Quotulatiousness

September 10, 2009

Random links

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:43

A few links that I found interesting or amusing:

  • It was 70 years ago today. Then: “Parliament will decide.” Now: “we require that military deployments … be supported by the Parliament of Canada.” Chalk one up for Mackenzie King, as he was right then and Stephen Harper is right to follow his precedent.
  • Let’s all hear it for “Open Mike” Duvall, former California Republican state representative. Everyone needs standards, and Duvall sets a very low one indeed.
  • The Minnesota Vikings cut WR Bobby Wade (in spite of him having taken a big pay cut to stay with the team this season) and replace him with former Philadelphia Eagles/New England Patriots WR Greg Ellis (who played for Brad Childress).
  • Wi-Fi Isn’t the Best Way to Network…Right?
  • The CBC shocks us all . . . and decides to broadcast a program that offends certain groups in Quebec.
  • Two Royal Marine officers traverse the Northwest Passage in an open boat.
  • Thinner is not cheaper: the paternalistic urge to get us all to lose weight won’t make healthcare any less expensive.

Oh, and last, but not least, “The Guild” Season 3, Episode 2 (belated H/T to Ghost of a Flea for bringing it to my attention):

<br /><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&#038;vid=bdab0fe5-ecc7-4f5e-a946-feefa45d531b" target="_new" title="Season 3 - Episode 2: Anarchy!">Video: Season 3 &#8211; Episode 2: Anarchy!</a>

September 7, 2009

PSA: Back up your data

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:57

I’ve been having frequent enough issues with my various computers that backing up regularly (which I’ve done for years) isn’t as simple as it used to be. Now that I’m running both a desktop and a laptop machine (at least, when the desktop gets back from the repair shop), plus everyone else in the household’s machines, my old backup strategy fell flat.

My old strategy was each machine on the network using the same backup software (Cobian Backup 9) to create differential backup files — only saving the files that changed since the last complete backup was taken — and storing them on a secondary hard drive on my desktop machine.

As you can tell, there’s an easily defined point of failure there: if my machine isn’t online or there’s an issue with the secondary hard drive, the backups will fail to run. So we’ve been over a week now without the usual backups being taken.

My short-term strategy is just to worry, but my longer-term strategy is to buy something like this, a 2Tb network drive with RAID 1 (disk mirroring). That still leaves a point of failure in the process, but with RAID, I can hope that unless both drives in the unit fail at the same time, there’s only a small chance of serious data loss.

Update: That just figures . . . it’s now marked as unavailable, but the 1Tb NAS is still in stock.

Update, the second: Here’s an up-to-date article on backup strategies.

August 30, 2009

Technology . . . can’t live without it . . . but . . .

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 15:00

After getting home from Pittsburgh yesterday, I discovered that my desktop computer has developed a problem while I was away. It no longer thinks it has a DVD writer or a second hard drive, and takes forever to boot.

I tried checking the physical connections between the two drives and the motherboard, and between the drives and the power supply, but they seem to be solid. This means the desktop is headed into the shop this afternoon. Drat!

August 15, 2009

Computers . . . can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

It’s been a bad week for electronics around here. Last month, I bought an external 20″ monitor for Elizabeth to use with her laptop. It worked great — until last week. Then, she started getting BSOD issues and the external monitor would start flashing until she disconnected it.

Off to the shop it went. We’d bought the laptop and the monitor from the same place, with a verbal assurance that they’d work together (and really, in this day and age, how unusual is it to connect an external monitor to a laptop?). The technician was rather dismissive, telling Elizabeth that she probably just needed to download new drivers (she already had, with no improvement). He said they’d run some tests, install updated drivers and run it for 24 hours to verify that it was working properly. She got a call on Thursday to come in and pick up the equipment — it was working fine now.

On Friday, she got there after work to discover that the laptop had exhibited the same reported symptoms during the day, so it was back to the drawing board. So she continued using my laptop.

Which started to have problems first thing this morning . . . the mouse wasn’t showing up on the screen, and the screen itself was very dim (as though it was on battery power). A shutdown-and-reboot cycle seems to have fixed the problem, but it’s a bit of a concern: the laptop is my primary business machine. I’d definitely be delayed if it needed any extensive repair/reconfiguration work.

August 12, 2009

Final appearance of the Free Agent drive

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

In February, 2008, I bought a Free Agent USB hard drive to use as a backup device for the various computers in our home network. It lasted a month before failure started to set in. A few tweaks, a few visits to the support website, and it worked … until April. This time, it really was dead, so I got an RMA number, shipped it back, and eventually got a replacement drive.

The fact that I’m posting yet another tale of woe should tell you that the replacement was no better than the original. In fact, the replacement drive timed its failure to be almost as inconvenient as possible, failing just before it was needed to move files off a failing internal drive.

So the replacement drive has been sitting around for nearly a year, gathering dust. Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a problem that it wasn’t designed to work with Windows XP (why some deep thinking designer might have made that decision, I’ve no idea, but bear with me for a second). So I plugged it into my laptop, which is running Vista. It was recognized and configured immediately. I tested basic functionality by copying a few files over to the USB drive, then verifying that they were identical to the originals. Having passed that rudimentary test, I then dumped a medium-sized backup to the USB drive.

Twenty-six gigabytes of data went down … and 56 bytes were recorded on the USB drive. Yep. Bytes. Not Gigabytes, Bytes.

Now I’m going to borrow a sledgehammer, to ensure that this particular Free Agent drive never bothers anyone else . . .

Update, 14 August: Misery loves company: James Lileks posted a couple of tweets on a similar note.

Just had my fourth pocket hard drive go south. It won’t mount. Why does tech-talk sound like a robot’s sex-chat transcript?
It’s a Maxtor drive, btw. Apparently I enabled Daisy Mae Mode: looks hot, but can’t read or write.

July 25, 2009

Vista laptops co-ordinate glitches

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:32

When I got up this morning, Elizabeth mentioned that her laptop had BSODed. Not something you normally see under Vista. When she rebooted, it told her that her ATI video driver was faulty and needed to be updated (there was, of course, no updated driver for her specific card available on the ATI website).

After a bit of carping and complaining, I went to the kitchen, where I leave my work laptop most days. On reboot, I got a warning that the sound card drivers for my laptop were faulty and needed to be replaced. I probably don’t need to say that there were no updated drivers available for that, either, do I?

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