put linux on the laptop and let Lexi have that when I get my new macbook pro.

Friday, February 01, 2008

101 Design Patterns & Tips for Developers

An excellent collection of useful tips on design patterns, refactoring and other programming tricks

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